“Overcapacity”, a geeky economic term, has recently become the new buzzword for international discussion around China’s solar and electric vehicle industries. It is also becoming one of the thorniest issues in China’s relations with other major economies.

Notably, the word was mentioned five times in the G7 Leaders Communiqué released last week, with the G7 countries framing it collectively as a global challenge.

It is a debate that was initially sparked by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during her April visit to Beijing. According to her, China’s cleantech industry has excess capacities that cannot be absorbed domestically, leading to exports at depressed prices. And she stressed that this should be a concern not only for the US, but also for Europe and other emerging markets.

Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels

China strongly disagreed with this claim, while Yellen’s concern resonated in the EU, which has long focused on China’s market dominance. In short, there is an overcapacity of “overcapacities”, with neither side finding identical terms of reference. But as this debate is a harbinger of how climate solutions and political agendas will interweave, it’s worth parsing out some lessons for each side, on their own terms.

The US’ “overcapacity” claim as presented by Yellen is a non-starter in China.

China’s clean energy industry is an important point of pride internationally and a source of legitimacy domestically for Beijing. From that perspective countering the “overcapacity” claim is both emotionally and strategically important.

Strategically, this claim is being used to justify trade measures and tariffs against China’s clean energy products. Emotionally, the cleantech industry is a modern-day success story of China’s entrepreneurship and innovation. In China’s public discourse, the US “overcapacity” claims lands as a rejection of that success.

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The result is a political debate in which – by design – no side can convince the other. And the lesson? This posturing is at odds with US-China climate diplomacy as we’ve known it to function in the past. Whatever objectives this approach serves, it does not include closer climate collaboration between the US and China, even as multilateral climate action at the UN level still requires them to take action in concert.

In China, discussion on “overcapacity” emerged from an ongoing conversation about how to manage investment hype. And the answer lies on the demand side.

For investors inside China at a time of challenging economics, few industries are as attractive as the clean energy industry. And business leaders have focused on the risks of hot money and breakneck expansion of clean energy manufacturing capacity for some time now, particularly in the solar industry.

This was probably the origin of “overcapacity”. But in China, this has been a familiar, almost perennial discussion of investment and industrial cycles. While the US argument equates exports to overcapacity, Chinese companies argue that it is demand that determines overcapacity, and they make investment and expansion decisions based on projections of both domestic and global demand.

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That said, the size of China’s domestic market means it will remain the “base” for Chinese manufacturers. In the overseas market, the “overcapacity” claim underscores the complexity and uncertainties Chinese companies face.

For Chinese policymakers, one obvious response to the new market dynamics should be taking domestic demand to new levels. That means addressing lingering questions for China’s renewable energy future – namely, how to resolve the impact of coal. China’s power market was designed for a system dependent on coal, but it needs reform to allow wind and solar to take the central role. Injecting new political momentum to accelerate the reform will be key.

The EU has long been concerned about China’s market dominance, and the “overcapacity” debate is pushing it to decide its role in this trilateral trade and climate dynamic.

Even before this debate erupted, the EU had already begun, subtly, to diversify supply chains and build its own industrial strength, reducing dependence on Chinese products. Last week, the EU announced a maximum tariff of 38% on imported Chinese-made electric vehicles, concluding that Chinese EV makers are benefiting from “unfair subsidies”.

At this stage, it’s still unclear if this is the end of the EU’s low-key approach to date. Cultivating an EU-based clean industry hub without compromising the global response to climate change is a challenge, especially as the EU positions itself as a climate leader.

Entering the fray of US-China tension only makes this feat more complex, especially given uncertainties on the US end in an election year. How the EU approaches this climate and trade nexus will ultimately shape the trilateral dynamic among the world’s three largest carbon emitters in the coming years.

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For China, where relations with the EU and other countries are concerned, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the hidden messages in the “overcapacity” debate. Other countries want more than just Chinese products.

Climate leadership is not a buyer-seller relationship, but one between partners who want solutions that create local jobs, develop opportunities, and enable native development of a sustainable future.

China should see its role in the global clean transition as more than a manufacturing hub. The transition requires tools, technology, finance and know-how, and China has much to offer. It is time for China to think more creatively about how to leverage its industrial advantages to provide the solutions with which the world is currently under-supplied.

The post Lessons from trade tensions targeting “overcapacity” in China’s cleantech industry appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, China’s new top climate diplomat Liu Zhenmin travelled to Washington DC for two days of talks with his US counterpart John Podesta, also fresh in the job.

They discussed co-operation on climate issues, including plans for both sides to ramp up renewables, and vowed to “intensify technical and policy exchanges”.

But the day after, with Liu still in the country, the US State Department briefed journalists that Podesta had told Liu that China was producing too many solar panels and lithium-ion EV batteries.

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Then on Tuesday, the White House increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels, accusing the Chinese government of “unfair, non-market practices” and “flooding global markets with artificially low-priced exports”.

“Clear protectionism”

In response, the state-owned China Daily newspaper in an editorial described the tariffs as “a clear act of protectionism”.

The head of the China Automobile Association Fu Bingfeng agreed, adding that “the new energy industry is jointly created by mankind and can bring common benefits to mankind”, saying the tariffs were “very unreasonable”.

Asia Society analyst Li Shuo told Climate Home that, rather than thinking of over-supply of solar panels as a problem, “it is the world’s inability to deploy these products that is the problem”.

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The tariffs reflect “the new reality global climate politics needs to deal with” – that low-carbon products will not be made in the most cost-efficient way and distributed around the world, he explained. India also has trade barriers against Chinese solar panels, designed to boost its domestic solar manufacturing.

Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that such trade barriers can, in general, delay the competitiveness of low-carbon technologies against their market rivals – like solar against gas, or EVs against internal combustion engines.

Limited effect on solar, batteries bigger

The US-imposed measures are designed to increase the cost of Chinese goods needed for the energy transition – and could therefore slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels.

But BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase told Climate Home that the increase in the tariff on solar cells and modules from 25% to 50% would “have little effect”.

She noted that tariffs of 25% have been in place “for ages – and as a result the US imports almost no cells or modules directly from China, instead importing from Southeast Asia”.

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The Biden administration is currently weighing whether to impose tariffs on solar imports from four Southeast Asian countries over concerns that China is routing its panels through these nations.

US solar panel manufacturers are lobbying the government in favour of those tariffs, while US solar panel installers are lobbying against them. A decision is needed by June 6, two years on from a pause on tariffs affecting the Southeast Asian nations.

Similarly, the US already imports relatively few electric vehicles from China, as it already has Trump-era tariffs on them. The US’s adoption of electric vehicles is far slower than in Europe or China.

But US car-makers do import lots of lithium-ion EV batteries for their vehicles despite existing 7.5% tariffs. China produces about three-quarters of all the world’s EV batteries, with the US producing less than a tenth.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Earlier this week, the factory – which employs around 12,500 people and produces 1,000 EVs per day – was reconnected to the electricity grid after a costly power outage caused by a March 5 arson attack on a nearby pylon, claimed by far-left activists. 

 Now it faces protests from around 80 climate campaigners belonging to the “Tesla Stoppen” (Stop Tesla) initiative who set up a camp in late February inside 100 hectares of state-owned forest land that Tesla wants to buy and clear for its expansion.  

Annika Fuchs, a mobility expert with German climate justice group Robin Wood, told Climate Home she and others occupying the Grünheide forest – who could face eviction from Friday onwards – support local residents’ rejection of the factory expansion in a February referendum.  

“We want to make sure that we reduce the amount of cars that we have here in Germany, and really focus on public transport as the solution for the future,” she added.  

Both Tesla Stoppen and Grünheide inhabitants issued statements condemning the sabotage of the pylon by the leftist “Volcano Group”, but the incident caught the attention of the German media and has fuelled debate around the potential for EVs to fight climate change.   

On the day of the pylon attack, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns: “Stopping production of electric vehicles, rather than fossil fuel vehicles, ist extrem dumm” [is extremely stupid]. 

This week, Musk visited the factory after operations had resumed there, wearing a black T-shirt that read “We are (Giga) the future”, and shouting “Hey, Deutschland rocks! Dig in Berlin for the win!” as he headed back to his car.  

Tesla did not respond to a request from Climate Home for comment on opposition to its factory expansion plans. 

Water and mineral wars  

Tesla’s German gigafactory has been a controversial project even before it began operations in early 2022. Key political figures, eager to bring jobs and tax revenue to the area, have supported the company but local people and climate activists are more sceptical. 

Arguments on both sides highlight the contested nature of “green capitalism”. Backers of EVs see them as the best way to cut emissions from fossil fuel-driven transport, while critics decry their energy-intensive production process and the negative environmental and social impacts of battery supply chains for minerals and metals like lithium.  

The factory is located five kilometres south of Grünheide, a small town about an hour southeast of Berlin by train. Concerned about its impacts, residents formed a citizen’s initiative that monitors Tesla’s actions in the region. 

A general view shows the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, March 20, 2022. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

German newspaper Stern reported last month that local water authority officials warned Tesla repeatedly that phosphorus and nitrogen levels in the wastewater from its factory released into the nearby River Spree, which flows through Berlin, were found to be six times higher than permitted limits. 

Tesla has suggested that concentrations of pollutants in its wastewater are higher because the company reuses water. Tesla’s VP of public policy and business development, Rohan Patel, responded to the claims on X by pointing out that Tesla recycles “up to 100%” of its industrial water, and that the gigafactory uses 33% less water per vehicle than the industry average. 

Locals in Grünheide also fear that their drinking water sources may become contaminated if groundwater levels drop too low.   

Grünheide is surrounded by lakes and waterways, but as in large swathes of Central Europe, droughts in recent years have left groundwater levels at record lows. Tesla, meanwhile, has become one of the region’s biggest water users. According to German newspaper Tagesspiegel, Tesla used just over 450,000 cubic metres of fresh water last year – although this is less than a third of the amount it was allotted in an agreement with the local water board.   

Opponents of the proposed gigafactory expansion note that it would extend the factory into in a water protection area.   

At the entrance to the Tesla Stoppen camp, a tall banner hanging from the trees reads “Water is a human right”. Activists at the site told Climate Home that securing the region’s water resources is a key concern – one that also applies further afield. 

Photos of South American lithium salt flats hang in the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Photographs of South America’s lithium salt flats are hung around the camp, flagging how lithium mining drains water resources from arid regions in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.  

“We see that water injustice and climate injustice are caused by the same reasons. It’s big companies exploiting resources,” said protestor Lamin Chukwugozie.  

Stephen Musarurwa, a climate justice advocate from Botswana, said in a speech delivered at a Tesla Stoppen demonstration on Sunday that conflict and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being exacerbated by mining for EV battery components.   

“We have communities that don’t own a single electric car, but the amount of destruction is beyond humanity,” he said.  

Climate activist Lamin Chukwugozie plays piano at in the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Climate protesters ‘repressed’  

The protest camp at Grünheide was initially given permission to remain until March 15, after which local police could move in to evict its occupants.  

A police spokesman told the German Press Agency (DPA) it was considering how to deal with the camp but did not say when a decision was expected. Tesla Stoppen is organising workshops to prepare activists on how to respond to an eviction should it happen. 

