Another Shift? Revisited

Earlier this year I blogged about Project Better Place, a company that makes electric cars and battery stations - where you drive up and swap out the batteries instead of recharging. At the time they were only in Israel and starting up in Denmark.

I ran across this story last week, which I found very interesting – especially in light of the problems the Not-So-Big Three automakers in the U.S. are currently having:

Hawaii has decided to partner with Better Place to bring car battery exchange stations for electric vehicles to the islands, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle announced Tuesday.

Apparently Hawaii is now the fifth “better place,” following Israel and Denmark, along with recent announcements from Australia and California. As I stated in that earlier post (read it for links to some of the issues with this technology), I don’t know enough about the science or economics of this to really evaluate it. But I’m hopeful that with this progress they’re making signing folks up, hopefully some advances in battery technology, along with the major issues in the auto and energy industries, perhaps this actually has a chance of being one of the long-term solutions to some of our current problems.

As I also said in that earlier post, this is really off-topic for this blog, but sometimes you just need a little hope.