The “threat” posed to the west by Chinese EV’s and other new energy products seems to be a recurring theme at the moment. Politicians are ranting, but are caught in a classic catch 22: they need EV’s to be cheaper but the Chinese are so far ahead now in the race to make affordable EV’s.
What to do? The western car companies seem to be adopting an attitude of “if you can’t beat them, join them” as per the VW story below. Seems more sensible than bans, tarriffs etc.
UK NEWS
Labour beefs up £1.8bn green port investment pledge
Labour has announced plans to deliver “the most significant upgrade” to Britain’s ports in a generation if it wins the next election, confirming it would pump £1.8bn of public funding into the sector in a bid to cement the UK’s position as a leading developer in offshore wind technologies.
Keir Starmer this week visited a number of ports in the North East, as part of a trip that saw the Labour leader provide more details on plans to ramp up investment in port infrastructure through the Party’s Green Prosperity Plan and ‘crowd in’ billions of pounds more of private sector investment into the renewable energy industry. (businessgreen)
Northgate launches EV micromobility programme
Northgate Vehicle Hire has launched a new micromobility programme, which offers a range of EVs, including electric utility vehicles and eCargo bikes.
The new fleet offering is in response to what the company believes is a growing need for emissions-free, flexible electric options to sit alongside more traditional commercial vehicles.
Northgate says that from business or educational campuses to industrial or military sites and municipal parks and gardens, micromobility vehicles can offer high efficiency, a high payload and low running costs to fleets and can be integrated with light commercial vehicles (LCVs) as part of a larger rental fleet.
Its micromobility provision is supported by several carefully selected partners to ensure that a wide variety of vehicles is available. (theenergyst)
photo: Northgate
Japan’s biggest powerco opens global green hub in London
Japan’s largest power company is basing its new global renewables business in London. JERA Nex will develop, own and operate renewable assets, including offshore and onshore wind, solar and battery storage.
Attracted by Britain’s status as the world’s second biggest offshore wind market and a global leader in renewables development, JERA Nex – the acronym stands for ‘Japan New Era’ – has an ambition to develop 20GW of renewables worldwide by 2035, through selective acquisitions and partnerships. (theenergyst)
EV OF THE WEEK
Maeving launches RM1S with more power and greater range
Maeving is a British start up launched in lockdown. They make urban electric motorbikes that update the stripped down, rugged looks of classic British bikes (think Triumph, Norton, BSA). Not only do they capture the looks of these they are also made in Coventry, the heartland of the British industry, and utilise the local engineering skills honed at those companies. Where they diverge from the heritage model is in their sales approach: they are principally a direct to customer online service.
The first model, the RM1 launched 18 months ago and has sold well, but it became clear that there was demand for a version that could, when required, venture outside the urban environment. In response to this feedback the company have launched the RM1S, which packs more power and 70 mile range into the same design. I was pleased to attend the launch party held at that hub for Shoreditch Bikers, the Bike Shed where the company announced that sales had started in Germany and California as well as the UK. I am also pleased to say that the RM1S, offered in colours that nod to racing favourites of yesteryear, looked beautifully made.
Order yours HERE
photo: Maeving
EUROPEAN STORIES
Hungary boasts the EU’s largest geothermal system
The fight against climate change is gaining momentum in Hungary. The European Union’s largest geothermal system is powering residential and commercial buildings in Szeged, 160 kilometres from Budapest.
Szeged launched the project after the local district heating provider suggested that geothermal energy could replace the town’s old gas-powered system dating back to the early 1980s.
With its network of 27 wells, 16 heating plants, and 250 kilometres of distribution pipes, the new system exploits thermal energy underground and converts it into warm air. The previous system was a leading contributor to the poor air quality in the city in winter.
Szeged’s geothermal heating system is the second largest in Europe after Iceland and the largest in the EU. The project cost approximately €70 million and provides clean, renewable and affordable energy to over 28,000 households and over 400 public buildings in the area. (euronews)
Volkswagen’s Upcoming Cheap EVs In China Will Use Xpeng Tech
Last year, the Volkswagen brand lost the top spot in the Chinese sales charts after a 15-year reign after being dethroned by BYD, so the German-based group wants to regain some of that lost momentum with help from local player Xpeng.
The partnership between the two companies will result in four affordable Volkswagen-branded battery-powered cars engineered specifically for the Chinese market that will utilize Xpeng’s know-how in electric and electronic architectures.
According to the German group, the new zonal E/E architecture bearing the name China Electrical Architecture (CEA) will be jointly developed by Xpeng, Volkswagen China Technology Company (VCTC) and CARIAD China.
The biggest benefit of Xpeng’s involvement in VW’s upcoming electric cars will be a significant reduction in costs. VW said that it’s expecting a 40% drop in costs compared to the current MEB platform thanks to the reduced complexity and lower number of control units that come with the adoption of Xpeng’s E/E tech.