Many of the camp’s members have also been involved in other environmental direct-action movements in Germany, such as the occupation of the site of a lignite coal mine in Lützerath, which attracted Greta Thunberg and other high-profile youth activists in early 2023 and ended in clashes as the site was cleared by riot police and bulldozers. 

Here, and before that at the Hambach Forest, campaigners living in tents and treehouses spent years resisting police evictions to stall the expansion of brown coal mines in west Germany – winning a commitment in early 2020 that the Hambach Forest site would not be developed.

In both Lützerath and Hambach, activists reported widespread and brutal police violence used against them. According to a report released this week by global civil society alliance CIVICUS, climate activists face growing restrictions in Germany – as in many other industrialised nations.   

“Germany has a reputation of being a country with high protest freedoms, but what we’ve noticed is that not all protests are being treated the same,” Andrew Firmin, who leads climate activism research for CIVICUS, told Climate Home. “Climate protests in particular are being targeted and repressed with excessive force.”  

Resistance growing   

In Grünheide, as the sun set over the forest after Sunday’s demonstration, Sulti, a Kurdish refugee who did not want to give their full name, admired a wooden platform they and other activists had suspended in a tree about six metres off the ground. Sulti planned to sleep up on the platform, which would be given walls and a roof in the coming days. 

Sulti said protestors had come to Grünheide aiming to abolish companies that exploit natural resources and defend shared commons like the forest. “We are trying to build a utopia, and to show people that it’s possible to live in a collective, and to not let the capitalist system push us all into individualism,” the activist said.  

Kurdish refugee and protest camp participant Sulti poses in front of a banner at the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Sulti is not afraid of potential confrontation with the authorities, saying: “We are the seed, we are the soil, we are the land, and we will keep growing and growing.”   

Chukwugozie pointed to how the climate justice movement has shown it can learn and rebuild after struggles like Lützerath, in which he also participated. “We come back in different places and continue to fight from the ground up,” he said. 

Editor’s note: On March 19, an administrative court in Germany rejected a police application to end the camp’s right to legal assembly which had asserted the tree-houses built by protesters were dangerous. After the court decision, the activists said they plan to remain in the forest until at least May 20, DPA reported.

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But things did not go according to plan. First, Iskan crashed one electric sports car into a cliff on a test drive. Then one of his lead engineers, Dasep Ahmadi, was sentenced to seven years in prison for wasting state money, after his EVs were judged not fit for the road.

For several years afters this conviction, Indonesia’s entrepreneurs were too scared to go near the industry, leaving drivers with a choice between polluting domestic models or expensive imported EVs.

“After [Ahmadi’s] case, the research programme relatively stopped”, said Agus Purwadi, an EV researcher at Indonesia’s prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology.

Transport accounts for some 28% of Indonesia’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution kills an estimated 120,000 Indonesians a year. Although most Indonesians still get around by motorbike, demand for cars is booming, particularly in major cities. Just 0.15% of cars sold in Indonesia in 2020 were electric.

“If you walk in [Jakarta] for half an hour you will feel the pollution from the vehicles,” said Julius Adiatma, a Jakarta-based EV researcher at the Institute for Essential Services Reform. “You can see the smoke, from the breathing you can feel it, the smell of the air is not fresh”.

This week, the International Energy Agency said that, if the world is to reach net zero emissions by 2050, then 60% of global car sales should be electric by 2030. Indonesia has a long way to go.

Iskan came to prominence as the football-mad editor of the Java Post in the 1980s, with a reputation for humility and a youthful demeanour which he attributes to the transplant of a 21-year old’s liver.

He gained popularity by prioritising Indonesian, not foreign, football in his newspapers. He paid for the food of his local team’s fans when they travelled to Jakarta for games – and damages when they smashed up trains.

In 2011, after two years running the state electricity company, Iskan was appointed as minister of state enterprises and made it his mission to sponsor the development of a cheap electric vehicle.

One of the men he turned to was 46-year old Dasep Ahmadi. Raised by his mechanic father, Ahmadi had studied mechanical engineering at Indonesia’s prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology and on a scholarship in Germany. He had worked at big car companies and won a national robot-building competition.

In 1998, with southeast Asia shattered by the financial crisis, Ahmadi left a cushy job at Astra to start his own business providing motorbike testing equipment. When Iskan was looking for an electric car builder, his name came up.

Although he admits he once felt “very embarrassed” about driving an electric car, Iskan took such a personal interest that he insisted on test driving the prototype cars himself.

While driving a group of journalists around one of Jakarta’s busiest roundabouts in Ahmadi’s bright green Evina, the car broke down. In a later test drive, it failed to make it up the hill to Bandung.

It could, and did, get worse. While Iskan and one of his engineers were test driving a sporty red electric car at around 70km an hour, he swerved off the road, later blaming brake failure.

The prototype Tuxuci, which had been developed at Iskan’s request, crashed into an electricity pylon, wrecking the car. The minister emerged unscathed: “Not even blisters,” he said. He claimed he would rather be used as a guinea pig for new technology than let the general public take the risk.

https://twitter.com/agusjurnalis/status/287541326097031169

The incident did not put him off electric vehicles. A few months later, Iskan persuaded three state-owned enterprises to sponsor the construction of sixteen of Ahmadi’s electric vehicles to ferry world leaders around the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit in Bali.

The cars were supposed to advertise the new Indonesia to visiting bigshots like Xi Jinping and John Kerry. They were home-made, modern and (both literally and figuratively) green.

But they never made it to the summit. The attorney general’s office later said their brakes were too strong, their rims too wide, their engines over-heated when they tried to go uphill and they were too similar to the Toyota Alphard.

Prosecutors said Ahmadi’s car was too similar to the Toyota Alphard. (Photo: M93/Wikimedia)

The cars were donated to Indonesian universities to help in their research. In most countries, this would be classed as a promising start or, at worst, a failed experiment. Tesla, the pioneering American company founded by Elon Musk, took five years to release its first car.

But Indonesia has a law against causing kerugian negara, a financial loss to the nation. So, after a change in government, Ahmadi was arrested and detained at the attorney general’s office in July 2015.

He was sentenced to seven years in prison and a fine of RP200m ($14,000). Iskan, now an ex-minister, was also questioned by investigators and his old ministry office was raided although he was not convicted.

Ahmadi and his lawyer Vidi Galenso argued the conviction was unfair. At court, Ahmadi told reporters: “We do our best, if there are still shortcomings, that’s normal. But, if this is called a crime, I don’t accept it.” His lawyer Vidi Galenso added: “In research, failure cannot be considered wrongdoing”.

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Ahmadi was supported by prominent commentators too. Indonesian economist Faisal Basri said it would be ridiculous if those behind every project sponsored by state companies were prosecuted for poor performance.

Should the organisers of the Java Jazz festival, which is sponsored by a state bank, be prosecuted if no one turns up to hear the music? Basri asked.

Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa) analyst Elrika Hamdi said several CEOs of state-owned companies had been convicted of corruption “when they were simply making wrong or slightly off-track business decisions”.

“Making a mistake on business decisions should not be equal to corruption,” she said. “But when you do it in a [state owned company], that means (in the Indonesian legal system) you’re causing losses for the state, and that translates to corruption.”

Purwadi suggested there was a political motivation for Ahmadi and Iskan’s persecution. After Joko Widodo was elected president in 2014, Iskan was an ex-minister from an opposition party and Ahmadi was an opposition candidate for the West Java regional parliament.

The effects of Ahmadi’s conviction went beyond the engineer himself. Fear of the same fate, plus the drying up of research funding, put off engineers from trying to develop Indonesia’s answer to Tesla.

A 2018 report by the Jakarta-based Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR) found that Indonesia was “still at a very early stage of EV diffusion” and the prospects for EV adoption were “dismal”. EVs were 2-3 times more expensive than fossil fuelled cars, it said, largely because they had to be imported and were subject to import duties.

https://twitter.com/MacoanaBawalipu/status/768824487710117889

Ahmadi’s Indonesian EV was supposed to be priced at IDR 200-300m ($14-21,000) while  Nissan, Hyundai and Toyota EVs cost in the region of IDR 400-700m ($28-49,000).

Putra Adhiguna, an Indonesian energy analyst at Ieefa, said: “The case created a bad precedent for inventors… it tarnished some of the grand ambition.”

To encourage the kind of domestic EV industry that India, China and Malaysia have the government needs to support the industry for decades, he said.

According to Adiatma, the government has taken some measures to address the price difference between electric and fossil fuel cars but these have not gone far enough.

In 2019, the government introduced measures to encourage investment in electric vehicles and battery manufacturing. Despite this, and even if foreign companies avoid import taxes by manufacturing their EVs in Indonesia, Adiatma said an EV would still cost over $30,000 compared to $10-20,000 for a conventional car.

“We need to do something with the conventional cars to make electric cars competitive,” Adiatma said. “The conventional car price is too low”. He proposes a carbon or luxury tax on conventional cars and raising the price of fuel, which state-owned oil company Pertamina regulates.

While Indonesia’s answer to Elon Musk languishes in prison, any government initiative on EVs is greeted with a chorus of scepticism on social media.

Below, in response to president Joko Widodo praising a student EV project, a Twitter user writes: “Hopefully it doesn’t have the same fate as Dasep Ahmadi’s electric car.”

Smoga tidak bernasib seperti mobil listrik Dasep Ahmadi pic.twitter.com/cT6QwRjvAZ

— Abuzhafir (@budiagani) December 20, 2017

In 2019, the government posted a “fact check”, claiming that an article titled “only in Indonesia, electric car creator imprisoned for 7 years” was “disinformation”. But it did not refute the basic facts of the case.

Indonesian ministers are weighing up scenarios for reaching net zero emissions between 2045 and 2070 and the country’s biggest utility has pledged to stop building new coal plants.

As the country’s electricity system gets greener, the climate benefits of EVs increase. IESR’s research found that an ambitious EV transition could do 6% of the emissions reduction necessary to change a 3C global warming trajectory to 1.5C.

Sadly for Indonesia though, the companies who cash in on this EV transition are likely to be foreign giants like Hyundai and the price of these foreign cars will mean the transition is slower than the melting polar ice caps and Indonesian lungs would like.

The post With Indonesia’s answer to Elon Musk in jail, electric vehicles are going nowhere appeared first on Climate Home News.

Plug-in vehicles emit less greenhouse gases than petrol and diesel models over a car’s lifetime – that includes the mining of metals or lithium for batteries, manufacturing, driving 150,000 kilometers and finally scrapping, a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability on Monday found.

Some past studies have questioned the greenness of electric vehicles (EVs), especially because of high emissions linked to making batteries.

“In most of the world, in countries accounting for 95% of road transport, EVs would reduce emissions compared to average petrol cars,” lead author Florian Knobloch, of the Environmental Science Department at Radboud University in the Netherlands, told Climate Home News.

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The study said it made sense to drive an electric car rather than a fossil-fuel vehicle in major markets including China, the United States and almost all of Europe.

The exceptions, where EVs need electricity generated from coal-fired plants to recharge, were India, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria, it said.

Transport, mostly by road, accounts for about a quarter of total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

“But it’s not like driving EVs is a silver bullet solution for transport. It’s much better not to drive a car at all,” Knobloch said of the findings by a team also including researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge.

