News on China's scientific and technological development.

The speed and scale at which China is transitioning into a high-tech powerhouse is mind-boggling.

China Goes All In on the Transit Revolution
Just one city's fleet of electric buses is bigger than the five largest North American bus fleets combined.
by
Nathaniel Bullard
17
December 8, 2017, 2:00 PM EST

In 2009, the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen rolled out its first electric city bus. As of May of this year, it had 14,500 of them on the road -- and by the end of this month,

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. Shenzhen’s efforts are another example of how China is leading the way in transforming urban transportation.

Shenzhen’s effort is striking in its scope. The largest city bus fleet in North America is in New York City, whose 5,700 buses put it well ahead of Los Angeles, New Jersey, suburban Chicago and Toronto. These

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.

Shenzhen’s fleet of electric buses is bigger than the five largest North American bus fleets combined. Not their electric bus fleets -- their entire bus fleets.

Shenzhen’s buses represent only a small fraction of China’s total electric bus sales, which reached 116,000 last year.

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On the deployment arc of that circle, my colleagues expect global electric vehicle sales to reach nearly 1.1 million this year, up from 695,000 last year. But given the size of an electric bus’s battery pack as well as the country’s electric bus sales, China’s demand for electric bus batteries is almost equal to that of demand for

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...

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supercat said:

The speed and scale at which China is transitioning into a high-tech powerhouse is mind-boggling.

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Perhaps offering to retrofit existing buses with electric power trains is also something BYD might consider.
We had a couple of BYD electric buses on trial earlier on in the year in NZ. I do not know what the outcome was but apparently in parallel with the trial, NZ Bus in the process of retro-fitting Wrightspeed electric power trains to its existing bus fleet at its workshop in Wellington.

Wrightspeed founder Ian Wright who is a NZ'der was a co founder of Tesla and left and established a company specializing in electric heavy vehicles



Ian Wright is one of the co-founders of who doesn’t often make headlines, especially since he left the company in 2005 when it was still a startup. His latest venture, Wrightspeed, is doing something not entirely dissimilar to Tesla, and commercial trucks are his focus. Wrightspeed doesn’t make the whole truck, though, just a clean, electric powertrain specially designed to meet the needs of industrial trucks, such as garbage trucks and large delivery vehicles.

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While Tesla is known far and wide for its innovations in electric cars, you don’t hear much about commercial trucks going electric. And why not? Commercial trucks, like those used for delivery or for garbage pickup, are noisy, smelly, and guilty of a lot of carbon emissions. Wright hopes the prospect of converting fleet vehicles to electric powertrains will be attractive to business owners, because it can represent a significant cost savings in the long term. There’s a pretty hefty up-front investment, though, as an electric powertrain costs between $150,000 and $200,000 to install, while a brand-new garbage truck, for example, costs $500,000. Convincing fleet owners to shell out that much cash will be a challenge, especially if they feel their current trucks are doing just fine.





Wrightspeed’s first clients are 25 FedEx trucks and 17 garbage trucks for the Ratto Group, a Santa Rosa-based waste management company. The electric powertrains being installed in these trucks feature a lot of familiar traits, like an electric engine, battery system, and an on-board power generator that can run on diesel or natural gas to recharge the battery when it runs low on juice. It may not seem like big business, starting with just 52 vehicles, but Wrightspeed has plans to grow. The company is moving into a new headquarters in Alameda, and plans to expand their headcount from roughly 25 to 250 employees over the next few years.

Comes down to scale and usage. In China it is normal to take a bus, in many parts of US, there is not much service and people drive.

Also, where did the electricity come from? Coal powered bus is dirtier.

PiSigma said:

Comes down to scale and usage. In China it is normal to take a bus, in many parts of US, there is not much service and people drive.

Also, where did the electricity come from? Coal powered bus is dirtier.

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This means that in order for the switch to e-mobility to be most effective, countries will have to transition their energy generation in parallel.

B.I.B. said:

This means that in order for the switch to e-mobility to be most effective, countries will have to transition their energy generation in parallel.

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Correct. Also need to consider life cycle cost and life cycle carbon footprint. Like a Tesla is less carbon intense than a bwm 7 series, but more than a small Honda civic.

I suspect China is going mass e-vehicle is more for hoping to import less oil due to geopolitical concerns than trying to save the environment. It is pretty easy to figure out the life cycle costs and footprint and see that most of these EVs sold in China are not much better than a gas car (considering the average small cars they drive there).

Duplicate post

PiSigma said:

Comes down to scale and usage. In China it is normal to take a bus, in many parts of US, there is not much service and people drive.

Also, where did the electricity come from? Coal powered bus is dirtier.

Click to expand...

How often you stand next to a diesel truck and smell the exhaust?
it is easier to apply filters and other pollution control devices at the coal power generation station than to individual cars and trucks



Some of the toughest limits for SO2 emissions are found in China, where flue gases from coal-fired power plants are not allowed to contain more than 35 milligrams of SO2 for every cubic meter of dry flue gas.

vincent said:

How often you stand next to a diesel truck and smell the exhaust?
it is easier to apply filters and other pollution control devices at the coal power generation station than to individual cars and trucks

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Some of the toughest limits for SO2 emissions are found in China, where flue gases from coal-fired power plants are not allowed to contain more than 35 milligrams of SO2 for every cubic meter of dry flue gas.

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It comes down to the diesel used. Ultra low sulfur diesel (I designed a couple of those plants back in the day) release less than 1% of sulfur from a tailpipe than regular diesel. I did some clean coal projects back in school, efficiency is higher than normal coal by factor of 2.5, but still much lower than diesel.

Coal produces more CO2 than other hydrocarbons due to its lower energy density. Your article even said the efficiency of coal is 47% max right now. For gasoline/diesel it is in the 90% range. But China got literally 200 years of supply for coal So they will continually try to improve their coal plants. Oil and gas are imported, and that what they to replace. That's what I think is their motivation for electrification. I don't buy the whole narrative on EVs being better for the planet.

Is this true or fake INVINCIBLE cloak

Hendrik_2000 said:

Is this true or fake INVINCIBLE cloak

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Fake. It's just a green cloth and video post-processing. This has been circulating on wechat for a while now.