Slashdot Mirror
Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD showed an early model. Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport -- and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand. The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters -- the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla to Toyota. For every 1,000 battery-powered buses on the road, about 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel will be displaced from the market, according to BNEF calculations. This year, the volume of fuel buses take off the market may rise 37 percent to 279,000 barrels a day, about as much oil as Greece consumes, according to BNEF.
Those electric buses are not yet zero emission in China - where most of the electricity is generated by coal.
They can be zero emission, when solar- or hydro-powered.
Diesel buses will never be zero emission.
But after you have the electric bus, you must close the coal mine, turn off the gas pipeline, and shut down the thermal power plant. Otherwise you just moved the emissions around a little.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Clean coal burning bus engines are the future. Bring back jobs to the Pennsylvania coal minors and make bussing great again.
Vancouver, BC has a fairly large electric bus system, and has had it for over 50 years. The trollybus system covers most arterial routes, and while the buses are primarily powered off the overhead wires, they can go for short distances (under 1km IIRC) on internal batteries. The latter capacity is primarily used to get around detours or accidents.
With one of these systems, your buses are as clean as your power supply, and you don't need to muck around with expensive/polluting batteries to the same degree.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
"Perfect" should not be the enemy of "good".
I've been spending a month or two a year in China for the last decade or so, and the air there is definitely a lot cleaner than it was in 2007.
As another poster already pointed out, it's heaps easier to put one scrubber on one smokestack than it is to put a million of them on a million automobiles. And it seems to be proving effective.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...is to create a comprehensive network of electrically powered public transport infrastructure. Spain is already the country with the highest per capita number of high-speed rail Km's in the world, and most EU countries now have extensive electric rail networks. Diesel public transport, by comparison, is slow, heavy, unreliable, and expensive but even that's cheaper and cleaner than individuals driving themselves to work each day.
American-style suburbia, with its heavy reliance on individuals driving themselves to work, is one of the most inefficient and polluting urban planning models devised in recent history. It's also an obscene waste of people's time when they have to sit idling in traffic jams every day.
On the other hand, China is by far the most aggressive investor in renewable energy. India isn't dragging its feet either. The USA is getting left behind and falling even further behind with its current stable genius in the Whitehouse. Without a sensible, well-informed, coherent energy policy, guess who's heading for a 2nd world economy pretty soon?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
It's just a reaction to the endless criticism whenever America does something virtuous. A thousand comments immediately point out that America's not perfect and doesn't deserve any praise while so many problems remain. Now it's China, but suddenly it's okay to applaud them despite China's horrible record. A double standard.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
yep.
Not to mention on individual vehicles you get yahoos removing emission reducing equipment (such as catalytic converter) for a slight improvement in performance or those fucks in diesel trucks wanting to 'roll coal' and leave a huge smokescreen behind them.
I must admit, while I was reading the headline I was quite sure it was clickbait materia. "Yeah right, no way in hell a few electric buses will hurt the oil industry" I told myself.
Well, look like I was wrong. I was very surprised to learn that China had 99% of the world electric bus but, when you think about it, it's not that surprising. They put the axe on many coal plants mega development because of the abysmal level of pollution in their cities so I can understand why they are the world leader on this. That "279 000 less barrel per day in the next year" is an impressive number.
Now, I wonder how it really "hurt" the oil industry. Does that 37% rise is to replace older gasoline type? How much is 279 000 compared to the world production? Probably less than 1% so I'm not sure "hurting" is appropriate. Maybe "make a dent on"?
Elok
Bloomberg posts this article today:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-24/trump-has-it-wrong-when-it-comes-to-oil-and-opec
So the industry isn't hurting at all, but even China's demand will grow this year. I guess you could say demand would be even higher without the buses, but they're certainly not causing problems.
Given that world oil production is around 35 billion barrels a year, 279,000 barrels isn't even a blip on anyone's radar.
Apparently I'm a yahoo.
Most high flow cats (including mine) require MIL eliminators.
Most high flow cats (including mine) require MIL eliminators.
