Electric Cars

 

Forbes Conrad for The New York Times

Charging an electric car at the China Southern Power Grid center in Guangzhou, China.
By KEITH BRADSHER

 GUANGZHOU, China — Three years ago, as part of its green-energy policy, the Chinese government set an ambitious goal: by the end of 2011, the nation would be able to produce at least 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses a year.

With only about a week to go, it is clear China will fall far short of that target. Despite dozens of electric-vehicle demonstration projects around the country, analysts put China’s actual annual production capacity at only several thousand hybrid and all-electric cars and buses.

“It’s pretty trivial at this stage — they hardly sell any,” said Lin Huaibin, the manager of China vehicle sales forecasts at IHS Automotive, a global consulting firm.

Obstacles include continued technological hurdles, disputes over technology transfers by multinational automakers, and a broad wariness by the Chinese public regarding alternative-technology cars.

Unlike in other nations, where automakers are leading the push for electric vehicles, in China the effort is being led largely by one of the country’s most powerful industries — the state-run electric companies that operate the national power grid.

This month in this sprawling southern industrial city, for example, the giant China Southern Power Grid company opened a sales and service center for electric cars.

The new three-story building, resembling a giant lizard egg of lime-green glass, is a showcase for technology supplied by Better Place, a start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Under the Better Place business model, customers do not recharge their electric cars but instead periodically stop at an electric filling station to swap their nearly depleted batteries for freshly charged ones.

Though automakers in other countries have supplied charging equipment to be installed at homes and parking lots, China’s power industry has already made it clear that it wants to dictate when and how plug-in gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric cars are charged, by owning the charging equipment and setting technical standards.

Some of the obstacles that have slowed deployment of all-electric cars in China also exist in other markets. The cars’ range, less than 200 miles even under ideal conditions, falls steeply in cold weather, if the air-conditioner is turned on or if the car was not fully charged overnight.

“I’m not interested in them — I worry I’d run out of electricity and get stuck,” said Mu Zhongbao, a 31-year-old businessman who paid the equivalent of $130,000 for an Audi Q7 minivan on a recent afternoon here at one of the many dealerships near the Better Place site.

Some executives say that China has fallen behind its schedule for hybrid and all-electric cars because it has put heavy pressure on multinationals to transfer technology to their Chinese partners to be eligible for generous subsidies for the sale of alternative-energy vehicles in China.

But the betting in China is that China Southern Grid and another big grid operator, the State Grid Corporation, and their allies among the country’s five main electricity generation companies have much more influence in Beijing than the auto industry.

But what is not clear is which of three experimental approaches to recharging will eventually dominate the field: the so-called fast charging of vehicle batteries at recharging centers; overnight charging options at homes and parking lots; or battery swapping à la Better Place.

The government wants to build an electric car industry that can export vehicles all over the world. But it does not want to someday face W.T.O. trade complaints from other countries that might accuse China of violating free-trade export rules by subsidizing the industry’s development.

The most promising trade strategy for China to avoid legal pitfalls might be for the government first to subsidize the development of a network of charging stations for electric buses and other municipal vehicles, the Chinese official said. Mass transit subsidies are hard to challenge at the W.T.O. because they involve an almost purely domestic government service.

The bus recharging stations, and the lessons learned in building them, might then be used in a more extensive network of electric car recharging stations. Subsidizing the charging stations could help make electric cars more affordable, and in turn help Chinese automakers achieve economies of scale in their home market that would help them build up an export business.

Wukan

Forever Young

The studio version. Times they are changing.

Dylan gigs are famously variable: songs are often transformed beyond recognition. Tonight, however, he was singing to the culture ministry's tune: the concert was performed "strictly according to an approved programme", a sign of official nervousness that has persisted since Björk's 2008 Shanghai concert, when she chanted "Tibet! Tibet!" while singing her song Declare Independence.

