Thought I'd put this here instead of news. China building an infrastructure for fueling electric cars and buses. Chrysler has three electric vehicles coming out. All EV sports car and two Volt-like: minivan and jeep. Ford is still five years away. I'll bet Toyota and Chrysler will beat GM to the dealership with a plug in.
At least 5 years. They originally planned to have their Fusion Hybrid in 2007, now it is 2010. I seriously am wondering if they will survive if gas hits $5 this coming summer. The electric Jeep is interesting. Apparently they have already had this as a concept vehicle, but if they could get it in production, it might help Chrysler stay afloat.
China has a lot of coal. Good for cheap energy today. Bad for the human race tomorrow, as it will accelerate anthropogenic global warming. As for Chrysler, wake me when they actually have an EV on dealer lots.
China is consuming their coal at such a pace that it's not going very long. They have large reserves, but their consuming so much coal that they've got less than 100 years now. If they continue to rely on coal to power their economy that time will rapidly plummet.
did anyone else read that china will run out of ip addresses in 830 days unless they upgrade the country to ipv6? major major issues with that cluster mess.
I haven't read anything, but if China is ramping up the electric infrastructure for cars, it isn't going to be supported by coal burning plants. They'll need to go solar. Anyone know what they're doing in solar production?
They're doing alright. They're rapidly expanding their wind capacity. They don't have enough coal to keep going down that path and they know it. They have less than half the coal we do and 4x the population... There are more and more Chinese firms in the solar industry (they make and use a lot of solar ovens as well, but that is mainly displacing wood not coal as a fuel).
Coal is like oil. Countries use up the high quality / easy access stuff first. The rate of return on investment (labor-money) for extraction of the good stuff (which was 100 years ago) was about 100 to 1, meaning for each unit of energy you invest, you get about 100 units back to use. The more decades you extract, the more expensive the remaing part becomes. Sure, China AND the U.S.A. have lots of coal remaining, but just like oil, all the high quality stuff is used up. Now we have to start extracting the crap ... the lower quality stuff ... the hard to get at stuff. The rate of return on the crappier stuff that's left after 100 years of extraction? Just a little better than 3 to 1 ROI. And folks think high prices are just conspiracy.
I was trying to explain this concept on a different forum where a couple of people believe that if we just "drill more, drill now" we will "pay less". I tried to explain why we are not likely to "pay less" because the easily recoverable stuff was pumped out years ago. They would rather believe the conspiracy. It is the fault of the "tree huggers" :tinfoil3:
Yup! A few years ago it was the tree huggers fault that we weren't building more refineries. Now it is the tree huggers fault that gas is so expensive. But back to topic... China missed the boat. They could have completely leap-frogged the whole stupid ICE car thing and gone straight to EVs - much like many places skilled land-line phones and went straight to wireless. But the ICE caught on (jeepers, it wasn't the American car companies pushing their vehicles overseas was it?!) And now they have to switch gears and abandon a bunch of expensive infrastructure that they really shouldn't have wasted their time on. :sigh:
You didn't mention it explicitly but the BTU content is also lower (hence the crappiness). That means you've got to burn even more of the stuff to get the same amount of work out as before. Also consider that if coal consumption grows at 7% annually you double your consumption in 10 years. Which is precisely why our 500 yr reserves (in the 1970's) are now only about 250 years 30 years later. China is certainly in this situation (or even worse) now.
