It’s not just the busses and taxis but lots of bikes are electric too. Most of Southeast Asia is full of loud mopeds but Shenzhen now has these small electric bikes which people make deliveries on (similar to other parts of Asia), except quieter.
Another fun fact is that the local government restricts electric bike ownership over a certain capacity to citizens. It’ll be hard to get one as a visitor. I’m not quite sure why.
Capitalism beat Communism in the 80's but it really seems Chinese 2.0 Communism is whipping its butt. I'm very jealous that they get to ride Maglev trains and I can't even get high-speed rail. :/ In the future it's going to be good to be Chinese, unless you like Democracy that is.
You’re on HN right? As they say in the startup world, it’s all about execution. Sorry Facebook stole your idea, I’m sure they’ll make you ceo when you sue them in the courts
...with lax safety standards and little consideration for property rights.
We could build the Melbourne - Sydney high speed rail line in 3 years if we didn’t care about a) the people who built it or b) the people whose houses were in the way.
The property rights one always bothers me; it seems to me that if you're right where a necessary transport link needs to be, you should of course be fairly compensated, but ultimately you shouldn't have any say/choice in the matter.
Ridiculous obstacles like this are, IMO, a major part of why the US is seemingly completely paralyzed when it comes to constructing any major transit projects.
One problem is that historically it somehow turned out that poorer, blacker people tended to be the ones in the way of big transportation projects. A lot of the backlash has roots in real abuses.
Property rights still exist but since it only became a concept about 80 years ago lots of property still belongs to the government and they can generally give you something worth more than your current property.
Another benefit would be that people would pay much greater attention to local politics. You would need to make sure that the bus road goes through your neighbor's house, not your house. Whoever ignores the local democracy, loses their house; that is a powerful incentive for participation. What could possibly go wrong?
Why was this downvoted ? I thought it was common knowledge that the current China is communist only in name, but more capitalist than most western countries in practice?
I do not know if centralized planning is capitalism. Beijing decides what need to be done, then they make that happen. It might look like capitalism from afar but it is not. For example, in true capitalism, companies that make money-losing decisions go out of business. In China, the central government does not go out of business and the government owned companies executing those ideas do not go out of business.
Having the losers go bankrupt and exit the playing field is an important part of capitalism.
It’s State Capitalism. We know it works when the state knows what to do and picks correctly, but when you reach the forefront, it becomes harder to know the path forward and individual businesses incentivized by profit can do a massively parallel search. So goes my thinking.
The city i live in Sofia, just got 20 electric busses [0], and are planning to bring 142 new LPG (propane) busses.
This is a big deal! However, given that about half of the country's electricity is still from coal, not sure how "clean" those busses really are. (30-35% is from Nuclear power)
In _all_ parts of the US, electric buses would cut emissions compared to diesel buses[1]. I suspect in Sofia, it would absolutely be a reduction in emissions.
Large coal plants are more efficient than internal combustion; electric drivetrains are more efficient than gasoline or diesel.
Slow, frequently stopped vehicles like buses derive the maximum benefit from electrification.
And their emissions improve automatically as the grid improves. You could easily schedule bus recharging to occur during maximum solar electricity generation times, as it falls between morning and evening peak times. Each bus in the fleet just needs one hour downtime in the middle of the day to recharge; that’s only a 25% downtime ratio across a 4 to 5 hour window of opportunity.
There are still 2 basic sources of benefit. First, power stations generally use turbines which are much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Even after accounting for inefficiencies electric often comes out better. The other benefit is that it decouples the vehicle from the energy source.
That should be "China content with getting the pollution out of the tier 1 city". Those old diesel buses were probably moved to some tier 2 or 3 city to replace an even older fleet.
Correct that his is thermal efficiency, and I apologize for not breaking into out earlier.
An ICE is ~20% efficient.
A combined cycle gas turbine is ~60% efficient, transmission systems ~98%, LiIon ~99%, motors around 85-90%. The first is thermal, the rest are electrical. Well-to-wheel this is about 50%.
My point was just that you really do get a large efficiency improvement (50 - 20 = 30) by electrifying cars. Climate argument aside, energy is simply being wasted.
I don't see how hiding your pollution is helpful, in fact it may do the opposite as it allows people to delude themselves into thinking they are living a 'green' life. I already see this sentiment a lot, of people believing living in a city makes them 'greener' because they can't see the pollution their daily life creates everywhere else to supply them.
The potential for a gas powered bus to become "clean" is nonexistent. They will always run on 0% clean energy.
The potential for those electric buses is completely maximized. They likely run on greater than 0% clean energy now, and can potentially run on 100% clean energy in the future.
The difference could not be more stark or significant.
It's a lot easier to get natural gas to burn down to CO2 and water than it is to get diesel to do so. You might be conflating 'clean' ( = minimal harmful emissions) with 'renewable'?
Agree that electric is the way to go for both goals, though - EVs are as clean and as renewable as their power generation method.
Natural gas powered buses are already pretty clean, it’s the ones running diesel that are a problem. Though I guess NG has issues with green house emissions if not what in what we would call air pollution.
Another benefit: it is much easier for power plants to remove sulphur and nitrogen based pollutants and organic particles due to imcomplete combustion from emission. Those pollutants are much more harmful than CO2.
