Bloomberg has a report on the rapidly growing electric bus industry, with China leading the way (adding a London-sized electric bus fleet every five weeks) - Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry.

Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD Co. showed an early model. “Everyone was laughing at BYD for making a toy,” recalled Isbrand Ho, the Shenzhen-based company’s managing director in Europe. “And look now. Everyone has one.”

Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport—and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand.

The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the passenger sedans produced by companies from Tesla Inc. to Toyota Motor Corp.

GTM has a look at the wave of gigafactories being built - 10 Battery Gigafactories Are Now in the Works. And Elon Musk May Add 4 More.

Gigafactory announcements have been trending in recent months, with plans for at least 10 new plants revealed in the last six months. Half a dozen have been planned in the last month alone.

In Germany, for example, the Daimler subsidiary Accumotive laid the foundation for a $550 million plant designed to take annual lithium-ion battery production from its current level of 80,000 units up to around 320,000.

And Energy Absolute, of Thailand, reportedly has plans for a $2.9 billion factory in Asia, with an annual production capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour per year, scaling to 50 gigawatt-hours a year by 2020.

Meanwhile, a consortium including Boston Energy and Innovation (BEI), Charge CCCV, C&D Assembly, Primet Precision Materials and Magnis Resources confirmed it will build a 15-gigawatt-hour-a-year plant on IBM’s former Huron Campus manufacturing site in New York.

BEI, Charge CCCV, C&D Assembly and Magnis Resources are also working with Eastman Kodak Group to build a similarly sized plant near Townsville in Queensland, Australia. The backers have said the plant could create around 7,000 jobs.

More recently a company called Energy Renaissance has lifted the lid on plans for a factory in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, with a production capacity of a gigawatt-hour of batteries a year.

The most aggressive gigafactory plans, however, remain with the company that came up with the concept. Tesla’s Elon Musk has said he will announce “probably four” new gigafactories this year. One has long been slated for Europe, and another has been confirmed to be in the works in Shanghai, China. ...

The Atlantic reports that Volvo is going to cease making fossil fueled vehicles entirely - Volvo's Electric Future.

Volvo, the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker, announced Tuesday that starting in 2019 it will only make fully electric or hybrid cars. ... The move is a significant bet by the carmaker that the age of the internal-combustion engine is quickly coming to an end—though the Gothenburg, Sweden-based automaker is lone among the world’s major automakers to move so aggressively into electric or hybrid cars. Volvo sold around half a million cars last year, significantly less than the world’s largest car companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and GM, but far greater than the 76,000 sold by Tesla, the all-electric carmaker.

BNEF reports that Tesla Model 3 production is about to commence - Elon Musk Says Model 3 Production Will Begin Friday.

The company now makes two all-electric models: the Model S sedan and Model X sport utility vehicle. The Model 3, which is slated to start at $35,000 before options or incentives, is the culmination of Tesla’s 15-year-quest to reach mainstream consumers with a smaller, more affordable electric car. The Model 3 price tag is in line with the industry’s average new-car transaction price of $34,442 in June, according to Kelley Blue Book. ... The company delivered 25,051 vehicles in the first quarter and aims to make 500,000 in 2018 and 1 million in 2020. Tesla is expected to release second-quarter sales figures Monday.

Bloomberg NEF is forecasting that up-front electric vehicles will match those of fossil fuelled cars by 2025 - Pretty Soon Electric Cars Will Cost Less Than Gasoline.

Now research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025. Batteries currently account for about half the cost of EVs, and their prices will fall by about 77 percent between 2016 and 2030, the London-based researcher said. “On an upfront basis, these things will start to get cheaper and people will start to adopt them more as price parity gets closer,” said Colin McKerracher. “After that it gets even more compelling.”

Investment bank UBS is forecasting that electric car costs will hit parity with petrol cars next year - UBS: Electric vehicles to reach cost parity with petrol cars by 2018.

Analysts for UBS have torn apart a perfectly good Chevy Bolt to see how it is put together. What they found led them to make this rather startling announcement: the “total cost of consumer ownership [of electric cars] can reach parity with combustion engines from 2018.” Notice that doesn’t mean an electric car and a conventional car will cost the same to buy new. It means they will cost the same to own, figuring in maintenance, cost of fuel, insurance, and all the other factors that are part of the total cost of ownership.

The UBS study goes on to say, “This will create an inflection point for demand. We raise our 2025 forecast for EV sales by 50% to 14.2 million — 14% of global car sales.”

Ambrose Evans Pritchard has an article on Stanford professor Tony Seba's optimistic predictions that the end is nigh for fossil fuelled vehicles in his report "Rethinking Transportation" - The end of petrol and diesel cars? All vehicles will be electric by 2025, says expert.