As electricity sources shift from fossil fuels to renewables such as hydro, solar and wind power, EVs would become relatively more attractive. India, for instance, is shifting to solar power so EVs would make sense within a few  years, he said.

India has previously committed to raise the portion of renewable into its energy mix to 175GW by 2022, with the aim of boosting it to 450GW in the long-term.

The benefits of driving EVs are highest in nations with few fossil fuels in electricity generation. “Average lifetime emissions from electric cars are up to 70% lower than petrol cars in countries like Sweden and France (which get most of their electricity from renewables and nuclear),” the authors wrote.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global electric car fleet exceeded 5.1 million in 2018, up by 2 million since 2017. China led sales with 1.1 million in 2018 but, worldwide, EVs are still less than 1% of the global car fleet.

Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says

NGO Transport & Environment (T&E), which campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe, said its research was more favourable to EVs.

“EVs are better than petrol or diesel cars in every country in Europe. This also includes Poland,” Lucien Mathieu, a transport and e-mobility analyst with T&E, told CHN.

Mathieu added that grids were likely to be a lot greener in 15 years’ time – the expected lifetime of a vehicle – if governments stick to pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

There are also massive differences between the carbon footprint of manufacturing, he said. Tesla, for instance, uses clean solar power at a Gigafactory in Nevada to assemble battery packs and reduce emissions.

The post Electric cars help limit climate change despite blackspots in India, Poland appeared first on Climate Home News.

Driven by generous tax breaks (carrot) and increasing road tolls (stick), demand for EVs has been rising rapidly. Because of these tax breaks, electric cars can be sold at the same price as fossil fuel vehicles. EVs, however, are considerably cheaper to run.

A calculation by our institute shows that, for example, an e-Golf reduces total running costs (excluding insurance, depreciation and parking) by around 75% compared to its diesel equivalent, for someone driving through an Oslo toll station twice daily.

This makes it attractive for Norwegian consumers to replace their diesel or petrol cars by electric ones. A recent poll showed that nearly half of the people, who are planning to buy a new car in 2018, want a chargeable one.

In fact, the demand for electric cars in Norway is currently growing so rapidly that car producers cannot keep up with it. Thousands of Norwegians have been waiting for months for their new EVs and car sellers have repeatedly extended delivery dates.

The waiting time for existing models like Volkswagen e-Golf, Hyundai Ioniq and Opel Ampera-e is between eight months and two years. Meanwhile, thousands have paid to be put on a waiting list for new models by Nissan, Tesla, Audi and Jaguar, which will be launched in the coming months and years.

A recent survey among Norwegian consumers, which we ran as part of an EU-funded research project on energy efficiency, shows that Norwegian consumers are willing to pay considerably more for cars with lower running costs.

Yet what happens if supply does not meet demand, for various reasons? The delays risk putting off consumers buying energy-efficient products.

Climate goals

Moreover, delays in electric car production also put Norway’s and the EU’s climate targets at risk. Under the Paris Agreement, Norway pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, relative to 1990 levels. How Norway will meet this target outside the emissions-trading sectors is currently still a matter of negotiations with the EU.

Transport is certainly the most important sector in Norway’s climate efforts. Emissions from transport have risen since 2005. In order to fulfil the Paris pledge, emissions will need be to cut by half by 2030. The Parliament has set an indicative target that all new passenger vehicles sold by 2025 should be emissions-free.

While electric car sales in Norway are far ahead of most other European countries, they are only just keeping up with the Norwegian Environment Agency’s projections and are far behind projections from the independent Institute for Transport Economics.

The institute has estimated that Norway needs around 65,000 new electric vehicles on the road in 2018 alone to hit the 2025-target, which is close to twice the number of EVs sold in 2017. Supply will need to increase manifold over the coming years if Norway wants to meet its vehicle and climate targets.

The current waiting lists for new electric vehicles indicate that supply is limiting sales. Being dependent on production abroad, a small country like Norway is vulnerable to marketing decisions by car producers and other market players in the transport sector.

With the European Union currently reviewing its Clean Vehicles Directive, it can learn important lessons from the EV revolution, and its setbacks, in Norway.

First, a well-designed policy package of carrots and sticks can drive deployment of energy-efficient technologies faster than expected. Second, policy makers must make sure that car manufacturers actually can deliver – on acceptable timescales – what they offer.

The Clean Vehicles Directive would benefit from considering these lessons, and avoid that car manufacturers respond to the directive with EV “window dressing”. If not, the climate and energy targets in the EU may be in peril.

Steffen Kallbekken is the research director of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research. Håkon Sælen and Erlend Hermansen are senior researchers; Elisabeth Lannoo is a senior communication advisor of the same organization.

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But recently it has entered the national spotlight. In the space of a year, Taiyuan has shifted its entire taxi fleet from petrol power to electricity. Thanks to strong support from the local government, electric vehicle (EV) sales in the city accounted for 7% of total car purchases in 2017, compared to 1% globally.

What’s happening in Taiyuan serves as an important lesson for other cities as governments struggle to shift economic growth away from heavy industry towards more sustainable models of development.

By reducing the number of petrol cars on the road, the city is tackling its car pollution problem while shoring up China’s position as a leader in clean technology.

Taiyuan illustrates how with the right policy support, a town can deliver rapid change. But the city still has plenty of conventional cars on its roads and its experience also shows the risks of moving too quickly.

Taiyuan’s taxi switch

In 2015, Shanxi’s coal output stalled before shrinking by 14% the following year. In need of new sources of economic growth, Taiyuan’s government began working hard to court the country’s burgeoning electric vehicle sector.

In 2016, and with little fanfare, the city switched its entire taxi fleet to electric cars (excluding the private cars used by services like Didi and Uber). Chinese vehicle manufacturer BYD sold 8,292 E6 vehicles. So how did a city built on coal wealth come to have more electric taxis than any other in China?

China is the world’s largest car market. Its leaders have set ambitious medium-term goals for automotive efficiency and climate change, including a cap on carbon emissions by 2030. In September 2017, they went further and announced plans to ban combustion engine cars altogether (though no timeline was announced).

China began promoting EVs in 2009, initially across ten cities. However, Taiyuan was not one of them. In fact, its cold temperatures can limit the effectiveness of the lithium-ion batteries used by EVs, potentially reducing the distance vehicles can travel.

Nonetheless, in March 2016 manufacturer BYD set about opening its first factory in Taiyuan. Today, six other EV makers have facilities there. And BYD alone is expected to contribute 5% of the city’s GDP.

This is partly due to support from local government, which is working hard to lure carmakers.

Like most of China’s city’s, Taiyuan has a public taxi fleet owned by several companies. In recent years this has been supplemented by an unofficial taxi sector, which operates in much the same way as Uber, with private drivers offering their services through a mobile application.

Public taxi drivers buy their own vehicles (or lease them from companies). However, it’s the local government that decides the type of cars that can operate as public taxis through mandatory purchase requirements.

The contract to buy over 8,000 BYD cars, which retail at 300,000 yuan (US$46,000) each, was a welcoming signal to the EV sector.

Taiyuan’s city planners also promised to replace all public buses (some 2,650) with electric ones, which is expected to complete this year.

In recognition of its EV policies, Taiyuan also made the International Council on Clean Transportation’s list of 20 EV Capitals last year – a ranking of cities with the highest EV sales.

Electrification of the taxi fleet meant Taiyuan accounted for 1% of electric vehicles globally as of 2016. Data and image from the ICCT’s 2017 EV Briefing.

Making the switch work

Having a local EV manufacturer has helped Taiyuan to bring electric cars online but without an overhaul of the existing infrastructure, a complete switch would have been impossible.

The provision and maintenance of charging stations, and management of new grid demands are needed, too. As are public awareness campaigns that promote greater understanding around the benefits of EVs.

Why Taiyuan has moved ahead 

First, the size of Taiyuan’s taxi fleet is relatively small (Beijing and Shanghai each have fleets greater than 50,000), which made planning and financing the transport upgrade simpler.

Secondly, charging stations were carefully positioned on the city’s ring road, making them easier for drivers to access.

“They can charge and go,” said Li Dewang, of the Taiyuan Environmental Planning Institute. Convenience is a factor.

Timing was another. Taiyuan’s fleet was due to be replaced in 2016 anyway (in China, municipal governments set limits on how long fleets are allowed in operation before re-registration is needed), so taxi drivers were expecting to buy new vehicles.

Finally, Taiyuan’s government had the financing and determination to offer generous consumer subsidies for EV vehicles. (Subsidies offered roughly double the provincial government rate, according to the Economic Observer, which is owned by Chinese state media site, Xinhua). In Tiayuan, drivers can buy a 300,000 yuan (US$46,000) BYD E6 for 87,500 yuan (US$14,500).

“In late 2015 and early 2016 many drivers were against the change,” said Xie Hongxing, head of Clean Air Asia, an international environmental non-profit organisation. “But by March 2016 a majority who’d made the switch were happy; by June most had switched and there weren’t many objections,” he added.

Electric taxis solve the problem [of vehicle pollution],” said Wu Ye, a deputy professor at Tsinghua University’s School of the Environment, “but we can’t yet say Taiyuan has been successful.”

A limited success

The city’s car owners have been less eager to embrace vehicle electrification. EVs account for 1.8% of all road vehicles in Taiyuan (20,000 EVs out of 1.15 million vehicles). Of this, almost half are designated taxis and buses.

“Taiyuan’s taken the first step, but there’s a long way to go yet,” said Wu Ye.

More charging stations are needed and parking garages.

But more worrying is that Taiyuan’s electricity is still mostly sourced from polluting coal generation.

“80% of Shanxi’s electricity comes from coal, 10% from wind, solar and hydro, and despite this, wind power is still being wasted. So the electricity system could be better managed,” so that coal power is displaced by renewables, said Zhao Yongqiang, deputy head of the Renewable Energy Centre at the National Development and Reform Commission’s Energy Research Institute.

In China as a whole, coal accounted for 63% of electricity generated in 2016. But Shanxi produces one quarter of the country’s coal and its power generation relies on it far more than the national average.

Deeper reforms

The plan to build and buy EVs looks to have been successful in Taiyuan. But that doesn’t mean that other cities will be able to replicate it.

It is worth noting that the city’s promotion of the EV sector is closely associated with the current mayor, Geng Yanbo, who featured in the BBC documentary The Chinese Mayor. Geng is a controversial figure. As mayor of the city of Datong he embarked on wide-ranging plans to improve traffic flow and infrastructure, but was criticised for pushing through changes too quickly and destroying sites of cultural importance.

As mayor of Taiyuan, Geng has rebuilt the city’s road network and as the chair of a working group promoting EVs is a strong advocate for the technology. Whilst electrification of the taxi fleet has bolstered the city’s low-carbon reputation, it does little to address the city’s worsening traffic pollution given that taxis make up only a small proportion of vehicles.

Although replacing 8,000 taxis with EVs within a year is a huge feat, it is only a starting point for the broader transport reforms Taiyuan needs. And these will depend on much more than the determination and capabilities of whoever is in charge.

