According to the New York Times,
Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.
Since I live in Beijing, I am glad to hear this. The story omits an important detail. Every day in Beijing, dozens of electric bikes zoom by me as I ride my non-electric bike. There are 30 or 40 models available, average price about $300. This means when battery makers make car batteries, they will build on a wealth of experience derived from making millions of bike batteries. This isn’t China with cheap labor, as Americans usually imagine the situation; this is China with more experienced labor. It isn’t obvious that American car makers can ever catch up.
The article continues:
Electric vehicles may do little to clear [China’s] smog-darkened sky . . . . China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only 19 percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities.
Please. It is far easier to clean the output of a few hundred power plants than a few hundred million cars.
The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress.
I think it’s too late. If the $25 billion were used for rebates to encourage electric car buying, as the Chinese government is doing, that might work, but there aren’t any decent American-made electric cars to be bought.
In related news, Tsinghua University (above all an engineering school) undergraduates who come to America for graduate school now account for more American-trained Ph.D.’s than any American school. In case you think that American engineers are better trained than Chinese ones.
Seth,
Do you have a sense of whether Tsinghua undergraduates who come to America for graduate school tend to stay in America (or wish they could) or return to China to pursue their careers?
As a student major in vehicle making,I think there is a long period before the electric cars in widely use,especially in China.
> Please. It is far easier to clean the output of a few hundred power plants than a few hundred million cars.
Also, plugin-hybrids and electric cars are typically charged over night during off-peak times, so they improve the efficiency of the power plants.
Your last sentence is a non-sequitur. I might draw from your interesting fact that Tsinghua is big, and maybe that it produces more reliable graduates than other Chinese institutions. If individual elite schools accepted more from Tsinghua than a particular large elite American school, then I would start to reconsider. It’s obviously tough to tell though, because of visa stuff.
Nadav, I think Chinese students who get Ph.D.’s in America are becoming more likely to return to China (comparing now with 10 years ago, say) because of more opportunities to do research and better business opportunities.
NE1, I think elite American grad schools do accept more Tsinghua students than students from any particular elite American school. More Tsinghua students than MIT students, for example. I am trying to say that there is no great difference in the formal education received by the best Chinese engineers and the best American engineers.