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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."
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.
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.
It is not good to think of China as communist when thinking about world trade and management matters.
At the national level, perhaps China is the ultimate capitalist competitor. They act in the self-interest of the nation of China - not in a communist-like belief that all of the nations of the world should be equal.
When you view nations as actors instead of people, there is zero communism in the way China trades as an entity. The international market is capitalist and China enjoys a greater ability to decisively manage their participation in that market because they are acting more cohesively internally. This leads to the ability to be more ruthless seekers of profits externally.
China has been letting more capitalism into their internal system anyway. They're growing their upper class, and beginning to create a sizable middle class — only a small percentage of their population has to improve their lot to create a large number of consumers. And relevantly, their auto industry is finally getting to the point where they can design and build a car that someone might want to drive without a ton of help from outsiders.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"