The electrification of its taxi fleet put Taiyuan at the forefront of cities replacing their fuel-burning vehicles. On October 23, 12 cities in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, including London and Paris, announced they would buy only zero-emission buses from 2025. Previously some countries, including Germany and the UK, announced plans to ban the sale of fuel-burning vehicles. China has also started looking into a timetable for doing this.

But for Taiyuan to remain an EV Capital and become a real leader in promoting a shift to greener transport, this coal city needs to consider deeper reforms.

This article was produced by China Dialogue and shared under a creative commons licence. Read the original here

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Martin Selmayr, a German lawyer and one of commission president Juncker’s closest advisors, sent out the order last Thursday following a meeting with Matthias Wissman, the head of the powerful German auto-manufacturers lobby, the VDA, two EU sources confirmed.

On top of reducing the electric vehicles mandate – due to be proposed on November 8 – to a voluntary scheme, Selmayr, the powerful official dubbed ‘Rasputin’ and ‘monster’ by UK Brexiteers, also demanded that a 2025 target for vehicle emissions reductions be scrapped.

Selmayr denied he had made the intervention. “This is not true. Obviously invented,” he told Climate Home News.

Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva would neither confirm nor deny that Selmayr had sent out an instruction to commissioners. But she said that Selmayr had referred Wissman on to the climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, after receiving a phone call from him last Thursday. The lobbyist and Cañete then spoke the following day, Andreeva said.

The energy commissioner’s press team said: “During the call, Mr Wissman outlined VDA’s position on the upcoming proposal on CO2 standards for cars and vans. The commissioner explained the rationale behind the preparation of the draft proposal and did not comment on the content of any of the proposals that will be part of the package.”

The day before he spoke to Selmayr, Wissman and Gunther Oettinger, the German vice president of the commission, made a joint plea for there to be no electric car quotas in the EU proposal.

The German chancellor Angela Merkel is currently locked in coalition talks with the Greens, who favour strong CO2 regulation for automobiles and the pro-business Free Democrats, who do not.

The resulting stasis has led the auto industry to use its Brussels contacts to tip the balance of power, according to Greg Archer, T&E’s clean vehicles director.

“Having failed to gain support from the German Government the VDA has run to their German friends in the commission to emasculate the commission’s proposal for future car CO2 regulations,” he said. “This is blindingly shortsighted and unnecessary.”

While no announcement on a final decision is expected before November 8, during the Cop23 climate summit, sources say that the issue is being debated by key commissioners today.

One EU official told Climate Home News that despite Selmayr’s intervention, the inclusion of sanctions with the CO2 in cars proposal was strongly backed by several commissioners. “It is not finished,” he said. “We are still discussing it internally.”

In its present form, the draft blueprint would reportedly use carbon offsetting to reward or punish carmakers’ efforts to meet a 15-20% target for zero-emitting vehicles by 2030, with a possible additional target of 10% for plug in electric hybrids.

Report: EU ‘increasingly likely’ to implement electric car quota, despite denials

An overarching 25-30% emissions reductions goal for cars in 2030 – and 30-40% for vans – has also been pencilled in to deliver a big chunk of the bloc’s 40% emissions cut, pledged under the Paris agreement.

“We’re trying to give a signal that the decarbonisation of transport needs zero-emitting vehicles (ZEVs) and we don’t want them all to be Chinese, American or Asian,” an EU source said. “Europe’s industry can manufacture them too.”

“That’s why we need a signal from a benchmarking system beyond CO2 targets that tells industry how many batteries we need, and local authorities how much infrastructure for charging we need,” said the source.

The draft measure was opposed by the influential European Automobile Manufacturers Association (Acea), which pushed for lower goals and less ambitious conditions on any ZEV mandate.

But the industry bigwigs may have been lobbying for a more regressive position than their own members advocate. A VW lobby presentation seen by Climate Home News shows that the firm could accept a ZEV mandate of 22% in 2025, rising to 34.5% in 2030 under certain conditions.

Archer said: “As the VW leak shows carmakers can accept a ZEV mandate and targets more ambitious than the commission is proposing. But some European carmakers are fixated on preserving the market for dirty diesel in Europe for as long as possible, despite collapsing sales, in a desperate attempt to recoup their past unwise investments.”

If the commission’s proposal is lost as a result of the last minute manouevring, attention will switch to the European parliament, where MEPs could reinject some of its original ambition. 

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With France, the Netherlands and Britain planning diesel bans by 2040, commission officials are said to view a new mandate as a natural step. The issue is fraught though, particularly in Germany where the car industry remains a powerful political force and elections are looming.

One source with knowledge of internal EU discussions told Climate Home that cabinet members in the bloc’s climate, industry, energy union and transport directorates had reached a consensus on the need for tough enforceable targets.

“They have made it very clear that it is their intention to go to a zero-emissions mandate and the car industry has been told to stop complaining about it, and start being constructive,” the source said.

A California-style mandate, obliging car-makers to meet a minimum fleet quota for electric vehicles is one option on the table.

“It is looking increasingly likely that they will come forward with a proposal of that sort for 2025 and 2030, probably including plug-in hybrids,” said the source.

There has been confusion about the EU’s intentions since last Monday, when commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told journalists that “no quotas for electric cars are being considered”. Nor could they be, she added, as the bloc was committed to technological neutrality.

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Contacted by Climate Home, Andreeva accepted that a binding target for ultra-low emitting vehicles was one of the options put forward for consideration by a commission paper last year. But this was different from a technology-specific quota, she argued.

“You have wording on targets for ultra-low emitting vehicles in the communication, so prima facie it’s out there,” she said. “But the distinction between targets and quotas is important as targets are much softer than quotas, which are legally enforceable.”

Despite this, Germany’s environment ministry reportedly expects a proposal that includes a quota on electric cars, as do commission cabinet members. EU diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Climate Home that they did too.

“It is under consideration,” one diplomat said, on condition of anonymity. “It is part of [the commission’s] brainstorming process.”

Targets for vehicle emissions in the EU have previously been legally enforceable, although that does not necessarily mean they will be under future legislation.

Commissioners are expected to discuss the proposal in a meeting next month, ahead of its release, which is due in November.

Report: German vice chancellor attacks China’s electric car targets

Next month, the European parliament will also vote on a proposal for a 25% minimum fleet quota for electric cars by 2025 and ban on diesel and petrol engines by 2035. MEPs have already backed tougher CO2 benchmarks for 2025 for 2030 and more cheat-proof testing.

If the new measures pass parliament, they will only be a signal of battles to come. The EU parliament can block, tweak or amend regulations in three-way negotiations with EU states, and with the commission. But the commission alone has the power to propose laws.

Moves to restrict pollution from the car industry within the EU commission and parliament have emerged as a hot button issue in next month’s German election. Earlier this week, chancellor Angela Merkel reversed a position that quotas were “not thought-through” under opposition fire, and backed an eventual diesel phase out, without committing to a date.

Merkel has previously warned about the dangers of “demolishing” the diesel industry. But there will have been relief in Germany’s car industry – a major historic contributor to her party – that she also pledged to maintain diesel’s current tax incentives.

The automobile sector is crucial to Germany’s economy and Merkel has not hesitated to use her clout in Brussels to protect its interests, as the industry sees them. 

During negotiations for the last CO2 auto standards in 2013, diplomats accused Merkel of going “rogue” behind the scenes, by threatening car plant closures unless an agreed EU plan was stalled.

Any similar manoeuvres after the Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ scandal might further damage consumer confidence and the industry’s long term future, according to some green analysts.

Greg Archer, the director of clean vehicles at Transport & Environment, told Climate Home that without zero-emissions sales targets for 2025 and 2030, “European car companies will suffer the same catastrophic collapse Nokia experienced for failing to embrace new technologies”.

Car-makers in Europe say that emissions standards are a regulatory burden that place them at a competitive disadvantage. Critics argue the industry is highly profitable and will need to invest heavily in electric vehicles to remain in business.

Last month, European car manufacturers pleaded with China to weaken its ambitious roadmap for introducing electric vehicles, after an apparently unsuccessful bid by Merkel to slow green growth in the east Asian giant.

“The European car industry’s dream that they’d sell diesel to China and the US is dead [after dieselgate] and the European commission knows it,” said Archer. “They’re worried that they will finish up with an industry locked into old technologies that isn’t going to invest in the new solutions needed to maintain exports around the world.”

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A retired economist and head of the Mumbai Environmental Social Network, which advocates public transport, Datar wanted to practice what he preached.

“On the whole, it was a good experience,” he says. “I must have done about 40,000 kilometres. I changed the lithium batteries, which cost $3,000, twice, which is steep. With the falling prices of solar power, it should be possible to charge these vehicles more cheaply.”

Datar is upbeat about India’s ambitious plan to sell only electric vehicles from 2030, a whole decade before the UK and France. He enthuses about the potential for power-assisted bicycles and auto rickshaws, which are more widely affordable than cars.

But there is a long way to go. Only 1% of all passenger vehicles are electric in a country which is the fifth largest market for such vehicles in the world. That amounts to 400,000 two-wheelers and a few thousand cars, according to the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles (SMEV) in Delhi.

High prices and a lack of public charging infrastructure are major barriers to a wider rollout. Limited and sporadic government subsidies go only part way to addressing those obstacles.

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Lithium batteries, which account for 60% of the cost of a two-wheeler, need replacing every few years and are imported from China, Alok Ray of SMEV tells Climate Home.

Indian state-backed researchers and private companies are starting to invest in domestic innovation and manufacturing. Mahindra Electric, a branch of India’s major automobile manufacturer that bought the Reva from its pioneering founder in 2010, has funded a start-up called Lithium Urban Technologies in Bengaluru. But it is early days yet for producers of electric batteries.

Government backing has come in fits and starts, making investment risky. “The government isn’t clear about its policy to support electric vehicles,” says Ray. “The ministry of new and renewable energy withdrew a R5,500 subsidy [$86] for a two-wheeler in 2012. While there was a market for 100,000 two-wheelers at this reduced price, the next year we only sold 16,000.”

This ministry provided the subsidy through a $15 million Alternate Fuels for Surface Transportation Programme, of which the EV industry was a beneficiary. After its withdrawal, the market crashed and around 1,000 dealers and eight manufacturers shut down their EV businesses.

Scooters like Hero Electric’s Optima, with a top speed of 25 km/h, do not require a driving licence, registration or number plate (Pic: Viswaprabha via Wikimedia Commons)

In its 2015-16 budget, the government introduced a new subsidy under FAME – Faster Adoption and Manufacture of Electric (and Hybrid) Vehicles in India, under which manufacturers are reimbursed 15% of the cost of the vehicle.

Small petrol or diesel-fuelled models remain cheaper than the Reva, however. Mahindra Electric produces only 200 electric cars a month.

From 1 July, a 12% goods and services tax will apply to EVs, further hampering the industry’s growth.

It stands in contrast with China, where government subsidies nearly halve the cost of EVs, while there are disincentives for conventional vehicles. It is different, too, to the consumer-driven US market, where Tesla’s cheapest model retails at $35,000 – far beyond the budget of Indian buyers.

And a shortage of charging stations, even in cities, limits the range that EVs can ply. While the exact number is hard to pin down, PlugIn India lists just 222 community charging stations across the entire country. Electricity distribution is largely under public control and Indian laws make it difficult for the private sector to get involved.

