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China makes us jealous by offering huge incentives to green car buyers

China makes us jealous by offering huge incentives to green car buyers

Posted May 28th 2010 2:56PM

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Governments here in the U.S. have been kind enough to offer some significant incentives for purchasing green vehicles. Buyers can get up to $7,500 off an electric vehicle, thousands off on hybrids, and there are some deeper discounts for buyers in some states that have decided to offer additional rebates. Though incentives here are strong, China has taken this rebate thing to the next level.

According to the Shanghai Securities News, the Chinese government has finalized a plan to offer incentives to buyers of green vehicles. The government will offer maximum subsidies of $7,300 (U.S., at today's exchange rates) for plug-in hybrids and an amazing $8,800 for fully-electric vehicles. Full details will be released by the Chinese government within the next few days, but the numbers are enough to make us jealous already. Surprisingly, the rebate for a standard hybrid vehicle in China comes in at a measly $440 – kind of odd if you ask us. Perhaps the government thinks that standard hybrids are already yesterday's technology, whereas plug-in hybrids and electrics are the future. Hat tip to Larz!

[Source: Reuters]

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Mr.Pea

Sorry for the error, Bolivia is were the lithium are. China have most of worlds resources of lanthanides for NiMH batteries.

May 29 2010 at 11:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Mr.Pea's comment

David Martin

You must distinguish between resources, where there are lots all over the place, and production, which is heavily concentrated in China:
'Thatâ€™s a big problem as rare earth metals, known scientifically as lanthanides are almost exclusively controlled by China. Could this stranglehold slow progress of these new vehicles and hasten Chinaâ€™s ascent to the worldâ€™s most dominant economy? These are concerns that Bryce has been voicing.

Bryce describes,â€œ95% and 100% of the worldâ€™s supply of this entire row of the periodic table [is controlled by China].â€

The biggest uses of lanthanides are in the battery pack and electric motor of hybrids and EVs. Bryce believes that lanthanide demand will outpace supply as early as 2013, slowing the industryâ€™s growth and allowing China to raise its resource prices. He states, â€œThere are no significant supplies (of lanthanides) that can come on stream in anything close to the time span the market need.â€

Currently, 100,000 tons (90,718 t) per year of lanthanides are manufactured and utilized. That figure is expected to soon rise. Bryce says, â€œEstimates are that within two-three years the market demand will be 120,000-130,000 tons (108,862-117,932 t) per year.â€

Worldwide thereâ€™s 99 million tons (89.8 million t) of rare earth metals, but itâ€™s expensive and tricky to tap these reserves. It also takes time - up to 15 years. The U.S. currently has no working lanthanide mines, though it does have lanthanide resources. '

http://insidetech.monster.com/news/articles/8355-chinas-stranglehold-on-rare-earth-metals-could-choke-ev-hybrids

May 30 2010 at 2:42 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vin7619

Just a quick follow up on Pebble Bed Modular Reactors. As many are aware, a nuclear submarine can go about 25 years without refueling. http://www.atomicengines.com/ uses the pebbles in a PBMR to create atomic drives. A scaled down version appears to be capable of powering a vehicle. Might be worth thinking about as lithium supplies are just as finite as oil supplies.

May 29 2010 at 10:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to vin7619's comment

David Martin

'lithium supplies are just as finite as oil supplies.'

Not really. The lithium can be recycled, once the oil is burnt it is gone.
According to Chemetall there is around 150 million tons of lithium carbonate in reserves, so at around 1kg/kwh that is enough for around 150 billion kwh of storage, or enough for 6 billion or so Nissan Leaf cars.

The South Koreans, however, are not leaving it at that, but are trying to get it from the sea under a Government sponsored program:
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/news/stock-alert/pkx_gov-t-posco-to-invest-30b-won-in-lithium-extracting-plant-751107.html
Lithium is an abundant element in rocks, and so as they gradually weather into the sea, this effectively gives an infinite supply of lithium for any practical purpose.

Picking up on the excellent comment about Traveling Wave Reactors, this is the technology favored and backed by Bill Gates, so they won't be short of the odd few billion to get it off the ground.
Here is Bill talking about it, and solving the energy and carbon dioxide problems:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

I must drop him a line, and see if he can spare a billion for my own favorite, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor!

May 29 2010 at 2:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vin7619

David,
Thanks for posting something intelligent about China. PBMRs are the future of nuclear and China is pragmatic enough to know that nuclear is the cheapest, most abundant source of clean energy on the planet. Here's another nuclear technology that solves the problem of waste from the current reactors http://earth2tech.com/2010/02/15/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wave-nuclear-reactor-works/.

