The modern-day world runs on oil. It fuels our cars, heats our homes and takes a large chunk out of most Americans' wallets each day. Groups like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries possess bargaining power over even international superpowers like the United States, greatly affecting the positions our leaders take in foreign policy. According to the Web site NationMaster.com, which compares statistics between countries, the U.S. alone consumed 20,680,000 barrels of oil in 2007 per day. Now imagine a world without oil. No longer would people depend on foreign organizations like OPEC for how much they could afford to drive or where they could take their cars. Money paid for these and other needs might be transferred to United States companies and not overseas corporations. Better Place is trying to do just this.

Better Place, a startup based in Palo Alto, Calif. with a presence around the globe, is trying to build an infrastructure to allow for the mass adoption of electric cars. On March 23, the Brandeis International Business School gave the 2010 Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship to Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, and Michael Granoff, its first investor. The event took place in the IBS Thomas H. Lee Lecture Hall. Granoff, who is humble and possesses a calm demeanor, spoke at the event about the importance of Better Place in the environmental world. Agassi was not present at the event.

Better Place, which was founded in 2007 and is the highest-funded green startup in history, produces services for electric cars. It is unique in its ability to produce the infrastructure and network necessary for mass electrical car adoption, and it allocates production of the cars themselves.

The Asper Award is an honor awarded every year to "an entrepreneur who achieves outstanding success in the global marketplace through creative marketing and business strategies," according to the IBS Web site.

Granoff talked about how, up until now, a major obstacle to the mass adoption of electric vehicles has been the amount of time it takes to recharge a car's batteries. But Better Place has developed a solution by creating a system that plants networks of charging stations throughout cities, allowing drivers to easily swap their old batteries for freshly-charged new ones without having to worry about recharging too often.

It is no surprise that Brandeis has given this year's award to a startup focused on the environment. Brandeis' Students for Environmental Action, a student-run organization that promotes environmental sustainability on campus through initiatives that range from eating organic food to recycling and conserving energy, has done a lot of work for environmental issues to, like Granoff's company, make the world we live in a cleaner place.

When asked about Better Place, President of SEA Hannah Saltman wrote in an e-mail to the Justice, "It's great they are developing economically feasible options to solve the problem of oil dependency."

Granoff had experience with energy and the environment prior to joining Better Place. He first became interested in energy security in 2004 after helping out on a political campaign. He then learned more about energy security from an organization called Securing America's Future Energy, where he serves on the board.

He spoke at the event about a war game simulation SAFE created to see what would happen if world events caused oil prices to rise to extreme heights. "The moral of the story was," said Granoff, that "there are no short term fixes," especially in scenarios like the situation in which "you have a major disruption in supply."

After that, Granoff "started delving deeper into this issue of oil and asking the question [of] what would realistically replace oil that could scale, be market-driven and did not involve a science project," he said.

Other fuel sources like hydrogen require new technologies to be developed or complex mixtures of chemicals, and Granoff did not think hydrogen would be transformed into a fuel source. Ethanol, another alternative fuel source, has "huge water requirements [and] huge agricultural requirements," he said.

Granoff also believes that oil companies could help those in favor of alternative energy to achieve the same goal of making electric-powered cars. He thinks the big oil companies are rooting for Better Place to succeed because the oil industry is now in what he calls a "boomerang scenario." A boomerang scenario occurs when the price of oil rises and decreases steeply, back and forth. This, explained Granoff, leads to super-spikes in the price of oil, which happened in 2008. Granoff believes the housing crisis occurred because of oil price spikes. People had to pay more to fuel their cars and heat their homes, which put a considerable strain on their abilities to manage their other finances like home loans. This entire boom-and-bust cycle, Granoff said, is not good for people in the oil business.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said that for a company like Better Place, "A big issue is going to be to make sure it is economical and more effective to users over other options."

According to Granoff, Better Place has done exactly that. In an invite-only talk immediately before the event, he explained how Better Place has used economics and business and not new technology or clever "science projects," as Granoff called it, to create something innovative and profitable.

"[Better Place] took the next step and pushed forward to lay the groundwork for electric car adoption," said Saltman.

However, Jaffe believes that the United States has to put in place policies that would make it profitable to be clean in order for Better Place and alternative energy to make a mark.

"I think what has to happen [is] Congress needs to get its act together and pass legislation that would actually require or give incentives," said Jaffe, "something like the cap-and-trade bill the house passed last year."

One improvement, said Saltman, would be, "if there was a gas tax for non-electric cars." Alternatively, there are other roads to take down Electric Avenue besides through legislation. "The U.S. needs to use other transportation besides cars," she said, "whether that means upgrading public transportation or becoming more of a 'bike culture.'" She adds that "ultimately, if it's more economically better for consumers, they'll adopt it."

As Granoff points out, solving this issue and getting electric cars adopted in the U.S. is "really not for Better Place to do; it's for the United States government to do.