Electric cars-Conversions

[Mandrake]

From late last year:



And way back in January last year:



China is certainly getting on with things!

It does seem that their air pollution problems are the major driving factor too, as evidenced by the "registration lottery" to register an ICE car talked about in the second clip!

[white exec]

It puts the UK to shame, it really does.

[Mandrake]

It puts the UK to shame, it really does.

The difference I think is they have already reached the "pain point" of extreme smog and air pollution so have been forced to act now, despite the shortcoming of current EV's. (Short range, charging time etc) A case of "it'll get worse before it gets better"...

The UK has not yet reached a crisis point (and hopefully doesn't) so doesn't have the same impetus to act and is therefore moving a lot more slowly, mainly to try to meet EU regulations that we are currently in breach of. Even so, there is still a smog problem in the UK.

I miss the clear, uniform deep blue sky in small town New Zealand where I'm from - even here in less populated Central Scotland let alone London there is a smog problem - the first sign of blue skies and hot sunny weather and the smog arrives - if the colour of the sky changes from blue directly above to a more washed out grey towards the horizon you have smog!! (I remember it being really bad in Paris when I visited too)

Some people are probably used to that as that's all they've ever known, but I can state for the record that when there is no smog and pollution that the sky should be a deep rich and uniform blue all the way from directly above down to the horizon. I do miss it. But maybe one day 20-30 years from now smog will be a thing of the past in the UK and a deep blue sky will be back.

[white exec]

Apart from urgency, the other difference between China and UK is that China sees an active and prescriptive role for government on these matters. The current UK government's approach is to leave national planning and virtually all other matters to 'market forces', in the hope that commercial firms and private enterprise will sort the problems as they arise. Historically, it was called "laissez faire", long ago discredited. The approach has left us with a dreadful state of railways, schools, health, housing, transport, energy, investment . . . Urban air quality is just another example of inaction.

[Hell Razor5543]

It will take something like the Thames Stink (early Victorian era, 1858) before any Government will take action. It was the Stink (and the epidemic) that resulted in the engineering project of Joseph Bazalgette.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Well I'm not going have the benefit of listening to the Jeremy Vine programme's discussion on this news item so I wonder if the Telegraph does a decent job of it...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/201 ... evolution/

Regards Neil

[RichardW]

Don't forget the Chinese are building coal fired power stations at the rate of about 1 a minute to provide all the power required by this E-car revolution.....!

[harryp]

Love the comment on Mandrakes "the growing electric vehicle market in China" where "major global brands are also bringing EV's to China in order to help the country reach it's ambitious goal....etc., etc".
Hahaha. not selling them then? No profit motive? No comment on self interest?
Maybe time the (arrogant?) West realised that getting China to manufacture most of our goods, thus "giving" them the technology and also due to the excellence of their engineers and their skill sets, it is us who are slowly slipping behind. Whatever the perceived faults of their Government, it has the ability for huge investment in both money and materials without the petty, often very childish, Parliamentary squabbling we have to go through in order to try and get anything moving, let alone completed in a reasonable time.
Now takes cover time for

[NewcastleFalcon]

Relax the Uk Government has all this under control....there's going to be a white paper to the very strict timetable of "later this year"!

The Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy has received almost 2,000 responses to its consultation on the new industrial roadmap and will respond in a white paper later this year.

Regards Neil

[MikeT]

Know what I think?
It's all moot anyway.
The climate is fubar'd.
After decades of doing nothing, the industrial bus has finally driven the planet over the, albeit very, very high cliff.
Just waiting for the impact while the privileged few are busy, busy, busy accelerating the syphoning and hoarding of great wealth in the vain hope it'lll offer them and their future generation(s) some sort of protection against the impending doom.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... isers-warn

[Mandrake]

Don't forget the Chinese are building coal fired power stations at the rate of about 1 a minute to provide all the power required by this E-car revolution.....!

It's true that China is about 57% coal generation as of 2016, ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrici ... r_in_China ) but that is rapidly changing, as it was 73% in 2014. You don't skate to where the hockey puck is now, you skate to where it will be when you get there...

If you buy a new ICE today, it will be as polluting in 10-15 years from now as it was the day it was made. If you buy an EV today and it is only marginally cleaner due to coal generated electricity, if the grid is cleaned up in the 10-15 years that the car is on the road it will become cleaner to run.

China has massive under developed hydroelectric resources in the south west of the country, while most of the power demand is in the east and south east industrial areas, which has been a problem because China doesn't have a unified grid like smaller countries, both for historic reasons and because you can't have a unified grid of that size anyway when using AC transport. Their solution is to build the biggest long distance High Voltage DC transmission lines (800kV) in the world to link the Hydroelectric generation regions with the regions where the demand for power is. And according to that article they expect to have 15 of these cross country HVDC links up and running by 2020...

As well as that China is the biggest market in the world for both manufacture and use of PV Solar panels, with Solar generation sky rocketing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

So yes, there is a lot of coal used for power generation in China today, but they're not stupid, and that is changing very rapidly. In fact they're rather cannily pushing EV adoption hard at the same time that they're transitioning over to much more renewable generation, so that both pieces of the puzzle will click into place at the same time...

Meanwhile the UK government is letting the market decide what should happen as it largely sits on its hands...

Edit: One other point I forgot to make is that it's well known that it takes about the same amount of electricity to refine a gallon of Petrol/Diesel as will drive an EV the same distance that gallon of petrol/diesel would have taken you in an approx 40MPG car. So assuming that China refines its own Petrol/Diesel from crude oil and uses their own electricity to do so, there is no large net increase in electricity demand as cars transition from ICE to EV, because as the demand for Petrol/Diesel drops, the refineries will use correspondingly less power! An often overlooked factor in the big picture.

[Gibbo2286]

I read in a science magazine that the China energy project 'Three Gorges Dam' is so great that it has slowed the rotation of the earth measurably, I wonder how that fits into the climate change scenario.

[Mandrake]

I read in a science magazine that the China energy project 'Three Gorges Dam' is so great that it has slowed the rotation of the earth measurably, I wonder how that fits into the climate change scenario.

Heaven forbid that everyone in China runs in the same direction at the same time.

[Gibbo2286]

I read in a science magazine that the China energy project 'Three Gorges Dam' is so great that it has slowed the rotation of the earth measurably, I wonder how that fits into the climate change scenario.

Heaven forbid that everyone in China runs in the same direction at the same time.

Or jumps up and down.

[Gibbo2286]

I read in a science magazine that the China energy project 'Three Gorges Dam' is so great that it has slowed the rotation of the earth measurably, I wonder how that fits into the climate change scenario.

Heaven forbid that everyone in China runs in the same direction at the same time.

Or jumps up and down.

I've often wondered about the launching of those huge space rockets, Newton's law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.