Analysis: Volvo electric vehicle push reflects China’s leadership ambition

The government ministers responsible for road transport, electricity and oil – Nitin Gadkari, Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan respectively – have floated ideas to boost the emerging industry.

These include stimulating demand by ordering 270,000 EVs, including 20,000 buses, and making charging stations free for three years, funded by a cess on oil. It remains to be seen whether these plans will materialise.

In May, a report by state-backed think-tank NITI Aayog and Rocky Mountain Institute in the US called for a 15-year plan to limit registration of conventional vehicles by lottery.

With better urban design, the report says, much of mobility demand can be met by non-motorised transit and public transit, while access to vehicle-charging infrastructure enables higher penetration of electric vehicles.

To address the lack of charging infrastructure, it recommends providing standardised, swappable batteries for two- and three-wheelers (auto rickshaws) on a pay-per-use business model.

Report: Solar has not beaten coal in the race to electrify India

The solutions will depend on private sector innovation as well as government interventions.

This may be taxi or bus companies using their bulk buying power to bring down prices. In Nagpur, Ola – India’s answer to Uber – has launched a fleet of 200 EVs, from e-rickshaws to electric buses, supported by 50 charging points across the city. Maharashtra state is waiving VAT, road tax and registration on EVs to encourage take-up.

Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest manufacturer of two-wheelers, is investing in start-up Ather Energy, which plans to roll out its first indigenous electric scooter in December, as well as developing EVs internally through its Hero Electric business.

Ather founder Tarun Mehta tells Climate Home the company is in talks with owners of malls, offices, restaurants and grocery stories to install charging stations, and creating a prototype for residential buildings. Initially, Ather proposes to pay the building for the electricity and pass it on to customers for free, to kick-start the model.

The pioneer of India’s EV industry is Chetan Maini, who made the Reva. Maini’s Virya Mobility 5.0 is now joining hands with SUN New Energy Systems to form SUN Mobility to accelerate the mass use of EVs. It plans to deploy a smart network of quick interchange battery stations. “These stations, predominantly powered by renewable energy, will refuel electric vehicles at a cost lower and speed faster than conventional petrol pumps,” say the promoters.

Report: India diverts $25 billion away from clean energy fund

“We have to address the cost of energy, which includes the battery and electricity,” Maini tells Climate Home. “The Indian market is price-sensitive, so we have to create solutions that enable such transformations. The space taken for charging two- and three-wheelers (auto rickshaws) is less than that required for cars, which present a greater challenge.”

It the obstacles can be overcome, EVs – combined with communications technology to make efficient use of them – have enormous potential to save energy and prevent air pollution. The NITI Aayog report claims e-mobility will reduce oil demand in 2030 by 156 million tonnes compared to relying on conventional vehicles, worth around $60 billion at today’s prices.

If India can get ahead of the game, it also represents a substantial export opportunity.

EV pioneer Maini says: “The 15 years of experience taught us that it is very important to go global. We had to deal with different consumers and markets – the global market was in fact bigger than the domestic one.

“We learned product development needs: in 2002, hardly anyone exported anything from India, let alone cars. Our biggest market was the UK, where the government waived the London congestion tax and reduced parking charges.

“In hindsight, it was a mistake to rely on the government’s support. This was a business that should stand on its own feet, with support from the ground.”

New Delhi has been through a fuel transition before, in 2001, when it became the first city in the world to require public vehicles to run on compressed natural gas. The move, intended to reduce air pollution, did not go smoothly, but it happened. When gas was introduced, Maini recalls, it required huge tanks at petrol stations and there were endless queues for taxis and rickshaws to fill their vehicles, as there still are. “With electricity, it is only wires, so it’s easier to manage. It marks a fundamental shift: it will call for business sense as well as environmental sense.”

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With the government aiming for India’s car, scooter and motorbike fleet to be 100% electric by 2030, petroleum players do not want to be left behind.

The Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) – Asia-Pacific’s largest national oil producer and number 18 in the world – is among those researching the technology. If trials are successful, it may invest in battery production.

“In our quest for feasible and eco-friendly options for the upcoming EV market, lithium-ion batteries can be an emerging option,” NS Raman, a top research official at IOC, told Climate Home.

Under government plans, involving R140 billion (US$2bn) of public and private investment, India’s EV sector is set for explosive growth. The goal is 6-7 million EVs by 2020, up from 130,000 registered today. The idea is to become more self-sufficient in energy – India is a net oil importer – and ultimately export cleaner transport technology to China and Europe.

Globally, the electrification of transport is expected to hit demand for petrol and diesel, with potentially disruptive effect.

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India’s first experimental lithium-ion battery factory, Central Electro Chemical Research Institute (CECRI), opened in Tamil Nadu last year. It can produce 200-300 cells a day, using a flexible carbon paper developed under the same parent institute, Council of Scientific Industrial Research, to bring down costs.

“With India presently importing nearly 5-6 million lithium ion batteries from Japan, China and South Korea every month, this invention would make the country self reliant in manufacturing of lithium ion battery shortly,” said S Gopukumar, leader of the initiative.

Started as part of a project to find energy storage solutions for solar power installations, the technology can also be applied in the transport sector.

The IOC is watching these developments and doing its own research said Raman – but there is some way to go before entering commercial production: “The life cycle of the battery has to be enhanced to make it cost effective and suit the Indian market.”

There are also concerns about availability of lithium, the raw material for the battery. While India has deposits of this strategic metal, it is not considered viable for mining.

“During the next ten years, the demand for lithium in the country would be immense,” said Pratap Bhan Singh Sengar, a former scientist with Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC). On a conservative estimate it is likely to go up between 20,000-25,000 tonnes a year.

Instead of going for spot purchases, it is time the country entered into long term import agreements, said Sengar, who is working on disruptive green solutions in mobility and telecoms. Supplies come from China, Australia or the “lithium triangle” of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. “In order to develop steady manufacturing of li-ion batteries in India, import of the ore is necessary from such lithium rich countries,” he said.

With CECRI having developed indigenous technology for the manufacture of Li-ion batteries, it is for the oil and petroleum majors to provide the financial back up for their manufacture and marketing, he added.

Meanwhile, Enerrsto Solutions, a Chennai based firm, has signed an MoU with CECRI to start producing the lithium-ion batteries on a larger scale.

“In the process, we are trying to bring together various companies, that can make these battery management systems commercially viable,” said the company director GV Shankar. Automobile giant Mahindra & Mahindra, has already joined hands with Enerrsto for testing, analysis and validation of these batteries.

“Considering the company’s big dreams for EVs, we are on the lookout for home grown components and operating systems for EVs that can assure better mileage and cost effectiveness of the vehicle,” said Matthew Abraham, head of advanced technology for Mahindra Research Valley.

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This policy mix is key to the public’s growing acceptance of EVs. However, the adoption of EVs is still being held back by the limited number of charging points and the strain on electricity grids from the additional loads from cars.

License to buy 

Like Zhang, fellow Beijinger Li Fang was persuaded to buy an EV by the near impossible odds in the public lottery for license plates for petrol vehicles. At least 2.72 million people are registered in the lottery competing for just 90,000 licenses. Li had taken part since the lottery’s 2011 launch, but with no luck. “So I had no choice but to look at an EV,” she told a low carbon seminar in August.

By contrast, EV licenses are not awarded by lottery but through queuing. However, as the EV market becomes more established, it too is facing license plate scarcity. An annual quota of 51,000 private car licenses (excluding taxis, trucks and government cars, etc.) was exhausted in August, leaving 4,644 applicants having to wait until 2017.

Beijing’s 2016 quota for EVs was 40% of its total new car license plate quota. This is likely to increase, with further cuts due in the quota for traditional-fuel vehicles, and EV buyers anxious to purchase before expected reductions in subsidies happen for domestically produced EVs.

Annual license quota for all traditional and electric vehicles (conventional cars in blue; EVs in red)

National and local subsidies soothe worries over the higher cost of EVs: Zhang was pleased to get a 30,000 yuan (US$4,366) car for only 20,000 yuan (US$2,910). Other benefits include exemption from anti-congestion rules, which prevent drivers using their petrol and diesel vehicles one day each week.

Beijing’s approach has shown that when purchase options are constrained, consumers care first about owning a vehicle and less about how it is powered. However, Beijing’s approach is not reproduced nationally, where EVs are still less than 1.5% of all new car sales.

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A major issue that risks damaging public acceptance of EVs and limiting adoption is a lack of charging points.

Even in Beijing, which has 14% of China’s charging stations, recharging can be difficult. This means EVs still remain impractical for long journeys across the country.

Although automakers are busy developing vehicles with longer ranges, for the time being at least, drivers are legitimately concerned about getting stranded because a charging station cannot be found. Li says she struggled to get home once on a 200 kilometre-round trip to Tianjin, Beijing’s neighbouring city, because she couldn’t recharge her car.

Beijing had 6,789 public charging stations at the end of 2015, second only to Guangdong. Most cities have far fewer, according to the 2016 China New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Report.

Beijing added 1,000 public charging stations in the first half of 2016, and total private charging stations reached 8,000.

But Beijing has issued licences for 51,000 EVs this year, and the National Development and Reform Commission’s target of one charging station per EV by 2020 remains far off.

Power problems

EVs can still require lengthy charging sessions at one of two kinds of charging station. Most private charging stations use alternating current (AC). These are slower but place less load on the grid. Direct current (DC) stations are faster but place greater stress on local grids.

“500,000 EVs recharging on direct current would cause Beijing’s electricity grid to collapse,” says Liu Chun, deputy head of the New Energy Centre at China Electric Power Research Institute.

Property managers sometimes ban private charging points to protect safety and power supply. But if space is available, a private charging station is good value for drivers. Li estimates her EV’s running costs are just one third of an equivalent petrol car.

Zhang’s electricity supplier installed his charging point for free, and he profits from renting it out to other EV owners at one yuan per kilowatt hour (US$0.14), roughly double what he pays.

Drivers can face queues at public charging stations; recharging takes time, and EV rental firms hog some venues. Public charging stations are often costly, too, though prices diverge wildly in an immature market that proper pricing regulations. Zhang calculates that recharging her car a public charge point costs 50 yuan (US$7.2) per 100 kilometres, which offers no real saving compared to the cost of refueling a petrol car.

Higher-end EV brands, such as Tesla, offer free, unlimited fast recharges at the company’s 11 Beijing stations but such perks are rare.

New infrastructure

To make Beijing more EV-friendly, the city plans to install 435,000 charging stations between 2016 and 2020, more than twice as many as Shanghai. But more than a million EVs will be sold over the same period, according to the 2016 China New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Report.

Also, as EV ownership increases so too does demand for electricity. Two solutions are being considered: more power sources and better management of existing ones.

The Beijing Development and Reform Commission is leading a project to bring all EVs and charging points onto a single charging platform, said Niu Jinming, director of the Beijing New Energy Vehicle Development Centre. This will make it easier for vehicle owners to connect and pay for electricity at charging stations. The platform, which is operated by a private company, can also be used to charge vehicles in line with user preferences. In future, such platforms could reduce peak demand on the electricity grid.

