China speeds up EV infrastructure construction

30-Oct-2018

The Chinese government has come up with a plan to accelerate infrastructure construction for electric vehicles (EVs).

Chinese premier Li Keqiang at a state council meeting last week released a guidance plan for the EV industry, aimed at building sufficient charging poles to meet demand from at least 5mn EVs by 2020.

The plan requires all parking spots at new residential buildings to have charging poles and at least 10pc of spots at public parking facilities to have charging poles. This is to ensure one charging pole in a public area for every 2,000 EVs.

China is the world’s largest EV producer and consumer. It produced 795,000 EVs last year and is on target to produce 1mn EVs in 2018.

Beijing is aiming to double production of EVs to 2mn by 2020 to save energy and curb pollution. China produced only 8,200 EVs in 2011.

China as of August has installed at least 662,000 charging poles across the country — 275,000 public poles and 387,000 private poles.

The central government’s guidance plan comes after many Chinese provinces introduced regional plans to boost the use of EVs.

Shenzhen city in southern Guangdong province is on target to entirely switch to electric taxis from 1 January 2019. Shenzhen will install 18,000 new charging poles this year to further promote the use of EVs, bringing the total to 40,000.

Hainan province requires all new official cars to be new electric vehicles (NEVs) and plans to install at least one charging pole every 50km on expressways. Hainan has also removed curbs on foreign investment in EVs as part of plans to set up the country’s biggest free-trade zone (FTZ).

The fast growth of EV production is expected to raise demand for metals used in batteries such as cobalt, nickel and lithium. China is likely to produce 12.1bn lithium-ion batteries in 2018, up by almost 23pc from last year, with rising EV production the biggest driver of the increase.

More and more Chinese companies are investing in lithium-ion battery cathode material production, with domestic capacity reaching 150,000 t/yr.

Source: ARGUS MEDIA