If you look at a few thousand years of history, most of mankind's important technological developments have come from China. This is a country now run by technocrats while the U.S. is run by lawyers. It's beginning to look as though the ultimate fate of democracies is bankruptcy as the cost of buying votes continues to escalate. Meanwhile, China doesn't have to spend its money buying votes, it spends it on infrastructure. They're ruthless enough to move 3 million people and dam the Yangtze to get cheap hydro power and are building a new nuclear power plant every 45 days for the foreseeable future. When it comes to manufacturing, that kind of cost differential for power plus cheap labor (no unions) means products made in the West will never be able to compete.

May 29 2010 at 10:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to vin7619's comment

TheTom

Some good comments there!

But the US is not run by lawyers (liars). It is run by bean counters who don't know sh*t from shinola about running a company, just what will look good on the next quarterly profit statement. Short term thinking is what is destroying the American economy and causing us to be unable to compete.

We cannot compete with China and the rest of the third world "on their terms," by reducing the cost of labor. That is all the bean counters know, reduce column A until column B looks a little better. Dumbasses! What we should be doing is moving to robotic manufacturing with assurances of jobs for our present labor force. Robots work a hell of a lot cheaper than any 12 year old Chinese kid and they do it 24/7.

Our economy is drained of its life blood because of all these jobs moving to other countries. The middle class is the goose that lays the golden eggs for the economy and these idiots are systematically killing it.

We can compete if we get our heads out of our a$$es and kick the damn bean counters back into the basement where they belong. Get America working again - hire a robot!

May 29 2010 at 10:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Silva

"Actually the smog clouds in China are not entirely to do with the density, I have spent a lot of time in various parts of China and the smog clouds are present even in the smaller and less dense cities, to my understanding they are due to innefficient burning of coal."

Hm.. have you ever been to southern California during the summer? keep in mind that the population density of SoCal is about 1/6th of that of the Beijing area. It does look pretty crappy out there. I can imagine that multiplied by 6 being worse than China.

"Also on the note of chinese people living green lives, it is true that your average chinese person pollutes less then your average western person but that is not by choice, if you look at chinese people of similar income to those in the West they pollute a lot more."

That goes without saying, the majority of people are pretty poor and live that way. Maybe 1% of them pollute like a westerner? But even the poorest of Americans pollutes more than the average Chinese citizen, probably even more since in poor states there is no emissions testing, and even lesser concern for the environment, compared to say.. the coastal states.

"That being said I dont entirely blame the government for such pollution, its a side effect of the rapid economic growth and I hope for their own sake that they work hard to clean up the mess they have created."

Yeah, i don't know how they're going to deal with it. It's out of control out there.

What i'm getting at is that relative to how many people we have, we pollute a hell of a lot. The only countries that are worse per capita.. are those that produce oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
^--- look at those stats ( unfortunately 4 years old ). Consider that China has 4-5x the population that we have. They've also started cutting emissions since then. I'm not sure if we've done diddly squat since 2006.

May 29 2010 at 2:15 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

torfred

Actually the smog clouds in China are not entirely to do with the density, I have spent a lot of time in various parts of China and the smog clouds are present even in the smaller and less dense cities, to my understanding they are due to innefficient burning of coal.

Also on the note of chinese people living green lives, it is true that your average chinese person pollutes less then your average western person but that is not by choice, if you look at chinese people of similar income to those in the West they pollute a lot more.

That being said I dont entirely blame the government for such pollution, its a side effect of the rapid economic growth and I hope for their own sake that they work hard to clean up the mess they have created.

May 29 2010 at 12:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nozferat

Ahhh..NEP..our favorite sensitive troll is trolling practically every thread...as to be expected by the ONE.

NEP...can you ever say anything useful for a change? At least try??

May 28 2010 at 11:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Silva

Racist... no. I haven't heard anything racist in this post.

China seeks to become the next superpower and half of our manufacturing jobs have gone to them. Outsourcing is a real fear. And they defend North Korea, so there are political issues. And the way they treat their people is pretty bad.

There are lots of reasons to dislike China, and none of that has anything to do with race.

Please don't play tht card on here. That's for another forum, friend.

May 28 2010 at 11:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

evnow

@P54 Do you any anything to backup your "95% of world's supply of a key ingredient in lithium batteries comes from China" BS ?

