IT WAS a case of once smitten forever Shai as this columnist watched US chief of electric car battery company Better Place chat up a Federation Square audience yesterday.
How can anyone with Hollywood looks like Shai Agassi's ever expect to be taken seriously by dry policy-makers on a subject as far-fetched as replacing the economy's oil imports with more windfarms.
Hang on -- he has been taken seriously: by Macquarie Bank, Israeli President Shimon Peres, carmaker Renault-Nissan, Denmark's DONG Energy and former LookSmart chief and ex-politician Evan Thornley.
Hmmm. Maybe the notion is not so surreal.
Thornley, now the Australian head of Better Place, and Agassi both cut their teeth and made millions in IT.
But you can tell Thornley is the one with the political experience.
Agassi is all smoothness and charm. Thornley is direct and emphatic and yesterday he delivered a sharp poke in the eye to the oil sector, just for good measure.
Thornley said: "The renewable energy sector and car makers are good friends of ours. We are all looking forward to taking $20 billion off the oil industry and sharing it with a different set of people, including our customers."
Australia uses 38 billion litres of fuel a year and 70 per cent of it has to be imported.
As the economy grows, so will these imports and no one is expecting the cost of oil to be capped anytime.
Such dependency on foreign fuel imports, especially if, as some say, we have already gone past peak oil, puts the economy in a precarious position.
Better Place's solution is to switch our road fleet to electricity, and not just any electricity, but power generated by renewable energy.
And there is another poke in the eye, only that one is for the beleaguered coal-fired generators.
The plan is to roll out a massive network of charging points around Australia and dotting switching stations here and there.
The switching stations are for automated battery swapping for drivers who don't have the time to charge up.
Agassi said yesterday that for every 1000 cars that hit the bitumen, Better Place will buy one megawatt of renewable energy from the likes of AGL and other clean energy companies.
Thornley said the company will be the best friend the renewable energy generation sector has ever had.
"We will be their biggest customer and we are willing to pay a fair commercial price . . . we are not an aluminium smelter."
And that's another pointed poke, this time for rent-seeking industries.
Macquarie Bank likes the plan and has committed to helping Better Place raise $1 billion for the rollout in 2012.
According to Agassi, the break-even point for this massive project is just 50,000 cars, or just 5 per cent of the million new vehicles sold in Australia each year.
Compared with petrol-driven cars, Better Place vehicles will be cheaper, faster and quieter.
Agassi quipped they will be so silent that he was considering enabling them with downloadable drive tones. A Ferrari tone will no doubt be very popular.
For more of Agassi's quips and progress reports on the adoption of Better Place technology overseas, go to www.betterplace.com.
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