A solar solution

A team at Tsinghua University has proposed installing small-scale solar farms on city rooftops to power charging points, along expressways and at tourist spots surrounding Beijing, though trials have yet to take place. A similar model may be pursued by Tesla, which merged with rooftop solar power firm Solarcity in November; a step towards linking EVs with locally-produced solar power.

The government’s effort to encourage EVs in Beijing is in the hope of cutting emissions and meeting air quality targets. China’s coal consumption has been declining since 2014, and an anticipated restructuring of the economy towards high value-added manufacturing and services means that future emissions growth may come from the buildings and transportation sectors. Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan for Transportation Development and Construction estimated that by 2020, 57 million journeys will be made daily within the city’s sixth ring road – up 21% on 2015.

Although concentrated in a few cities, total EV sales in China rose dramatically from 74,000 in 2014 to 330,000 in 2015, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

For Beijing, which already has a high rate of car ownership and major congestion problems, the next question on the minds of policymakers may be just how much scope there is for greater car use.

This article and the embedded video were produced by chinadialogue

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The Norwegian struck a pessimistic note at the annual Oil and Money conference, which traditionally offers upbeat assessments on the hydrocarbon sector.

But his logic was simple: transport accounts for 55% of oil use, and the electric vehicle industry is starting to gather pace meaning a once-guaranteed market could start to fade – fast.

According to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report in June, there are now more than one million electric cars on the roads, with sales up 70% from 2014 levels.

Oil demand will peak in 2020s "then we'll have a shrinking oil industry" as vehicles are electrified, says Statoil boss Eldar Saetre #OM2016 pic.twitter.com/LFAQaPVkzR

— Andrew Ward (@andrew_ward1) October 18, 2016

Range anxiety is also waning, reports the Carbon Brief website, as electric batteries get larger and more efficient, meeting 98% of daily driving needs.

It’s still tiny compared with the numbers of cars with traditional combustion engines, and the charging infrastructure remains mixed. The US, China, Norway and Netherlands dominate growth.

Speaking at an event held by Bloomberg earlier this month, BP chief economist Spencer Dale laughed off the threat: “It’s not a game changer over 20 years, even with aggressive electric vehicle penetration,” he said.

Still, it’s a development that last month led analysts at BHP Billiton to brand 2017 as the year when “the electric car revolution really gets started”.

By 2035 they believe 140 million of cars on the road will be electric, about 8% of the global fleet, displacing 2.3 million barrels of oil a day – equal to about 2% of demand.

“Our projections in this regard put us firmly at the ‘green’ end of the spectrum, well above the levels projected by ‘traditional’ industry consultants,” reads the BHP report.

#OPEC Watch: #SaudiArabia #oil minister says market "clearly rebalancing", industry at end of "considerable downturn" #OM2016 #OOTT #OPEC pic.twitter.com/wmPZ74xTcP

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) October 19, 2016

Well – not quite. The team at Bloomberg New Energy Finance reckons electric vehicles could account for 35% of car sales and displace 13 million barrels of oil by 2040.

This week Fitch Ratings issued a warning that global credit markets covering a quarter of outstanding corporate bonds were potentially threatened by the rise of Tesla, Toyota Prius and other EV makers.

Fitch cautions that the switch from oil to electric won’t be overnight, largely due to high battery prices, but predicts a quarter of the global car fleet could be weaned off oil by 2035.

Even that could be underestimating the growth trajectory, suggest the report’s authors, considering battery prices fell 35% over the last 12 months.

(Pic: Bloomberg New Energy Finance)

“We believe it will be important for oil companies to react early, and we will continue to evaluate their strategies for doing so even though the changes discussed here would occur well beyond our rating horizon,” reads its summary.

“Many are already taking initial steps such as diversifying into batteries or renewables or focusing more on natural gas, and many are actively participating in the debate around future energy sources.”

PwC’s upcoming Low Carbon Economy Index will also suggest change is afoot with most governments developing plans to decarbonise electricity and electrify transport.

“Electric vehicles are potentially disruptive in the medium term, but inevitably there’s a time-lag between EV sales and emissions reductions as petrol and diesel cars sold today will be on the road for the next 15 years,” said PwC director Jonathan Grant, lead author of the LCEI.

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The Climate Action Tracker analysis released on Thursday also highlighted the need to stamp out the rigging and massaging of vehicle emissions test that have been revealed to be widespread throughout the auto industry.

Stronger tests would allow for a necessary doubling of new car fuel economy standards across the world in the next fifteen years.

But even if these reductions were achieved and enforced, the gains would not be sufficient. If the world is to stand any chance of staying within the 1.5C warming limit set by world leaders in Paris last year, electric vehicles must replace traditional combustion engines entirely by 2035.

“Emissions standards only get the transport fleet to a certain point – it is clear that in order to get to the Paris Agreement’s lower temperature goal of 1.5C, the world needs to make a paradigm shift to zero emissions vehicles,” said report author Markus Hagemann of NewClimate Institute.

To reach the secondary goal of the Paris agreement – keeping warming below 2C – electric vehicles will still need be to hugely mobilised. By 2050 half of all cars would need to be “zero-emissions”.

Current government policies in the EU, China and the US will only see 5% of all cars running solely on electricity by 2030. Other countries are moving faster. In the Netherlands a parliamentary committee is investigating a ban on new petrol cars by 2025. In Norway last year 23% of new vehicle registrations were electric vehicles.

The emissions gains won by electric vehicles will be undermined unless the electricity sector is decarbonised. Source: CAT

The report notes that electric vehicles come with their own challenges, most importantly, the increased demand for electricity. As such, any boom would need to be underwritten by the continued growth of renewable or zero-carbon energy.

“Aside from much-needed shifts in transport behaviour, for the transport sector to decarbonise there is no choice but to adopt zero-emission vehicles. For electric vehicles this would mean that they also need to be powered by renewable electricity,” said Yvonne Deng of Ecofys.

With regard to the wider transport sector, the report found that electric vehicles were a ready technology only at the light-weight end. The aviation, shipping and haulage industries had to make big efficiency gains in the short term. Because zero-emissions solutions in those areas remained in development.

A deal to reduce emissions in the aviation industry came a step closer last week after the US, China and the EU agreed terms. The shipping industry has proven harder to motivate.

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It is a radical plan, which could yet be overturned by the senate. But they are not the only Europeans to be thinking along these lines.

Germany’s top energy official, Rainer Baake, says no new fossil fuelled cars should be registered after 2030.

His arithmetic is simple: to meet climate goals, the transport sector must be decarbonised by 2050. Vehicles have a working life of 20 years – so carmakers need to be ahead of the game.

“Otherwise, we will end up with bad investments we will regret,” he said in a panel discussion reported by Clean Energy Wire.

Coming from the birthplace of Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen, that carries some weight. The world’s third largest automobile producer (after China and Japan), Germany has market clout.

Report: Electric cars ‘cheaper’ than petrol, diesel rivals in 6 years

But taking oil out of transport is easier said than done, according to Christian Hochfeld, director of Agora Verkehrswende.

“It is really, really very ambitious,” he tells Climate Home. “I don’t see what kind of regulation is behind this.”

The recently established think tank aims to do for transport (Verkehr) what its sister organisation Agora Energiewende does for energy: support a sustainable transition.

It has some catching up to do. While energy has been the prime target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts (complicated by a simultaneous nuclear phase-out), transport has changed little in the past 25 years.

The sector accounts for nearly a fifth of Germany’s emissions. At 164 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, it’s estimated output last year was the same as in 1990. Improvements in fuel efficiency were cancelled out by people driving bigger cars longer distances.

To make deeper cuts, efficiency needs to go hand in hand with fuel switching – to electricity, mainly, plus some biofuels.

Renewable-powered electric vehicles on the Innoz campus (Pic: www.kai-abresch.de)

Germany is aiming to have 1 million electric cars by 2020; the transport minister recently announced plans for 15,000 new charging points.

Interestingly, Baake does not just rave about the new but consider how to get rid of the old.

It shows the government has learned something from its energy revolution. There, aggressive expansion of renewables did not automatically end coal burning, which clings to 45% of power generation and a substantial chunk of emissions.

What it does not address is the demand side – and that is where the industry faces perhaps its biggest challenge.

“We don’t want to substitute a fossil car for an electric car,” explains Frank Brehm of InnoZ, a mobility lab on the outskirts of Berlin. “We want to get people used to the idea they don’t need their own car.”

Researchers at InnoZ have built what they call a “micro-smart grid”, running a fleet of shared electric cars and bicycles from onsite renewable power generation.

That is how they see the future of getting around – with apps making it easy to connect with buses and trains.

Most private cars sit idle 23 hours a day. They are costly to run and take up valuable space in urban areas. Little wonder 1.2 million Germans have joined car sharing clubs instead.

Report: Green investors turn glare on car giants

Has Europe reached peak car? Maybe not yet.

Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, saw sales in the region increase 12% last quarter from the same period in 2015. “We are growing in markets that some experts previously considered saturated,” a spokesperson tells Climate Home.

Nonetheless, it is dabbling in “mobility services” with car2go and moovel public transport app. BMW, similarly, has teamed up with rental firm Sixt for pay-as-you-drive service ReachNow.

“The car manufacturers, all of them have recognised that the selling of cars is a business model that maybe will come to an end in the next decades,” says Brehm.

The transition away from high volume production could be tough for manufacturing regions like the Ruhr and the estimated 800,000 German autoworkers.

On the other hand, there is a huge market globally for car sharing, as growing Asian cities seek to avoid gridlock and pollution. Car2go has just launched in Chongqing, southwestern China.

“It is the future of the mobility market, but it can be a threat if companies aren’t prepared,” says Agora Energiewende’s Hochfeld.

Germany energy utilities were not ready for the pace of change and paid dearly for it.

Hochfeld warns: “Either we do have these models or our big car manufacturers become the next EON and RWE.”

Megan Darby visited Innoz on a trip organised and paid for by Clean Energy Wire

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Engineers at Audi’s Formula E team prepare their cars ahead of the last race of the 2014-2015 season (Pic: Ed King/RTCC)

By Ed King

It took a while to catch on, but high speed electric car racing is here to stay. 

That’s the verdict from Jean Todt, head of world motorsport’s governing body the FIA and manager of Ferrari’s Formula 1 team from 1994-2007.

“We are in a good direction… it’s the right way to go,” Todt told RTCC on the sidelines of a hectic pit lane ahead of the final Formula E race of the season in Battersea Park, London.

Sunday’s race saw Nelson Piquet Jr win the inaugural championship, drawing in crowds of 60,000 to watch the svelte electric cars hurtle round a narrow tree-lined track in central London.

For Piquet this was a personal redemption. The Brazilian’s previous claim to fame was deliberately crashing his F1 car at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help teammate Fernando Alonso secure victory.

But for Formula E and the wider electric car industry this race and the series was far more significant.

Born from a restaurant conversation in 2011 and backed with £60 million of funding from CEO Alejandro Agag, a Spanish businessman, few thought it would become reality.

Most observers predicted hardened petrolheads would ignore the Star Wars whine of electric motors, preferring the full throated roar of a V6 turbo.

Instead of competing with F1, Agag decided he would offer a different package, targeting iconic inner city circuits in Beijing, Moscow, Miami, Long Beach and Monaco.

