china calling, page-3

Some more interesting thoughts from the REE blogsite.
All good news. Talking of REE I wonder when GXY will take another look at Ponton?

Sunday, September 19, 2010
The London REE Report: 100 Million EVs Part 2

What we do in the U.S. doesnt matter, he said. What matters is what China does. The Chinese government has a goal that 50 percent of all new cars sold in China by 2020 will be battery-powered. That is what will change the game.

If the (US Department of Energys forecast proves correct, there will be 100 million electric or hybrid cars in use by 2020, fully 40% of the U.S. registered vehicles.

Germany aims to have one million electric vehicles -- powered by energy from renewable sources -on the road by 2020. And, within ten years, the German environment ministry expects "green electricity" to make up 30 percent of all power consumed.

Posted on Battle of Britain Sunday due to travel. This morning a slight change of plans. I will get to Fridays big story from the nearly bankrupt great state of California on Wednesday. Today and tomorrow, I wanted to address some of the comments my Friday posting 100 million EVs elicited. My thanks to Prescient11, Gareth, Kris and Ian for all commenting and contributing. Rather than reply in the comments section, the points raised were so good I thought Id take a stab at in this update. The comments fall into the [US] grid is not able to cope with EVs" category, and the EVs will never catch on, at least, as in in the timeline of 2020, and in catch on in the USA.

But first, to restate why any of this matters to us on a rare metals blog. We can have the best, most efficient, mine in the world, with the best management and infrastructure, and best weighting of heavy rare earths, but if there is no demand for what the mine produces, we havent got a mine at all. All we have, if we put it into production, is a reverse cash machine, a hole in ground rapidly swallowing up cash for no benefit at all. Cash that came from savings or the result of other productive enterprise. Such a mine would be a net drain on society. In reality, unless it was government owned, such a mine would never get into production. Thankfully EVs and green energy provide existing and foreseeable demand for at least the next few decades. EVs may or may not get to the targets mentioned above, but governments everywhere will do their best to try to ensure they get close. Once the performance and economics of owning and operating an EV exceeds that of an old fashioned 19th century concept of fossil mobility, demand will drive everything else.

I should point out I have no ax to grind in favour of electric vehicles, nor of straight EV over hybrid cars. However, it just seems logical to me that if were going to go electric at all, the hybrid isnt the answer. Dragging around two propulsion systems and two fuel systems is highly inefficient, adds the useless weight of the inoperative system, and doubles the chance of problems, adding to the cost of repairs. To my mind, an electric vehicle is an electric vehicle, and we will get there eventually, which to me makes the hybrid likely to be a dead end, and only an interim product in the marketplace, at best. The trick for long term investing success in an area like rare metals, is trying to make informed judgments as to the level of future demand. The lead time on some in the stocks that we follow, really does warrant us trying to figure out what the world will look like in 2020.

Of the two categories, I doubt that the catching on part of EVs will prove to be a problem. An entire advertising industry exists to manipulate our emotions and convert half lies into full truths. If young men think they will get the girl with a Tesla Roadster as the new Porsche but at half the price, young men will be separated from their money for electric roadsters. Besides, the technology is now changing so fast, we are not too far off where the economies of scale will really kick in on EV manufacture. Self interest ultimately drives commercial success, and todays Edisons, Bells, Westinghouses and Fords will not be denied, and will get there in the end with EVs. But the grid is an altogether different story. In many parts of the world it is old and inadequate and certainly not up to the challenge of taking on e-mobility. Sadly this is true in America, where investment dollars were channelled for years into financial fun and games. More on this tomorrow, but Ill close today with this view of the
future from Mitsubishi.

Mobile chargers could keep electric cars juiced up
05 September 2010
ELECTRIC vehicles are expected to stream onto the roads over the next few years, but some drivers may be put off by fears that they could be left stranded if their battery runs out of charge.

Zafer Sahinoglu at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues, think they have found a way to prevent this. They are developing a network of portable charging stations, which can be moved to wherever the demand for recharging is greatest.

To determine where the stations are needed, in-car sensors would monitor the level of charge in the battery and periodically report this to a central operations centre, which would flag areas where most cars run low on juice. The stations can then be deployed wherever the low-charge "hotspots" are at that time. Just five mobile stations would be needed to cover 100 electric cars on a 100-kilometre stretch of highway, the team says.

The roaming stations could be charged up from the mains at night, and then discharge their electricity to cars during the day, they say, reducing the load on the electricity grid at peak times.
More.

More tomorrow.

Graeme Irvine. London.