Last year, the Volkswagen Group acquired a 4.99% stake in Xpeng for approximately $700 million (insideevs)
FOCUS ON: POLITICS & ECONOMICS
Scottish government abandons flagship climate goal
The Scottish government will ditch a key climate target, ministers in Edinburgh confirmed on Thursday afternoon.
Net Zero Cabinet Secretary Màiri McAllan told the Scottish Parliament that the government will scrap plans to reduce carbon emissions in Scotland by 75 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.
The move is a significant climbdown from a government which was one of the first in the world to declare a climate emergency. It comes on the back of a damning report last month from the government’s independent climate advisors — the Climate Change Committee (CCC) — which warned that the region’s 2030 target was “no longer credible.”
The Scottish government will also scrap its annual emissions reduction targets, which ministers have missed eight times in the last 12 years. They will be replaced by “carbon budgets,” blocks of five-year emission reduction targets, which governments in the rest of the U.K. currently use to stay on track to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Scottish ministers recently delayed the publication of a draft climate change plan setting out how climate targets would be met.
The government has pledged to retain a more ambitious target of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2045. McAllan said this goal still had her “unwavering commitment,” and outlined a range of climate-friendly plans including quadrupling the number of electric vehicle charge points.
Hitting that goal will become more challenging if ministers do not urgently lay out a draft climate plan. (politico)
Clean energy is boosting economic growth
A new country-by-country and sector-by-sector analysis by the IEA finds that in 2023, clean energy added around USD 320 billion to the world economy. This represented 10% of global GDP growth – equivalent to more than the value added by the global aerospace industry in 2023, or to adding an economy the size of the Czech Republic to global output.
This assessment is based on a first-of-its-kind analysis of three categories of activity in the clean energy sector:
– Manufacturing of clean energy technologies: investment in clean energy manufacturing, covering the value chains for solar PV, wind power and battery manufacturing
– Deployment of clean power capacity: investment in deployment of clean electricity generation capacity – such as solar PV, wind power, nuclear power and battery storage – and in electricity networks
– Clean equipment sales: sales of electric cars (EVs) and heat pumps.
It is based on detailed project-by-project data gathered and processed by the International Energy Agency (IEA) from primary and secondary sources.
In the USA, clean energy growth accounted for around 6% of GDP growth in the world’s largest economy in 2023.
Clean energy accounted for around one-fifth of China’s 5.2% GDP growth in 2023.
In the European Union, clean energy accounted for nearly one-third of GDP growth in 2023, the highest share of any region assessed, although its share is inflated by weak overall GDP growth of around 0.5%.
India was the fastest growing large economy in 2023, with GDP increasing by around 7.7%. Clean energy contributed slightly less than 5% of GDP growth in 2023, predominantly from investment in new solar power capacity. (theIEA)
The US Has No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
Aware that what is called “the China Shock” upended the industrial and manufacturing base in the early 2000’s, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again.
The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles, which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe.
Why are they seemingly choosing to sabotage their own expensively supported climate goals? Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later. (theatlantic)
SUSTAINABILITY & OLYMPIC DEVELOPMENT
Why the Paris Olympics Will Be a Modest Showcase of Wood Architecture
There’s something highly unusual about the new Olympic Aquatics Center on the outskirts of Paris. It’s not just the building’s striking form, with its massive, Pringle-shaped solar roof. It’s not solely that the 5,000-seat venue, constructed mainly from wood, was pieced together like a Lego set.
It’s also the fact that the center, designed by architecture firms Ateliers 2/3/4/ and VenhoevenCS, will be the main architectural icon for a Summer Games that is actively trying not to build them.
Every host city of the Summer Olympics tries to use them to power some major transformative project. It might be a huge expansion of a metro system (as in Athens in 2004), the redevelopment of a large tract of derelict land (which London undertook in 2012) or the re-planning of an underused seafront (like the one Barcelona carried out in 1992).
But Paris 2024 wants to make sustainability, rather than monumental construction, its chief legacy. Compared to the pharaonic projects of the past, the aspiration might seem almost perverse.
There are still some new projects: The Olympic Village, north of Paris, will be an eco-quarter where all buildings under eight floors will be made from wood and glass, and all energy will be sustainably sourced via heat pumps and renewables. An 8,000-capacity arena at Porte de la Chapelle, comprised of a recycled aluminum façade around a wooden structure, is destined to live on as the home for Paris’ basketball team, as well as two public gyms.
But overall, 95% of the Olympics venues will be facilities that either already existed or that will be dismantled for reuse after the Games.
