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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Reality check 'As Shenzhen’s housing prices skyrocket to rival Hong Kong’s, real estate for charging stations isn’t easy to find, and then they have to be fitted to the grid, says BYD spokesman Xiao Haiping.

At Shenzhen Eastern Bus Co., one of BYD’s three bus-fleet partners, the monthly electricity bill of 17 million yuan is one-third of what its diesel bill used to be. The company has 15,000 employees and 5,800 buses, which use seven charging stations. Most of the buses are charged at night, when electricity is cheaper, though they sometimes have to top off in the afternoon. Each bus takes about three hours for a full charge and has a range of 250 kilometers (155 miles).'

These are coal powered buses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Co...

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EVs are more efficient (in terms of emissions per mile) even when powered by fossil fuel grid generators, because power station generators are so much larger. They can also be fitted with big, centralised, emissions scrubbers.

And the generators can be further away from cities,

And the generators can be replaced with renewable or nuclear power without requiring any changes to the vehicle fleet.

The change to electric vehicles is at first mostly about local emissions in cities. The percentage of coal in the energy mix is falling btw, and China installs more renewables and nuclear than anyone else.

Their total coal consumption is rising again.[1] US coal use as a percentage of its energy base is far too high at ~30%. China is twice that at 60%.

When you have the extraordinary financial resources that China has and your coal use is climbing despite nearly consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined, it's not enough to add renewable energy, you must aggressively remove coal. China isn't doing that and they never said they would. Their public plans include decades more of coal consumption near present levels.

Greater Asia Pacific is consuming four times the coal of the US and EU combined (representing nearly $40 trillion of GDP).

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-energy-coal/corrected-...

China already produces over 25% of its energy using renewable sources, as per your link.

What scares me about the massive push to electric vehicles - Most grids' even in recent cities such as built in china, are inadequate to supply demand and basically don't exist - In China you can buy an EV with no penalties, try and buy an ICE and there are fees and long waits - What will we do with all the batteries once they are exhausted? The range and recharge time on EV's is crap and there is virtually no infrastructure in place for charging if and when it all scales up, yet car firms are saying they will be all electric by 2020 (Tata/JaguarLandRover for example) On what planet is this going to work? - When EVs have violent crashes the batteries keep reigniting for days. What will future scrap yards look like?

I'm all for hybrid vehicles but there is something sinister about this flamboyant pr piece about the benefits of EV's...I just don't see enough infrastructure or tech maturity for the foreseeable future

I'm sure this was a sincere post, but this reads like total astroturfing.

All the negatives, none of the positives ... "sinister PR piece" ...

"I have two problems, coal power plants and ICEs. I know! I'll just replace the ICEs with more coal power. Now I only have one problem!"

(Sorry, jwz)

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