At £15 a ticket and at the centre of a city it’s a brand of motorsport that’s cheaper, more family friendly and easier to get to than its more illustrious cousins.

At the centre of this philosophy – featuring alongside adverts for solar panels – is the Fe slogan, “Drive the future”, and Agag’s favoured phrase, “much more than just a race”.

It’s one the likes of Audi, Virgin, Prost and Renault have bought into, not to mention Indian conglomerate Mahindra, Leonardo Di Caprio’s Venturi outfit and NextEV TCR, a team backed by the Chinese government.

What’s revealing is the huge investment F1 behemoths Williams and McLaren have made in these cars, developing a battery capable of accelerating the cars to 140mph and a motor with the greatest power density in any car on the planet.

Speaking amid the roar of pneumatic tyre drills, veteran racing engineer Nigel Beresford, now working with the American-registered Dragon Fe team, told RTCC the sport was looking at a “paradigm shift”.

“Throughout the greater world of motorsport there were more people who believed the the concept would fail,” he said.

“But when when you look at quality of teams, drivers and vendors – like Mclaren and Williams – there’s an enormous investment… it has silenced a lot of doubters.”

Two garages down in the pit lane, John Wedlake, a data and systems engineer at Mahindra, said he expected huge improvements in the speed and handling of the cars in the coming few years.

Rules designed to ensure the sport was affordable for new entrants specified exactly how cars needed to be set up. But from next year onwards these will be steadily relaxed, allowing teams to experiment with new technologies.

“Once you open up a section to a race team all the toys will come out of the box and they will work to get everything out of the kit we’re allowed to play with,” he said.

“In two to three years time they will be doing things that other race cars, possibly outside the Le Man series that no one else is doing. That’s what is going to come in the future.

Definitely a #cleanrevolution theme here at #FormulaE | countdown to title decider & sun has decided to come out pic.twitter.com/QGuRoM25VM

— Abyd Karmali (@AbydKarmali1967) June 28, 2015

For now the lithium Ion power pack designed by Williams – boasting the power of 10,000 AA batteries – will stay.

But new control systems for managing power delivery and battery consumption are likely to evolve in the coming years, said Beresford, as will their understanding of how electric cars handle in different conditions.

“Where we’re at now is where mobile phone technology was in the 80s… to those of us who want to look beyond the skin you are looking at the future.. but you just don’t know what it’s going to look like yet,” said Wedlake.

The sport has in effect generated a new and what is likely to be increasingly competitive market for electric car technologies which will eventually find their way into road vehicles.

And it could also act as a platform for steadily accelerating efforts to make electric and hybrid cars more acceptable to the public – and perhaps in time more affordable.

Judging by the heavy electric vehicle advertising around Battersea Park, tapping into this burgeoning market is a key goal for BMW and Renault, in whose huge stands in the “e village” the public could stroke and sit in their latest cars.

According to an Ernst and Young study commissioned by Fe, the sport could help sell an extra 77 million EVs worldwide, save 4 billion of barrels of oil and avoid the emission of 900 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Clean revolution?

Is this a green sport? That’s unlikely, despite the protestations of the organisers who stressed the low energy lightbulbs used in the media centre.

The ostentatious wealth on display during the pit walk suggests many of the sport’s biggest supporters are also likely to be some of the world’s highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases.

Still, it’s a sign that new and cleaner technologies are making headway in a sector dominated by oil and gas guzzling vehicles.

“What it showcases is a drive to get low carbon vehicles on the streets and the aim of having an ultra-low emission zone in the heart of the city by 2020,” said London Mayor Boris Johnson, after taking one of the cars for a spin around the track on Saturday.

Speaking on the Fe launch day at Battersea Park Sir Richard Branson – owner of the Virgin Racing Fe team – predicted that in 20 years petrol cars would be history, calling the combustion engine “antiquated”.

“I think in four or five years you will find Formula E taking over from F1 in terms of number of people,” he said.

“As time goes on, the clean energy type of business will power ahead of other businesses.”

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Pic: Dylan Passmore/Flickr

By Gerard Wynn

Private sector and government owners last year opened fewer electric charging stations, US data suggest, while distribution of liquefied natural gas (LNG) showed a small increase from a very low base.

That reversed a previous trend of year on year rises in the installation of electric chargers. The data also showed continuing falls in the distribution of hydrogen and higher blends of ethanol and biodiesel.

The data did not provide the dates that filling stations opened, in the case of liquefied propane gas (LPG), which were therefore excluded from this analysis. In addition, there were missing values for the opening dates for about half of the electric charging stations, but the scale of the decline last year appeared robust nevertheless.

The number of new electric charging stations for which opening dates were available fell by two thirds in 2013, to 685 new stations from 2,003 in 2013 and 1,347 in 2012.

That slowdown will be a concern for the electric vehicle industry, given that poor charging infrastructure is cited by drivers as a top reason for not buying an electric car.

Such concerns include the short distance that electric vehicles can typically travel on a single charge, and the fear that their batteries may therefore go flat mid-journey, also called range anxiety.

Updated

The continuously updated data are provided by the US Department of Energy.

They provide information on the distribution of dispensers for seven types of alternative fuels: biodiesel (20% blends and above); compressed natural gas (CNG); E85 (85% blend of ethanol with gasoline); electricity; hydrogen; LNG; and LPG.

The data were largely for public dispensers but also included pumps available exclusively for fleet operators.

By far the biggest source of alternative fuel was electric chargers, by number of stations.

At the last count, in the United States there were 9,758 electric charging stations, 3,017 pumps dispensing LPG, followed by E85 (2,748 pumps), CNG (1,522), biodiesel (822), LNG (170) and hydrogen (55).

That compares with more than 121,000 gasoline filling stations in the United States, according to 2014 US Census Bureau data.

After removing for alternative fuel stations with no opening date available, there was a total of 4,654 electric charging stations, 2,701 pumps dispensing E85, followed by CNG (1,366 pumps), biodiesel (816), LNG (95) and hydrogen (49), with barely any data for LPG.

The biggest decline last year was in electric charging stations, where opening dates were available, although all categories fell with the exception of LNG.

The number of new LNG stations last year nearly doubled to 27 new installations, from 16 in 2012. That growth reflects rapidly falling prices for US natural gas in the last few years, following a ramp up in domestic fracking.

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Source: Flickr/afagen

By Sophie Yeo

Tesla has proposed building a new “Gigafactory” for batteries – a mammoth $5 billion undertaking that will be vital to the future of the luxury electric car company.

The factory is a grand solution to a problem that the company’s chief executive Elon Musk acknowledged last year at an event last July in California: a shortage of batteries.

“Our issues right now are actually not so much demand generation as they are production related,” he said at Teslive, an exhibition for Tesla owners.

“In order for production to grow, we have to have the whole supply chain move in cadence. One of the bigger challenges for us is going to be lithium-ion cell production. We need a lot of batteries.”

The Gigafactory will allow Tesla to achieve economies of scale, said the company, driving down costs by 30%, helping them to achieve the goal of producing 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020 – almost 15 times its current output.

The company has previously outlined plans to start rolling out mass market vehicles retailing at around $35,000 from 2017.

This forecast boom in production has provided an opportunity to “leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible” they said in a statement.

Clean cars

Colin Brown, the Engineering Director at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, told RTCC that the new factory could be “highly significant” for the electric car industry, which is still young. According to the IEA, there were around 180,000 electric vehicles on the market in 2012, representing 0.02% of the global stock.

“It’s about scaling up,” said Brown. “These things are all too expensive and don’t perform well at the moment, and that’s because they’re on such small scale.”

So anything that helps Tesla on its way to producing 500,000 EVs a year is good news for the fight against climate change, said Dr Jill Cainey, an electricity storage consultant at Swanburton.

“If the cost of battery goes down then the cost of electric vehicles goes down and so then the uptake of electric vehicles might be increased, and that would be a good thing in terms of addressing climate change,” she told RTCC.

Storage

The $5 billion project means that, as well as enabling the company to become a mass producer of electric cars, it could make Tesla a major player in the field of electricity storage.

Tesla’s shares surged to a record high after Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas told investors that more than doubled its target price for the company from $157 to $320 as a result of the new factory.

He wrote to clients suggesting that the company’s foray into battery production meant that it could end up staking out a claim in the trillion dollar electric utility industry: one of the difficulties of renewable energy generation is how to store the intermittent supply to ensure a constant flow when needed. Batteries provide a solution to this problem.

“If it can be a leader in commercializing battery packs, investors may never look at Tesla the same way again,” wrote Jonas.

Cainey said it was possible that the batteries could have a more immediate impact, as they could have a “second life” in energy distribution systems once they became unsuitable for use in cars, although she added that the technology was still in its infancy.

“This has a huge impact beyond Tesla,” Harley Shaiken, a labour economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Bloomberg. “It gives enormous legitimacy to battery production and the future of the electric car because that lies in the battery. It’s high stakes, high technology.”

A graphic of the proposed site released by the company shows the building sitting alongside new wind and solar plants. The total construction will take up between 500-1000 acres of land, and will employ 6,500 people.

This means it would become a major industry, though Tesla has yet to announce where it will take root. Current finalists in the competition to host the new Gigafactory are Texas, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.

Brown said: “The whole eco-agenda, the whole electric transport agenda, needs courageous players, and Tesla is to be applauded for the fact that it’s showing leadership like this.”

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Industry leaders gathered in London to show off their electric car models (Source: RTCC)

By Sophie Yeo

Leading cities should do more to encourage the use of electric cars by investing in charging facilities and allowing zero emission vehicles to use bus lanes, says the head of Renault UK.

Kenneth Ramirez said that it was important to create a “wave of acceptance” around electric vehicle technology to encourage their uptake, calling on London Mayor Boris Johnson to follow Norway in allowing electric cars to use lanes reserved for public transport.

He told RTCC: “In London that would be an interesting approach. In other cities having legislation that requires new buildings have a dedicated number of parking spaces with charge stations already included.”

Renault sees electric cars as a key part of its portfolio of vehicles. It currently sells four electric cars, from its miniature Twizy to the Kangoo van, and leads the market in Europe with a 61% share. It has sold about 30,000 vehicles since its first model went on sale just over two years ago.

Ramirez cites Norway as a country which has ‘culturally accepted’ the benefits of zero emissions technology. There are now 21,000 electric vehicles registered in the country, which has a population of 5 million. Purchases of the zero-emission cars make up 10% of all sales.

Oslo’s success is in stark contrast to the UK. A  2012 government survey revealed 92% of respondents said they were “not at all likely” to buy an electric car as their next vehicle. Only 1% said that were “very likely”.

Ramirez was speaking as UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched a new scheme to dispel some of the myths about electric vehicles – that they have a limited range and are difficult to charge, for example – in the hopes that more people will be encourage to adopt a lower emissions vehicle.

Clegg said that he wanted the UK to be a “trend setter,” adding: “I think history shows that with these new technologies you have a period of time when things bubble along and then you suddenly get real lift off as consumer interest is really engaged.”

Nick Clegg alongside leaders of five leading electric car manufacturers (Source: RTCC)

Reshaping the public image of electric vehicles is the first step in helping the UK to catch up with its European and global competitors.

