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China has the world's most aggressive electric car goals. Communist leaders are promoting them to clean up smog-choked cities and in hopes of taking the lead in an emerging technology.
At the auto show, the global industry's biggest marketing event of the year, almost every global and Chinese auto brand is showing at least one electric concept vehicle, if not a market-ready model.
Heizmann said VW, which vies with GM for the title of China's top-selling automaker, expects annual sales of at least 400,000 "new energy vehicles" – the government's term for electric or gasoline-electric hybrids – by 2020 and 1.5 million by 2025.
The vast majority of Chinese get around by smog-free vehicles already. They're called bicycles.
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Volkswagen to Roll Out an Electric Car in China. Can It Help Reduce the Smog?
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 28 2017, @08:50AM (5 children)
> [...] pumped hydro storage just about everywhere [...]
For pumped storage, one needs two reservoirs at different altitudes, and enough water to fill one of them. I've heard that suitable places are uncommon.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @11:41AM (4 children)
These are solvable problems with construction machinery.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Friday April 28 2017, @12:13PM (3 children)
Yes, if one is willing to throw practicality out the window.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @01:36PM (2 children)
It's practical if you have a top-down, massively authoritarian government. Which China, in fact, has.
You build the system once. The resulting energy storage lasts a very, very long time. So the return on the investment can be correspondingly high. Especially if not doing it means your citizens suffer massive health impacts, degrading the performance of your economy at large in both an immediate sense, and in the "high CO2 levels are going to have serious follow-on consequences" sense.
It's not so much a matter of "is it practical" as it is "can anyone see beyond the next few months."
Again, in the US, the answer is generally "no." But in China, the system works differently. They often operate with long-term planning in mind, something we have almost completely abandoned at the governmental level, which operates in convulsive twitches that tend to expire at midterm-election rates. On its good days.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 28 2017, @04:22PM (1 child)
Here's an example of what I think we're discussing:
The lower reservoir has a gross storage capacity of 10,080,000 cubic metres (8,170 acre·ft) of which 6,840,000 cubic metres (5,550 acre·ft) of water is active (or usable for pumping to the upper reservoir). The lower reservoir is at an elevation of 227.5 metres (746 ft) while the upper reservoir is situated at 510.4 metres (1,675 ft). The difference in elevation between the reservoirs affords a maximum hydraulic head of 291.3 metres (956 ft) and minimum of 266.5 metres (874 ft).
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vianden_Pumped_Storage_Plant [wikipedia.org]
Note the last sentence. In the most pessimistic case, when one begins with a flat landscape, creating a mound nearly 300 m high in which to put a reservoir is a major undertaking. Moving so much material will generate lots of air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions up front; that should make us hesitate. These facilities aren't just placed arbitrarily; they're put where they make sense, like on a mountain or perhaps an escarpment. There are, however, ideas for hydraulic energy storage that could work with different topography.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph240/doshay1/ [stanford.edu]
http://www.thegreenage.co.uk/tech/pumped-storage/ [thegreenage.co.uk]
(Score: 3, Funny) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @04:31PM
Doesn't mean it has to, though. Solar powered electric constuction FTW. :)
Perhaps China will be the first to create a sustainable, non-polluting construction system for this. We surely won't be first. We'll probably be last.