This make-do-and-mend approach could, organizers hope, help provide a springboard for a green transformation of France’s construction industry. France hopes to cut carbon in the building sector as the European Union strives to reduce the bloc’s overall emissions by 55% by 2030. That will primarily mean retrofitting existing structures, but using more wood in new construction — including the advanced wood components known as mass timber — is expected to play a significant role as well. (bloomberg)
photo: VenhoevenCS
GLOBAL STUFF
Battery storage becomes biggest source of supply in evening peak in California
A landmark event occurred in the US on Tuesday night when battery storage become for the first time the largest source of supply in the California grid, which delivers electricity to the world’s fifth biggest economy and is one of the world’s biggest grids.
The milestone was noted by a bunch of energy analysts and data geeks on social media who noted that the output of battery storage in the evening peak went above 6 GW for the first time.
The California Energy Commission wrote last October that the state had about 6.6 GW of battery storage installed at the time. That means that a high percentage of its available capacity was discharging when the record was set this week. (reneweconomy)
How Amazon Became the Largest Private EV Charging Operator in the US
Every day, before 7am all over the world fleets of Amazon delivery vans wait at depots to be loaded up for that last mile run delivering to customers. Amazon are well aware that electrifying that fleet would be one of the easiest wins in their fight to become carbon neutral. It is a challenge and in the USA at least it is taking steps to address it.
In a little more than two years, Amazon has installed more than 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the US, making the retail giant the largest operator of private electrical vehicle charging infrastructure in the country.
How have they managed to do this? It is not easy as 100 chargers in a warehouse car park will increase the electricity requirement of the warehouse by up to 10 times. Amazon also learnt how slow infrastructure adaption at utilities might be and the first of their 100,000 order of bespoke Rivian vans were starting to be delivered by 2022, so some creative thinking was required. Because Amazon are such a big customer, local electricity companies were prepared to be creative.
An example was that Commonwealth Edison, Illinois’s largest power provider was struggling to secure some types of new equipment during the pandemic, so opted to repurpose old transformers for Amazon.
By the time Rivian began rolling out the vans during the spring of 2022, ComEd had routed additional power to an Amazon warehouse in Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood. Rivian’s CEO stopped by that July for a ribbon cutting to announce the vans were hitting the road. Today, ComEd powers about 1,100 chargers at four Amazon warehouses in greater Chicago. (adapted from bloomberg)
photo: Amazon
AutoFlight delivers first electric air taxi to customer in Japan
AutoFlight has achieved a significant milestone by officially delivering its first Prosperity aircraft to a customer in Japan, marking the world’s inaugural delivery of a civilian ton-class eVTOL aircraft.
The five-seater Prosperity aircraft was handed over to the customer, a pioneering Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operator in Japan. The operator, to be identified in due course, is currently developing plans for demonstration eVTOL flights at the 2025 Osaka World Expo, as well as a wider AAM rollout in Japan. (electriccarsreport)
photo: Autoflight
Blue Biofuels Makes its First Cellulosic Ethanol
Blue Biofuels (BIOF) has achieved a significant milestone by successfully producing its first batch of cellulosic ethanol, utilizing the cellulosic sugars created from biomass on its CTS pilot line.
BIOF has been granted two US Patents, with an additional six patents currently pending. The company has now embarked on the funding process to establish production capacity for Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in collaboration with Vertimass. BIOF is evaluating prospective locations in Florida capable of accommodating both SAF and cellulosic ethanol production facilities.
The CTS process can convert virtually any plant material – grasses, forestry products, and agricultural waste such as sugarcane bagasse and wheat straw — into sugars and lignin. Sugars are subsequently processed into biofuels, such as ethanol and sustainable aviation fuel, and lignin may be further processed into a variety of products. (renewableenergymagazine)
TECHIE CORNER
The Transmission Line Is Getting a 21st Century Upgrade
The green energy transition has been stymied by a lack of long-haul transmission lines to carry clean power from remote wind and solar farms to cities and power-hungry data centers where it’s needed.
The most discussed option is building more transmission projects. But startup TS Conductor Corp. says the key to addressing the shortfall isn’t just adding lines to the grid; it’s installing better ones that can deliver more electricity and potentially lower costs.
The California-based company has developed a power cable that weighs less and can carry more electricity than the standard wires that have been used for more than a century. While lining up permits and approvals to build new transmission projects can take years, TS Conductor contends that utilities can boost capacity now by replacing existing towers’ wires with its product. Tests are already underway, including by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The industry standard for long-distance conductor — the technical name for this type of transmission wiring — wraps strands of aluminium that carry power around a steel core to provide strength and support.
TS Conductor’s solution is to replace the steel with a carbon fiber core, which is stronger and about 80% lighter. The change means the core can be thinner and the product can pack more strands of aluminum in the same size conductor. Huang says his product can carry as much as three times more electricity than today’s wires. (bloomberg)
photo: CT Conductor