In the VAG/Bosch world, that could be programmed away. I don't know about your rustang. The only car I ever put a high-flow cat on only had one O2 sensor, a pre-OBD-II 240SX. That was CARB legal. Now I'm driving a pre-facelift D2 A8, which has the same exhaust they used on the S8 which tells me I don't need any more of it and it's definitely not limiting output. Post-facelift cars have cats and pre-cats. However, for all D2 A8s there are software fixes to patch away the downstream cats entirely so that you can run whatever you want, or nothing...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is little doubt that China has moved in a HUGE way to electric buses. And to be fair, it will hopefully make a difference down the road. BUT, the fact is, that China's Coal consumption and CO2 emissions went up last year. Why? Because China replaced burning diesel with burning coal. Keep in mind that China's AE was in use. Where did China get lots of new electricity? From coal.
However, China's reason for moving to electric has been to quit importing oil. These buses have made a difference. Way to go for CHina.
Now, with that said, the west needs to move to Electric buses. The reason is that other than Australia and Eastern Europe, the west has less than 40% on coal. For places like Sweden, Canada, UK, etc, it will make a noticeable difference in their CO2.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Tesla and other truck makers introduce semi-tractors. Over the next couple of years, transportation all around the globe, except for china, is going to see CO2 drop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I actually encountered a truck rolling coal when I was in Georgia for a conference a while back. Apparently a pedestrian walking on a road rarely used by pedestrians was enough to to be deliberately hit with a blast. Frankly, not only is rolling coal gross and damaging to the environment as a whole, the deliberate blast settings should constitute assault.
Burning a flag -> hateful political speech
Burning a flag such that the burning embers purposely fall on someone and risk hurting them -> assault
.. where regenerative braking can put the energy back into the battery. They are also big, so have room for lots of cells. And most cities number their busses for the peak morning and evening rush, so there's plenty of opportunities to schedule each bus off the road for 2 hours to fully charge it.
But busses are only the start. All the problems with electric vehicles have been solved - we just need to ramp up battery production. All that remains to be seen is if the electric takover will be the major car manufacturers will writing off their investment in the internal combustion engine, or whether a raft of new automotive companies will take over.
So the rest of use aren't going to want gas much longer.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
China is 20% of the world's population. Even if they punch way below their weight, in a serious bid for technological leadership sheer size.
Consider Liechtenstein. It may be a terrific place to live -- in fact it's got the world's highest per capita income $139,100. But with just 39,000 inhabitants, it's never going to be a world power at anything.
Now the United States is the third most populous country in the world. Our world-leading higher education system means we punch way above our weight. But realistically we're only 5% of the world's population. To put that in perspective, India, the second most populous country, may have a huge poverty problem, but its middle class (267 million) is larger than the US middle class (121 million). Within the next decade, the size of the Chinese middle class is expected to outstrip the size of the entire US population.
So the only way we're not going to lose ground to China on technological leadership is if China screws up badly. Or we make a really concerted effort to step up our game. Possibly both would be needed. The thing is, I don't think Americans realize this; we think of tech leadership as a birthright. People would be amazed to realize that other countries have better Internet, better phone, and better health care than we do.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why does the headline attempt to garner sympathy for a bunch of psychopaths hell-bent on destroying our habitat? Fuck the Oil Industry. Let them burn.
LED lights so far don't seem particularly better than CFLs. They certainly don't seem to be lasting longer.
Have they been around long enough to tell? I've rarely had a CFL fail after less than a decade of use. Most LEDs I've seen are rated to last 40 years, but have only been cheap enough to be a sensible choice for about 1-2 years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Early bird gets the worm or second mouse gets the cheese. Depends on situation whether being first or second better. Perhaps the West will get a chance to leap frog China refining their development learning curve like the Japanese, Korean and Chinese did in electronics and autos did at first then some became better (e.g. Toyota, Samsung). While fuel inexpensive and production optimized for petrol vehicles the West harder to justify the conversion while tech still relatively expensive. The West especially US should be careful to align with global supply chain progress or risk getting left behind, so waiting to long has itâ(TM)s downfalls too vs the bleeding edge early adoption premium. Anyway China should get the favorable recognition for their electric vehicles progress. It is positive for most even non Chinese.
I have a bus-stop in front of my house (traffic begins at 4:30 am) and since my city uses e-Buses from the beginning of this year, I can finally sleep without plugs.
When you drive a vehicle that means that you never again visit a gas station, you'll realize why fuel vehicles are as dead as the dinosaurs that power them. For that daily convenience, you'll happily rearrange your occasional long trip to include one or two 30-minute rest stops while it recharges.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp