Shai Agassi named Green Hero

Author: Bernd Hölzner

Last year we saw the Green agenda taking root in many places - think of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize raising mass awareness of global warming. TIME magazine just recently published an issue on the Heroes of the Environment 2008, listing entrepreneurs, visionaries, innovators and activists who care about the environment and try to find solutions to global climate change. Among them scientists like Germany's Joachim Luther, "the godfather" of solar power, Brazilian rain forest activist Marina Silva, VC John Doerr and DLD Speaker Shai Agassi who is the founder and CEO of Better Place.

Better PLC is new infrastructure creator and operator for the management of country-wide electric vehicle fleets. Agassi works on electric cars he wants to "sell like mobile phones": Customers sign contracts with a service provider and pay per kilometer driven. When the battery is empty, it is exchanged. The entrepreneur has already entered into a cooperation with carmaker Renault-Nissan and envisions Israel as the first country to shift entirely to using electric cars. According to TIME, he wants to already have 5,000 electric cars on the nation's road by 2011.

At current prices, electric cars will be 20% cheaper to run than gasoline engines and produze zero carbon emissions. Says Agassi: "We environmentalists made a mistake. We ask people to pay more to be green, and we should ask them to pay less". Read the full TIME article, or watch his DLD talk on green transportation here:

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Tags: better plc· climate change· dld-friends· green agenda· project better place· shai agassi