May 28 2010 at 10:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to evnow's comment

David Martin

He is confusing rare earths, things like neodymium, where the statement is true for production although not for resources, where there are plenty elsewhere, with lithium , where resources are concentrated in South America, although there are also reserves in, for instance, Burma, and China is offering to build out their share of a pan-Asian high speed rail network in return for supplies.
Details of this staggering plan here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/china-considers-high-speed-rail-line.html

Another point I would like to clarify is that there is no plan by China to go to 100% renewables.
They are indeed planning so large an expansion wind that it calls into question the ability to fulfill the plans elsewhere in Europe and the US, as the rare earths used for the permanent magnets usually employed in turbines use around 0.7-1 ton of rare earths per MW of wind turbine, and present Chinese plans would use almost all of their production, which is currently around 95% of world production.
Building new mines takes time.
Other than residential solar thermal, where China leads the world, solar is a tiny part of planned output, and likely to stay that way as the Chinese have taken a look at costs and didn't like what they saw, so in particular solar pv is being cut back, although there are fairly large plans for solar thermal - but not large in the context of China.

In fact, as usual the nominal build of wind is being confused by the media and greenloons with the actual average output, and the biggest non-fossil fuel contribution due to come on stream is nuclear.

One of the reactors due to come on stream is the Pebble Bed Reactor, due in 2013, which is interesting in several ways.
You don't need the huge containment vessel of a conventional reactor and they can be built in a modular way, with the parts deliverable by truck to the construction site or floated on barges.
Present reactors only burn around 1% of the uranium - the PBR can use 19% according to work done at Argonne, and the theoretical limit is 65%:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/idaho-national-lab-achieves-19-burn-for.html

The other really nice thing about the PBR is that it is high temperature.
This means that units could be slotted into existing coal plants, and use the present turbines and cooling system.
This replaces carbon and pollution emitting coal at a very good price with clean, safe nuclear.

Present Chinese coal production is around THREE times that of the US, using a far smaller resource base.
Present rates of economic growth mean that China will have to at least double that, and perhaps triple it, by 2020.
So it will be producing SIX to NINE times as much coal as the US, and burning through 5-7.5% of it's reserves every year to do so.
Importing coal across the oceans on the scale needed to be much help is simply impractical.
In my view then China will both have the means and the necessity to switch their coal plants to nuclear.
In addition to this, they should be able in the decade 2020-30 to perform a truly gigantic build out of conventional nuclear power - but this post is already quite long enough!

May 29 2010 at 4:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Silva

daaaaaaamnn...

May 29 2010 at 4:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

evnow

I'm sure most of China bashing is basically a racist thing.

BTW, whoever said something about China trying hard with renewables should note one thing. They open one coal power plant every week. Yes, every week.

As to "Government A makes sensible rules and enforces the laws of that country." - I'd definitely like to live in such an utopia ;-)

May 28 2010 at 10:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mr.Pea

95% of world's supply of a key ingredient in lithium batteries comes from China. Stimulating sales of battery cars is a sure way of selling China's "modern oil". What they give in rebate comes back in sales of natural resources. Battery electric vehicles are expensive and hard to sell in quantities at current price level. Hybrids are way cheaper and to say they pollute while electric are clean is the biggest lie in modern time. To get the batteries charged you need electricity, and unless you have hydro electric power plants you are going to pollute quite a lot to produce it. Big fossil fuel machinery dig and move coal from the pit and then diesel locomotives haul it to power plants. Modern cars, and hybrids with AT- PZEV engines are so clean that they clean the air in some bigger cities.
Today's CO2 craze is getting out of balance, maybe one day killing of humans will be promoted as a way of reducing CO2, or we will have to breath through a device to reduce the Co2. Plant more trees everywhere and stop clear cutting. Volcanoes spew out more pollutants than man ever did, and who can tame them? Co2 is more a political issue and a way to get more taxes. Why the widespread use of diesel in Europe, they are far worse and pollute more trash than a gas engine. Why not natural gas cars, they have so much of it that they burn it. You could fill at home as millions of homes in USA and Europe got natural gas, If you ever run out , you can make your own from animal manure. Oil companies make tons of money, and now electric/ battery people want their share of it. So many people have been brainwashed to believe that breathing (CO2) tax is OK. Stop the CO2 pollution - stop breathing! Stalin, Hitler and others killed millions of born people. Now we just kill millions of unborn, and put tax on CO2, is that what you call degeneration? Stop the insanity. Co2 is part of creation, not a taxable commodity.

May 28 2010 at 10:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

3 replies to Mr.Pea's comment