Slashdot Mirror
China Builds World's Largest EV Charging Network With 167,000 Stations (247wallst.com)
"It soon will become easier to charge a Chevy Bolt or Tesla in China," reports 24/7 Wall Street, citing reports from China's official newspaper that they've built the highest number of electric-car charging facilities in the world, offering "the broadest coverage, and the most advanced technology." AmiMoJo quotes their announcement:
A total of 167,000 charging piles have now been connected to the telematics platform of the State Grid Corporation of China, making it the world's largest electric vehicle (EV) charging network. By cooperating with 17 charging station operators, the SGCC now offers more than 1 million kilowatt-hours of power each day.
24/7 Wall Street says the ambitious (and government-subsidized) plan "is bound to help electronic car adoption since most vehicles in the category have ranges well under 300 miles."
24/7 Wall Street says the ambitious (and government-subsidized) plan "is bound to help electronic car adoption since most vehicles in the category have ranges well under 300 miles."
... I thought climate change was a Chinese hoax?
The strategy appears to be to lock in local producers for the bulk EV market while only letting foreign companies succeed at the high end and then to scale up quickly. Once they've achieved large scale production in the world's largest market, then they will seek to dominate the foreign markets. They will also have more of an excuse to use their own rare metals and charge higher prices to export them. Smart.
EV dominance will have side benefits in many other tech and energy spheres. It's an investment with potential similar to our Apollo investment half a century ago.
I know that guy. He is famous.
My head asplode.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
the roads are most of the time paid by taxes. These taxes are usually taken with the fuel sales. There are ways to get this done with electrical vehicles. It has to be done. Or else I would expect ICS users to go to courts to get their rights respected. But I guess tax men everywhere will get a feeling for it soon enough. SO with electric vehicles will come possibly some sort of road metering. The most likely way is gps plus some onboard device that reports to taxman what is due. I wonder how the Chinese resolve the problem.
I never thought China would end up being the environmental revolutionary of the world. Thanks to China's blend of Communism and Socialism, China can do with the stroke of a pen what greedy capitalist societies like the US could never accomplish.
Can you guess why?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Is the equivalent of 12-40 large fuel trucks depending on how you count efficiency. @121MJ/L
I was just noticing the same thing. There are a lot of suspicious aspects of the original article. The direction I was coming at it was to consider how many 50 kWH charges you could deliver (assuming that people aren't always on empty when they charge) - 20,000. So, on any given day, only 1/8th or so of the stations would be getting used even once.
That got me looking for the original article which I think may be this one.
It appears that around 40,000 of the claimed 167000 are SGCC's piles. The others are from the 17 cooperating station operators. In any case, this is enough to make me think that they are talking real stations and not counting stations people have installed at home which was my initial suspicion.
The only explanations I can think of are that the numbers are wrong or the numbers are correct and the stations are there for the rare circumstance where someone is using an EV to travel between cities or didn't get a full charge at home.
My guess is that the latter is true. China has new EV sales of more than 40,000 vehicles per month and they have to be getting charged somewhere. That somewhere is likely at home with travel contained to the city.
This is a population that was almost exclusively riding bikes a couple of decades ago. They likely still organize themselves in a fashion that puts them a bike ride away from everything they do.
What a bizarrely data free assumption. I would imagine that as half a billion people enter the middle class that having a car would become a status symbol much like it both became and still currently is in this country. What on earth would bike riding numbers have to do with that?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
A habit of not having a mobile society that is millennia long does not get changed in decades by the introduction of vehicles. It can take generations for the thought of living 50 miles from your work as many in America to not seem stupid. It's not about ability, it's about culture and culture has deep roots.
I should have also said that I fully expect them all to have cars, just not to quickly transform the general structure of their cities so that their home is so far from work and shopping that they will actually have to drive those cars further than the distance that an overnight charge at home will take them on the vast majority of their days.
Even in America, we will not need to replace all of our gas stations with electric stations. Most charging will be done at home. We will only need enough stations to allow for the few that need to recharge at some point away from home.
I drive around 15K miles per year, but the last time I drove more than 100 miles in a day was just before Thanksgiving of last year.
Funny, the west changed awfully quickly when the car was invented and that was brand new tech. Are you suggesting that Asians are some how backwoods savages that despite the fact that they can now afford cars will resort to old ways?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The volume carried by these trains is a trickle relative to their population. And trips taken once or twice a year do not dictate needs for charging stations when a working train system exists. My point was that if you look at the total times they would use a charging station away from home as a portion of their charges, it will likely be very small. There have been many studies showing that the same would even be true in our country.
We have not yet adjusted our thinking to the idea that almost everyone can have their own equivalent to a gas pump at home when we change to EVs. This greatly changes the need to charge away from home.
In the past year, if I had had a 200 mile range EV, I would have required 6 charges away from home that would have occurred on one trip. If I lived in a place with a good train network, I likely wouldn't have required that because I wouldn't have drove.
I believe that you are assuming the people that own these cars have a consistent place to park, and the ability to put in a charger. For example, a person that lives in a rental property may not have an assigned parking spot. Living in a rental would also likely mean being unable to wire in a charger.
Even someone that owns their home, and has a place to park, might not be able to put in a charger at home. For example an older house may not have the electrical capacity to add a car charger safely.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Standard units, dammit! How many libraries of Congress would that light, and how many football fields of solar panels would it take?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The irony is that the people who shop at Walmart are the same people who hate immigrants because they send their paychecks home.