An earlier post from the MIT Energy Conference completely ignored Sven Thesen of Better Place, who sat on the Global Transportation panel with John Casesa and John Viera. (I also didn't mention the moderator, Harvard professor Daniel Snow, but now I have. He did a nice job; noticeable but not intrusive.)

Thesen's attitude is "just say 'no' to coal," which makes him my pal from the start. Better Place's idea is to switch auto propulsion over to batteries using a subscription model similar to how we use cell phones today. Better Place would own the batteries, and you would pay according to the mileage you need, in the way that now you choose a cell plan based on how many minutes you need.

"We aren't a car company, and we aren't a utility. We sell distribution." There would be a plug-in at home and lots of other places, and a few exchange places, akin to gas stations now, where you could stop on long trips in order to go further.

He said that the majority of charging would be done at off-peak hours, but that cars would be plugged in whenever stationary so that, in peak times, cars could give back some oftheir power to the grid. "On the worst days, we'll have taken 3-4 miles out of millions of cars to avoid a brownout."

In response to a question from the floor, Thesen said he sees the transition happening slowly: "We all have range anxiety, so at first, one car will be electric. As distribution spreads, people will be willing to use one car, or to go electric on both."

In response to a different question, about how to get Americans to adopt lower-carbon vehicles, Thesen was nonplussed; all we need to do is decide we want to get there. "In Israel, they've decided they want to get off oil in 20 years, so they have a tax on all cars. The new vehicle tax for internal combustion vehicles is 72 percent. For electrics, it's 10 percent," he said.

Better Place is an Israeli company, which says something about innovation. Israel decides what it wants, for its own national good, and change conditions to point the nation in that direction. A company springs up (probably more than one) to meet the new reality, and here we are in America, talking about an Israeli company. If we change market conditions here, to achieve the common good, people elsewhere will be talking about American companies.