That, and so many of them are trying to turn English into an English-based conlang, with rules English speakers generally don't follow and have never followed, and then they have the utter temerity to get angry when nobody wants to agree with them that splitting infinitives is "wrong" because of some rule they made up out of flatus and nothing.
I think it's even stranger than that. Given how easy it is to do a web search, and given that you've just seen headline in a major newspaper use the word, think of how much overconfidence you'd have to have to declare to it's not a word without even doing the search before posting. And despite this seemingly reckless disregard for truth or accuracy, he's probably living a happier and more successful existence than I. Makes me wonder why I make things so hard.
I'm wondering if the technology is mature enough to actually be practical for this, or if Shenzhen will end up having to do an early fleet replacement because they jumped the gun.
The ones pictured in the article are BYD. I couldn't find any figures for the makeup of the fleet overall, but I imagine it's mostly BYD, as they seem to be by far the dominant player in the electric bus market, both in China and worldwide.
Don't forget the other note there - at the end of the year (end of this month) Shenzhen's taxi fleet will be required to be electric ... this hasn't been happening overnight, there have been electric cabs on the streets for a couple of years now, petrol powered cabs have been required to charge a 3 yuan 'petrol tax' so people prefer the blue electric ones
The article talks about barriers electric bus expansion after 2020 when the federal government is scheduled to eliminate subsidies.
However, the buses are going to get cheaper because battery prices keep falling. In the not-too-distant future they will be as cheap as diesels. I think the government is eliminating subsidies because it thinks the expansion is going to continue anyway.
Then there is the problem of charging stations for taxis. But electric car sales in China are exploding, and more and more stations are being built in all the cities, so this is only a temporary problem.
The big thing Americans should be worrying about is that electric buses, autos and trucks are going to take over the world market starting around 2023-2025, and it is looking like China is going to dominate.
The stations are pretty important in China since many people in the bigger cities don’t have parking spots they control for their cars where they could charge overnight (many even have to park wild). This is less of an issue in the states for daily commuters.
To play the devil's advocate: Shenzhen opened a metro/subway not before 2004 (being only the 8th city in China with a subway). And looking at the system map, it has as much stops as an average 500k inhabitants city in Germany. That's embarrassing for a city with a population of 12M.
Building subways is orders of magnitudes more expensive than running bus lines, even if they are electric. But it's an old standing answer to still thrilling problems of urban traffic...
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread(China ‘Is the Only One in the Race’ to Make Electric Buses, Taxis and Trucks - 331 comments)
Another fun fact is that the local government restricts electric bike ownership over a certain capacity to citizens. It’ll be hard to get one as a visitor. I’m not quite sure why.
In fairness, "Chinese 2.0 Communism", is really just market capitalism.
We could build the Melbourne - Sydney high speed rail line in 3 years if we didn’t care about a) the people who built it or b) the people whose houses were in the way.
Ridiculous obstacles like this are, IMO, a major part of why the US is seemingly completely paralyzed when it comes to constructing any major transit projects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
I am all for the compulsory purchase of property for very large infrastructure projects like this. Protection of worker safety is less negotiable.
Pertinent to this discussion, if you haven’t seen the wonderful Aussie film ‘The Castle’, you should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpqT_l7QcBM
Is it not?
Having the losers go bankrupt and exit the playing field is an important part of capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
[0] https://sofia.bg/web/sofia-municipality/start/-/asset_publis...
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/study_finds_electr...
Slow, frequently stopped vehicles like buses derive the maximum benefit from electrification.
And their emissions improve automatically as the grid improves. You could easily schedule bus recharging to occur during maximum solar electricity generation times, as it falls between morning and evening peak times. Each bus in the fleet just needs one hour downtime in the middle of the day to recharge; that’s only a 25% downtime ratio across a 4 to 5 hour window of opportunity.
Wish more people know about this.
Still, China is probably completely content with getting the pollution out of the city.
You need to consider the efficiency of the power generation, power lines, battery and then the electric motor. Any other comparison is misleading.
An ICE is ~20% efficient.
A combined cycle gas turbine is ~60% efficient, transmission systems ~98%, LiIon ~99%, motors around 85-90%. The first is thermal, the rest are electrical. Well-to-wheel this is about 50%.
My point was just that you really do get a large efficiency improvement (50 - 20 = 30) by electrifying cars. Climate argument aside, energy is simply being wasted.
until, you run out of the juice (electricity)
The potential for those electric buses is completely maximized. They likely run on greater than 0% clean energy now, and can potentially run on 100% clean energy in the future.
The difference could not be more stark or significant.
Agree that electric is the way to go for both goals, though - EVs are as clean and as renewable as their power generation method.
I'm wondering if the technology is mature enough to actually be practical for this, or if Shenzhen will end up having to do an early fleet replacement because they jumped the gun.
More here: https://evtrader.com/c/electric-bus-manufacturers/?fwp_locat...
However, the buses are going to get cheaper because battery prices keep falling. In the not-too-distant future they will be as cheap as diesels. I think the government is eliminating subsidies because it thinks the expansion is going to continue anyway.
Then there is the problem of charging stations for taxis. But electric car sales in China are exploding, and more and more stations are being built in all the cities, so this is only a temporary problem.
The big thing Americans should be worrying about is that electric buses, autos and trucks are going to take over the world market starting around 2023-2025, and it is looking like China is going to dominate.
Building subways is orders of magnitudes more expensive than running bus lines, even if they are electric. But it's an old standing answer to still thrilling problems of urban traffic...