Several news items have caught my eye lately that sort of all come together in an eclectic electric vehicle mashup. Let me know your reaction to these news bits.
China is pushing electric vehicles hard in an effort to stamp out pollution and save money buying fuel from the world’s oil suppliers. The Chinese government has stated that it wants to totally ban internal combustion engine-powered cars but has yet to set a firm date for that ban. Two examples of their push for electric vehicles in general:
- Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi province, located in a predominantly coal-mining area, replaced roughly 8,000 gas-powered taxis with electric vehicles from EV manufacturer BYD in one year! Source: Climate Change News, 1/15/2018
- Shenzhen, China, with a population of over 12 million people, over a five-year period ending in 2017, replaced all 16,359 of its diesel-powered busses with all-electric busses (most from BYD). Incidentally, as of January, 2019, more than 21,000 of Shenzhen’s taxis were also electric vehicles. The US’s major cities have far fewer busses than cities in China, and many cities here are just starting to convert to electric-powered busses. Source: qz.com, 1/2/2018
China is also making a significant effort to install more charging stations in more locations to keep up with their electric vehicle growth. I will be digging into the growth of electric busses and taxis around the globe in a future series of blogs.
We know that around the world, especially in major cities and urban areas, one of the major factors holding up electric vehicle growth is the lack of a public charging infrastructure. Here are have four related news bits:
- Staying with China, Charged Electric Vehicles magazine posted a 4/17/2020 article describing ABB, the Swiss-Swedish industrial giant, installing 1,600 AC chargers (level 2) in a Chinese housing development of some 2,480 homes. Residents have the ability to remotely schedule charging times in advance to ensure a charging port for a specific time, and to schedule their charging at off-peak electricity price times.
- The New York Times, in an 4/16/2020 article entitled “‘Charger Desert’ in Big Cities Keeps Electric Cars from Mainstream” describes this problem that affects the “40% of Americans that don’t live in single family homes”, those primarily in apartments and condos. Particularly acute is the shortage of fast DC electric vehicle chargers in parking lots, city parking spaces, and big-box store parking lots.
- In a recent blog — Battery-Powered Electric Vehicle Charging: A Primer (Part 6), I wrote about the city of London’s installation of over 1,300 public street “lamppost” electric vehicle chargers, installed by ubitricity and Siemens.
- A 4/17/2020 Axios article cites Morgan Stanley’s analyst Adam Jonas’ list of “10 things we gotta get right” in any forthcoming infrastructure stimulus plan. The first 6 of the 10 were all related to electric vehicles, namely (quoting directly):
Electrical vehicle charging infrastructure
Upgrades to the nation’s electrical grid
Battery manufacturing
Battery recycling
Renewable power
5G networks for connected, automated vehicles
One of the points of Axios’s story is that in addition to looking back and fixing yesterday’s infrastructure such as bridges, highways, rail, and ports, we have to look ahead to tomorrow’s transportation infrastructure needs.
The most perplexing bit of news was an article in CleanTechnica on 4/16/2020 that is headlined: “Work Begins on GM/LG Chem GigaPower Battery Factory”. The article begins with wry humor as follows: “Tesla isn’t the only company rushing into the electric automobile future. OK, maybe “rushing” is a little strong when the topic is General Motors…….” Sweet! This new plant will be located next to GM’s former Lordstown plant near Youngstown, OH. I found several things interesting about this press release:
- Work has started on this 3.1 million square foot plant that will employ about 1,100 workers. The plant will produce enough batteries for about 500,000 electric vehicles, or about 30 GWh annually.
- The cost of the plant (assuming no overruns) will be $2.25 Billion; land: $5 million, building $608 million, and $1.6 Billion for the production equipment, machines, and automation. The cost of the total plant is about what Tesla paid to get its Shanghai plant operational. Total costs work out to about $726 a square foot – a bit more than the usual house or office space.
- The most interesting thing to me about this announcement was the schedule GM/LG Chem cited. GM’s back is to the wall to get their new range of electric vehicles designed, produced and out into the consumer marketplace. Few-to-no batteries equals few-to-no electric vehicles sold. LG Chem is already crushed with demand for its batteries from other global automakers. You would think first and foremost LG would want to move much faster with this plant start-up.
Tesla just demonstrated that it could get an entirely new 2 to 3 million square foot from-the-ground-up total automobile production plant built and producing complete Model 3 cars in less than one year! GM and LG Chem say their (by comparison) relatively simple battery plant is going to take 20 months to become operational. Maybe….. if there are no delays, such as foul winter weather, materials or machinery shortages, COVID-19 effects, etc.. 20 months! You can’t be serious!
Obviously, GM still doesn’t get it. By the time GM/LG finally gets that battery plant up and producing quality products in volume Tesla will have moved on to its next generation of roughly 20% better battery technology, be producing over one million cars per year, have Shanghai Phase 2, Giga Berlin, and the Cybertruck Model Y plants producing vehicles, and will have even greater market dominance and customer affection and loyalty.
At this rate, it will be too little too late for GM (and Ford, perhaps even sooner) and it will be game over. For more information on this matter, be sure to read my “Detroit Big 3 on the Precipice….Again” blog series.
I will write these “Eye Catcher” blogs periodically as I collect bits of interesting news from my many video and printed sources. Please let me know what you want to hear more about.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
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