Why the change of heart? One former culture ministry official, Shi Baojun, told the Guardian it may be something as simple as fresh thinking at the Chinese embassy in Washington, where officials pore over the record of any artist hoping to play in China, examining their biography, opinions and – above all – previous comments on China. "As personnel change all the time, changes in decisions often only reflect who is in charge. Some are bold, some are cautious," Shi said.

That doesn't entirely explain why now, though: "You have to understand, the government's always balancing the need to look liberal with the need to keep control," said Shi. "They have so many audiences, and there's often no point in looking for logic because there isn't much, or any."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/06/bob-dylan-china-ai-wei

Stealth fighters

A Chinese Stealth Challenge? WSJ
Is China closer than thought to matching U.S. fighter jet prowess? CNN
China’s Push to Modernize Military Is Bearing Fruit NYTimes
China's development of stealth fighter takes U.S. by surprise LATimes

Asian Games

The sun sets behind Haixinsha Stadium shortly before the start of the opening ceremony of the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou on November 12, 2010. (TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

2010 Asian Games Opening Ceremony

Earlier today, in Guangzhou, China, the Opening Ceremony for the 16th Asian Games took place, with lavish stagecraft, costumes, fireworks and performers welcoming participants. Some 14,000 athletes from 45 countries and territories will compete in 42 sporting disciplines until November 27. Collected here are colorful scenes from Guangzhou, China.

In pictures: Asian Games open

The Official Website of the 16th Asian Games

Guangzhou using Asian Games as spark for urban redevelopment

The Guangzhou city government has earmarked more than 1 trillion yen ($12.1 billion) for urban redevelopment and infrastructure projects.

At the same time, the city must grapple with glaring contradictions, not the least of which is a growing disparity in wealth among residents.

Rare Earth

This lake outside of Baotou, China, contains sludge laced with toxic chemical compounds from rare earth processing (NYTimes).

After China’s Rare Earth Embargo, a New Calculus

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: October 29, 2010

BAOTOU, China — When Japanese mineral traders learned in late September that China was blocking shipments of a vital commodity, the word came not from a government announcement but from dock workers in Shanghai.

And on Thursday, the traders began hearing that the unannounced embargo of so-called rare earth minerals was ending — again, not from any Chinese government communiqué, but though back-channel word from their distributors.

Throughout the five weeks of the embargo, even when China expanded the rare earth shipping halt to include the United States and Europe, Beijing denied there was a ban.

Whatever it was called, a shipping suspension that started amid China’s diplomatic dispute with Japan over a wayward fishing trawler escalated into a broader international trade issue.

The episode alarmed companies around the world that depend on rare earths, minerals that help make a wide range of high-tech products, including smartphones and smart bombs. China currently controls almost all of the world’s supply of rare earths, for which demand is soaring.

To many outsiders, the undeclared embargo looked like a pure power play — a sign China would wield its growing economic might and apply its chokehold on an important industrial resource with little regard for the conventions of international trade. The export quotas China continues to impose on rare earths, even when it does let ships leave the docks, are restricting global supplies and causing world market prices to soar far beyond what Chinese companies pay.

From the Chinese perspective, though, the issue looks very different.

China feels entitled to call the shots because of a brutally simple environmental reckoning: It currently controls most of the globe’s rare earths supply not just because of geologic good fortune, although there is some of that, but because the country has been willing to do dirty, toxic and often radioactive work that the rest of the world has long shunned.

Despite producing 95 percent of the world’s rare earths, China has only 37 percent of the world’s proven reserves. Sizable deposits are known to exist in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, among other places.

Many of those countries, responding to the rising demand for rare earths and alarmed by the recent embargo, are now scrambling to develop new mines or renovate ones long considered not to be worth the effort. That includes an abandoned mine in California that the American company Molycorp is trying to refurbish.

But experts say that any meaningful new production from outside China is at least five years away, and that it will come with its own environmental cost calculus.

“China’s rare earth output cannot be raised fast enough to meet the entire world’s needs, as there are environmental factors to be taken into consideration with an increase in rare earth production,” said Zhang Peichen, the deputy director of the government-backed Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths, the main research group for the Chinese industry.