According to the International Energy Agency, 4.4% of the global electric vehicle stock is currently being driven on UK roads, compared to 38% in the US and 24% in Japan.

Its adds that ff the world is to stay below 2C of warming – the level deemed “dangerous” by governments – then three quarters of all vehicle sales need to be plug-in electric of some variety by 2050.

The widespread deployment of electric vehicles powered by clean sources of energy is seen as vital if the world is to successfully tackle climate change.

Figures from the US Environmental Protection Agency show that in 2011, transport accounted for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions in America – the second largest contribution after the electricity sector.

Inventive ways of encouraging the uptake of cleaner forms of transport are already being introduced by cities and companies around the world.

US electric car manufacturer Tesla motors recently completed a 76 hour coast to coast drive from Los Angeles to New York in an attempt to prove supercharging points in the US are accessible and work.

OFFICIAL: We have made it to New York City! Our Coast to Coast Rally is complete! #DriveFree pic.twitter.com/ESlSp15o7K

— Tesla Motors (@TeslaMotors) February 2, 2014

South Korea’s capital Seoul has a weekly ‘No Driving Day’ programme, where drivers receive incentives to leave their cars at home for one day a week. Further discussions and idea sharing will feature at the C40 summit of mayors taking place in Johannesburg this week.

Changing the way people think about electric vehicles is a political challenge, said Ramirez: “We provide a lot of awareness of technology, awareness of the benefits, but I think the cultural movement, education, always lies with the government.”

Persuading people of the benefits is the “next big challenge” for car companies, Matt Harrison, the UK managing director of Toyota, told RTCC. “People think ‘new technology – is it reliable? Is it proven?’ Our data shows it’s more reliable than conventional technology. There’s less to go wrong.”

He added: “You’ve got to make it easy for people to understand where all the charging points are. Today in London there are more charging points than there are fuel stations, and probably hardly anyone knows that.”

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Ford’s latest creation will save each driver up to four tons of CO2 a year (Source: Ford)

By Sophie Yeo

Ford has got a bright idea – an electric car with solar panels on the roof.

The new Ford C-MAX Solar Energi Concept car can capture enough sunlight in a single day to keep it charged for four hours.

The hybrid vehicle is the first of its kind to be self-sufficient in this way. All other electric cars – a cleaner alternative to their petrol-burning brethren – still have to connect to the electric grid to charge up.

“Ford C-MAX Solar Energi Concept shines a new light on electric transportation and renewable energy,” said Mike Tinskey, Ford global director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure.

“As an innovation leader, we want to further the public dialog about the art of the possible in moving the world toward a cleaner future.”

With a full charge, the C-MAX Solar Energi Concept is estimated to be able to travel up to 620 miles, including 21 electric-only miles. Ford believes that the sun has the potential to power up to 75% of all trips made by the average driver, if they switch over to a solar hybrid vehicle.

This could significantly reduce a driver’s carbon footprint. Ford promises that the car would reduce a US driver’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions by as much as four tons – or the amount produced by a US house in four months.

If all light duty vehicles in the US switched over to the new car, annual greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by one billion tons.

To make sure that the solar panels were efficient enough to power up the cars quickly, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology drew inspiration from an unusual source: lighthouses.

A special magnifying lens, which was originally developed to warn sailors away from dangerous rocks, amplifies the sunlight, boosting its impact by a factor of eight, ensuring that the car is suitable for daily use. The system tracks the sun as it moves from east to west. It can also connect to the electric grid.

The car will be on display at the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from the 7-10 January.

The post Ford unveils C-MAX Energi Solar concept car appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: SSgt Greg Biondo)

By Nilima Choudhury 

The US military is expected to purchase 92,400 electric vehicles for non-tactical purposes between now and 2020, says a new report.

Navigant Research says the military will invest around $2.4 billion towards integrating hybrid (HEV) and plug-in electric (PEV) vehicles into its fleet.

The US military establishment is currently the world’s largest single consumer of energy and fossil fuels.

Estimates place the total energy consumption of the Department of Defence (DoD) on par with the state of Oregon and greater than two-thirds of all countries in its use of energy.

Scott Shepard, analyst at US-based Navigant Research said: “In remote theatres of operations, the cost of moving fuels to forward military locations can be a multiple of the cost of the fuel itself.

“The military’s approach to reducing fossil fuel consumption from non-tactical operations includes acquiring increasing numbers of vehicles powered by ethanol blend and biodiesel blend fuels, but the majority of the investment will go toward HEVs and PEVs.”

US military spending on HEVs, PEVs and ethanol-powered vehicles is expected to increase from more than $435 million in 2013 to $926 million by 2020.

In 2012 the DoD emitted over 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which equates to the Armed Forces consuming as much energy and emitting as much CO2 as Nigeria annually.

Navigant’s report said one particular area of focus for the military will be to develop microgrids in tandem with HEVs and PEVs for energy independence and producing storage devices to make electricity more portable.

Targets

The federal government currently operates a fleet of more than 600,000 civilian and non-tactical military vehicles where alternative fuels make up 3% of the total federal fleet’s fuel consumption.

The DoD has set targets to increase alternative fuel use by 10% annually by 2015 and acquire plug-in hybrid electric vehicles when commercially available at a reasonable cost. 75% of light-duty vehicles must be alternative fuel vehicles.

Shepard told RTCC that not only does the DoD anticipate a drop in numbers of how many non-tactical vehicles owned, but buying the vehicles depends on the price.

“All these assumptions are founded on the principle that electric vehicles achieve price parity with conventional vehicles through various cost savings over the life of the vehicle.

“EVs can’t compete with existing joint light tactical vehicles (JLTVs) like the HUMVEE, nor does it look like they will be able to before 2020.”

Renewable energy

In June, President Barack Obama set out the country’s first national climate strategy which requires the DoD to install at least 3GW of renewable energy on or around its bases.

By 2025 officials expect the army will draw 25% of its power in the US from renewables, up from 5.5% currently.

The DoD has said it is on track to meet this goal having 9.6% already.

Last year, 75% of the renewable energy procured or produced actually came from the department’s 679 renewable energy projects.

Nearly half of the energy came from geothermal sources. Biomass and biogas from captured methane make up 8% of the supply mix, followed by 357 solar photovoltaic systems contributing to approximately 8% of the supply mix.

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If you’re not happy with the range of electric cars available on the market from the big manufacturers and you don’t have the budget for a Tesla Roadster, there might be an answer.

For £13,999 and some (considerable) elbow grease you could be the proud owner of your very own electric (or hybrid) iRacer.

The Birmingham City University and Westfield Sportscars have announced a partnership to produce the electric iRacer build-it-yourself kit car, while also providing some additional low-carbon industrial experience to the next generation of engineers.

Westfield produce around 400 cars a year and will now offer those willing to take on the task, the chance to build their own electric sports car.

The iRacer kit will allow people to easily switch between full electric, hybrid and a regular combustion engine if they prefer.

The iRacer will be the first electric racing car available in a build at home kit (Source: BCU/Westfield Sportscars)

The partnership will be used to give students real world engineering experience of electric and hybrid vehicles at a time when demand for high performance electric vehicles (EV) and those more equipped for the supermarket than Silverstone, is expected to rise.

A number of initiatives to stimulate the spread of charging points have been unveiled in efforts to end the “chicken and egg” problem of EV.

Many consumers are concerned about going electric because of fears that they won’t be able to charge it before it runs out of power, so-called “range anxiety”.

The electric version will have a top speed of 115mph and could be further developed to take its place in the FIA’s landmark Formula E racing series.

The University hopes this could include a street race in Birmingham when it begins its inaugural season in 2014.

Rome has already taken one of the two calendar slots for the European leg of the championship.

Be warned though, you’ll need more than a socket set and hammer to build it the £13,999 doesn’t include the engine or electric motor, they aren’t currently legal on UK roads, only race tracks.

Video: The iRacer prototype in action

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– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0830-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Thursday 25 October

Last updated: 1710

Poland: As EU environment ministers met today to set their mandate for Doha,Poland is said to be backed by seven other Central and Eastern European member states on the issue of excess AAUs. They have called for all credits to be carried over, and to be able to use their AAUs with no limits.

While earlier today, a released document raised doubts over Poland’s ability to veto EU climate policies, the mandate heading into the COP18 summit must still be decided on consensus – not majority.

“No limit is acceptable, whether it is for the use or sale of AAUs,” said Polish Minister Marcin Korolec. “The Presidency knows very well what is acceptable for member states: another formula is needed.” (Euro Politics)

US: Naturalist David Attenborough has spoken out about US politicians attempts to duck the issue of climate change. He says this is down to the economic cost of tackling it and warned it would take a terrible example of extreme weather to wake people up to the dangers.

“[It] does worry me that the most powerful nation in the world, North America, denies what the rest of us can see very clearly [on climate change]. I don’t know what you do about that. It’s easier to deny.” (Guardian)

Scotland: A new study from WWF Scotland found that for the government to meet its commitment of a 36% reduction in emissions from Scottish homes by 2020, it would have to invest £4.6 billion in improving energy efficiency. That is three times the current and projected expenditure. (New Scotsman)

US: The world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart has given global suppliers five years to comply with its environmental rules or risk being pushed off US shelves. The new requirements were announced in China, there the company has over 20,000 suppliers, and could compel workshops to improve energy efficiency, waste reduction and other environmental markers. (Reuters)

EU: Poland’s use of a veto to block EU climate goals for 2050 has no legal basis, according to internal legal document from the Council of the European Union. “A qualified majority of weighted votes in favour cast by at least two-thirds of members” is all that decisions require according to a response to a transparency request by WWF, from the Council’s General-Secretariat. (Euractiv)

Earlier this year Jason Anderson, head of climate and energy at WWF Europe told RTCC: “We don’t and it seems they don’t, have any idea how they came to the convention of having unanimous council decisions.”

But as environment ministers meet today in Luxembourg ahead of the UN climate summit in Doha next month, Poland continues to block decisions. Ministers have said they have agreed on virtually all areas of the EU’s negotiating mandate but the paragraph on AAUs as Poland refuses to sign off on anything that will not allow them to trade its excess units in the future. (European Voice)

Arctic: A new project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aims to use old US ship logs to help track Arctic climate change. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said archived logs could help establish a baseline of historical weather data to complement that collected from satellites and ground observations. The group will be getting volunteers to transcribe the thousands of pages of logbooks from 1850 to World War II. (Reuters)

UK: Climate change sceptic and oil company director Peter Lilley MP has been appointed to the House of Commons energy and climate change select committee. The Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden was one of five MPs who voted against the Climate Change Act in 2008. (Guardian)

Worldwide: A conference in London has agreed a target to cut gas flaring by 30% over five years.  Environmentalists have called for an outright ban of the process. Flaring happens mostly in remote areas where excess natural gas – a by product of oil – is released and burned.  The World Bank says $50 billion in fuel goes up in polluting smoke every year. (BBC)

China: Electric vehicle sales are unlikely to meet the government’s targets with only 13,000 vehicles purchased from 2009 to 2011, well short of the target of 500,000 sales by 2015. The latest figures have put the brakes on speculation that China’s electric car manufacturers were poised to leapfrog established vehicles. (BusinessGreen)

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