Any HNers with me?
I should have stated that I only support the ammonia economy provided the increase in ammonia production was powered by nuclear or other non carbon sources.
Also, the other major use for ammonia is as a major fertilizer for food products. Your ammonia idea will spike the food prices just like ethanol except that it will strike every food product instead of just corn.
Still, I am not an expert on this subject. Information from knowledgeable sources would be appreciated.
"At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO."
He left SAP a year and a half ago after a massive power-struggle on the executive board where it was clear that he wouldn't be the next CEO. That's why he founded the "not" company that is the topic of this article. Except, well, that it's a VC backed company.
My one thought is that he shouldn't be making the car and the battery. He needs to just design the battery stands and whatnot and license the technology to "real" car companies.
But if you're trying to test run for the world, a resort island doesn't prove anything. Israel's just small enough to be feasible. But it's big enough & 'normal' enough to be applicable to most European Countries. It's also got a big advantage that a large number of cars are leased by employers as part of salary packages. Similar advantage to the rentals in Hawaii.
If you're creating a new market, often the only way to be profitable is to create lock-in. Before the PC, you had to buy a computer and the peripherals and the software from a single vendor. Once adoption hits critical mass, it makes sense to make everything interoperable. With cellphones, the walled gardens are again just breaking down. And so on.
Currently, no other strategy for moving away from gasoline is even remotely as promising; I say having to pay for charging is a small price to pay.
With a car, there's no inherent service model. It'll only be a matter of time until people buy cheap cars and modify them to charge/run independently of the service. We all saw what happened to the i-Opener.
Ethanol, Hydrogen, etc. etc. all need new distribution networks. Electricity is "everywhere". In a country like The Netherlands almost every km of highway has lamppost along the road. A city has electricity cables running everywhere. It should be easy to install a lot of those charging stations.
In Europe a lot of cities have high parking fees. What if you would lower the parking fees for electric cars? By installing charging stations at those parking spaces the city council would get a percentage of the charging costs to make up for the "loss" in parking fees.
There are however potentially other problems. If this plan makes electric cars cheaper or more economical than normal cars people will be using their cars more. And that is huge problem. Cars take up space. A lot of space. And because of the high fuel prices people were finally cutting back on their car use.
Doh...
Ideas are cheap.
There's lots of data here. The cost of battery deprecation is $1050. That's enormously useful information to me.
I should say that the slow charge is a problem with batteries, but not with compressed air. :-)
I don't wonder why this thread gets more attention than the earlier same story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280245