Across China, rare earth mines have scarred valleys by stripping topsoil and pumping thousands of gallons of acid into streambeds. The environmental costs are palpable here in Baotou, a smoggy mining and steel city in China’s Inner Mongolia, where the air this week had an acrid, faintly metallic taste.

Half of the global supply of rare earths comes from a single iron ore mine in the hills north of Baotou. After the iron is removed, the ore is processed at weather-beaten refineries in Baotou’s western outskirts to extract the rare earths minerals.

The refineries and the iron ore processing mill pump their waste into an artificial lake here. The reservoir, four square miles and surrounded by an earthen embankment four stories high, holds a dark gray, slightly radioactive sludge laced with toxic chemical compounds.

The deadly lake is not far from the Yellow River watershed that supplies drinking water to much of northern China. The reservoir covers an area 100 times the size of the alumina factory waste pond that collapsed this month in Hungary, inundating villages there and killing at least nine people.

Even before the Hungary disaster, Baotou authorities had begun a program to reinforce the levee here. Huge bulldozers are adding a thick surface layer of crushed stone to the embankments to protect them from the region’s harsh weather.

But the bottom of the reservoir was not properly lined when it was built decades ago, according to a rare earth engineer who insisted on anonymity because of the Chinese government’s sensitivity about the problem. The sludge, he said, has caused a slowly spreading stain of faint but detectable radioactivity in the groundwater that is spreading at a rate of 300 yards a year toward the Yellow River, seven miles to the south.

Much of the radioactivity associated with rare earths comes from the element thorium, which is not a rare earth but is typically found in the same ore. With the exception of unusual clay formations in southern China that contain medium and heavy rare earths with virtually no thorium, every other known commercial-grade rare earth deposit in the world is laced with thorium.

To point out China’s environmental and supply concerns is not to overlook the economic benefits the nation accrues by restricting exports. The global shortage gives foreign companies a reason to move even more of their rare earth-dependent operations to China, to produce key components for a wide range of products.

A Chinese official has acknowledged as much. “To use moderation in the control of the production of rare earth resources and reduce exports to an acceptable level is to attract more Chinese and foreign investors into the region,” Zhao Shuanglian, the vice chairman of Inner Mongolia, said last year, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.

Meanwhile, China’s own fast-growing manufacturing industries now consume more rare earths than the rest of the world combined. And Beijing has done nothing to curb that domestic demand.

That apparent double standard could prove important if, as some trade experts have predicted, the United States, Europe and Japan bring a World Trade Organization case accusing China of unfairly restricting exports through a system of quotas and duties.

Analysis: China's rare earth hammer hits economic raw nerve

(Reuters) - China wants to use its monopoly over global rare earth supplies to win the race for clean energy technology that depends on the metals, but it is a strategy that could backfire, costing Beijing its advantage.

Is China's rare earth power play really such a big deal?

Three ways to end China's rare earth monopoly

Nobel Peace Prize 2010

Imprisoned Liu follows in footsteps of Suu Kyi, Sakharov
By Simon Hooper, CNN

(CNN) -- The award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo follows an occasional precedent of recognizing human rights campaigners who are either imprisoned or subjected to state restrictions or harassment.

In announcing the prestigious award, Norwegian Nobel Committee President Thorbjoern Jagland cited Liu for his "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Liu is currently serving an 11-year jail sentence in China for inciting subversion of state power.

Reacting to the award, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Mao Zhaoxu said Liu was a "convicted criminal" whose actions had been "in complete contradiction to the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo: Inside the heart of a gentle 'subversive'

His unwavering conviction that no authority could permanently block the natural human impulse to freedom struck an almost anachronistic tone, harking back to the crumbling of the Soviet bloc. (Charter 08 was modeled partly on Charter 77, the document that called for political change in communist Czechoslovakia.)

Nobel euphoria fails to mask tough reality in China

Where once human rights were a hot topic of discussion during meetings between Chinese leaders and their counterparts in the West, these days the lure of China's red hot economy amid a global downturn has muted criticism.