One element of China’s plan is to not become addicted to foreign oil as the U.S. already has and one-step toward achieving this goal led China to become a partner with Shai Agassi and Better Place — something Washington D.C. has not done.
Time and Foreign Policy magazines recently named Shai Agassi as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The reason is that Agassi, an entrepreneur from California, launched a company called Better Place.
Deutsche Bank analysts may have already concluded that the Better Place’s approach to end global “oil” addiction could be a “paradigm shift” that causes “massive disruption” to the auto industry, and has “the potential to eliminate the gasoline engine altogether”.
To achieve a world free of a dependency on oil, Better Place has already partnered with California, Hawaii and Canada, while globally, Better Place is working with Australia, China, Denmark, Israel, Japan and the European Union.
On June 18, 2011, Better Place unveiled Europe’s first battery switching station in Denmark, and you may have noticed that China, as one of Better Place’s partners, is positioning itself to save China from the same fate that has already happened to politically gridlocked Washington D.C.
The station in Denmark, which show cased the company’s battery switching technology, is the first of 20 battery switching stations to be deployed across Denmark over the next nine months.
In the next few years, if successful, Better Place may lower the cost of driving significantly and break big oil’s monopoly on the economies of the world while lowering the cost of cars worldwide by providing an affordable, convenient and sustainable system through a revolutionary switchable battery model.
This means that instead of filling up with gas when the tank is empty, a driver pulls into a Better Place switching station and swaps battery packs in less time than it takes to wait in line and fill a tank with gasoline or diesel.
Return to or start with China’s Expressway Dilemma and the Solution – Part 1
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
iLook China 
GZ? Its already a big city. I remember riding on the massive expressway thats about 20 stories in the air. At the time they were building a new one that reaches about 30 stories. Forgive me for not giving exact facts, but I can tell the exact location. You start driving a car from Gongyuanqian metro station. You get on the expressway and you take it directly west to Zhaoqing.
I agree. With the long reach of today’s modern weapons, it is counterproductive and very expensive to fight wars over something like oil. All one has to do is look at the US, the string of wars its fought since the end of World War II, which includes the Cold War with the USSR, and the size of the National Debt that helped create.
A better choice would be to find alternatives such as solar, safe nuclear, hydropower, wind power, tidal powers, and electricity generated from the currents of slow rivers, which China is doing.
Building up is crucial to the progress at the moment. Of course, there will be a higher dependence on oil, but it’ll be great for the progress as well. In any case, I don’t think they’ll invade countries for oil, they’ll probably just buy more oil from Russia.
Singapore makes for a pretty good example for China’s megacities. They are pretty efficient all around, and places like Tianjin are being developed as a green city in the Singapore model.
Just read yesterday that China is creating a mega city around what we once called Canton that will hold 45 million people.
I had a thought once about a battery station in Shanghai for the BILLIONS of electric bikes. But it requires startup capital, which I dont have. it’d be a simple business, just switch out the spent battery with a new one for a price. Then, take the spent battery, and charge it up again. Turn around and sell it again, but for a cheaper price since it would be labeled as USED.
If someone hasn’t done it already, they will soon and if this California company gets a start in China with the electric car, they may be the one to do it.