Original article:Op-Ed Columnist - While Detroit Slept - NYTimes.com
Thomas Friedman timely points at the new innovation in the automobile industry that has the potential to become a game-changing model for transportation business all over the world. What years of 'it's coming', 'it's here' cries of the environmentalists about global warming couldn't do was eventually done by the oil price hike in the last 2, 3 years - wake the world up from it's gasoline-consuming slumber. As car makers around the world look for smaller, smart and alternative-fuel run cars, Better Place, a Palo Alto-based company, is one step ahead of them. It is building the network that will fuel these electric cars of tomorrow. It is like laying the cable network before the first fax machine is shipped out - an electric 'fueling' station, if you will, for the green electric cars.
For the environmentalists, however, that solves only half of the problem. The supply of power to these electric fueling stations is also the area that must be powered by cleaner, renewable energy i.e. wind, geo-thermal, nuclear or solar. While much work still needs to be done in that area, at least we have started to see heavy advertisement by alternative energy technology providers like Vestas on CNN, which increases awareness, if nothing else, about the potentiality of these ventures.
As Zorlu Group from Turkey and Sanfarina, a local firm, work to charge our national power grid with some renewable energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels, we can only hope that other investors also see this as an 'investment of tomorrow' and increase the size of the alternative energy pie in Paksitan.