No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Prof Seba’s premise is that people will stop driving altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1m miles.

Futurism has an update on Elon Musk's boring project - Elon Musk Has Finally Confirmed What the Boring Tunnels He’s Making Are For.

We now have an idea of just what Elon Musk's Boring Company is going to be for. Yes, it's to solve traffic, but it looks like it isn't meant just to be your usual tunnel for cars. In a new update today, the company asserts that it's actually building a tunnel that can also run the Hyperloop.

Elon Musk recently had a TED talk with Chris Anderson covering a wide range of topics, including the Tesla Semi and expanding the Gigafactory fleet - What will the future look like? Elon Musk speaks at TED2017.

Showing a concept photo of a house with a Tesla in the driveway, Powerwalls on the side of the house and a solar glass roof, Musk talks about his vision for the home of the future. Most houses in the US, he says, have enough roof area for solar panels to power all the needs of the house. “Eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof,” he says. “Fast forward 15 years from now, it’ll be unusual to have a roof that doesn’t have solar.”

And to store all that electricity needed to power our homes and cars, Musk has made a huge bet on lithium-ion batteries. Moving on to a discussion of the Gigafactory, a massive diamond-shaped lithium-ion battery factory near Sparks, Nevada, Musk talks about how power will be stored in the future.

“When it’s running full speed, you can’t see the cells without a strobe light,” Musk says as a video of the factory pumping out Li-ion batteries plays behind him. Musk thinks we’ll need about 100 such factories to power the world in a future where we don’t feel guilty about using and producing energy, and Tesla plans to announce locations for another four Gigafactories late this year. “We need to address a global market,” Musk says, hinting that the new factories will be spread out across the world. ...

Sustainable energy will happen no matter what, out of necessity, Musk says. “If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy … The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur,” he says.

But becoming a multi-planet species isn’t inevitable. “If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 we were able to send somebody to the moon. Then we had the space shuttle, which could only take people to low-Earth orbit. Now we take no one to orbit. That’s the trend — it’s down to nothing. We’re mistaken when we think technology automatically improves. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”

Tesla have also released their "solar roof" product, with Bloomberg declaring it "better than anyone expected". RNE has a summary - Tesla’s solar roof sets Musk’s grand unification into motion.

Production of the tiles will begin at Tesla’s Fremont solar plant in California and then shift this summer to its new factory in Buffalo, New York, with additional investments from Tesla’s partner, Panasonic. Musk said initial sales will be limited by manufacturing capacity. As production ramps up into 2018, sales will begin in the UK, Australia, and other locations, along with the introduction of sculpted terracotta and slate versions of the solar roof.

The tempered glass in Tesla’s tiles is designed to conform to the toughest durability standards for both roofs and solar products, according to Tesla. The roof itself is guaranteed to outlast your home, while the power production of the solar cells is covered under a 30 year warranty, according to the company’s website. Glass, as Musk likes to point out, has a “quasi-infinite” lifetime, though the underlying solar cell will degrade over time.

Tesla’s basic premise is to make solar ownership more attractive and affordable by eliminating the need to install both a roof and solar panels. Tesla will manage the entire process of solar roof installation, including removal of existing roofs, design, permits, installation, and maintenance. The company estimates that each installation will take about a week.

Gas 2.0 has an article on an electric shipping experiments in Norway (the first vessel is due to launch in 2018)- Norway Is Looking To Autonomous Electric Ships To Replace Trucks.

Trucks are essential to commerce. Virtually every item purchased in stores is transported by truck at some point. Trucks add to urban congestion and clog highways. Worst of all, the vast majority of them are powered by diesel engines that pump millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Norway is experimenting with a new way to get some of those trucks off the road and reduce diesel emissions — autonomous electric ships.

Nick Butler at the FT points to this paper from the Grantham Institute and Carbon Tracker on the disruption cheap renewable power and electric vehicles are starting to have on global energy markets, a process which is going to continue to accelerate - Expect the Unexpected: The Disruptive Power of Low-carbon Technology (pdf).

Butler notes of the report:

* Solar will take 23 per cent of the power generation market by 2040 and 29 per cent by 2050.
* Wind power could constitute another 12 per cent of the power market by 2050.
* Electric vehicles will account for around 35 per cent of the road transport market by 2035.
* Hydrocarbons will peak and the authors are bold enough to foresee peak oil and coal demand in 2020

Bloomberg has a report on Argentina's hopes to dramatically expand lithium production - Argentina Eyeing Lithium Superpower Status Amid Battery Boom.

If all of the projects go ahead, Argentina’s annual output of the metal used in electric-vehicle batteries would surge to 165,000 metric tons, or about 45 percent of global supply, according to government projections. Prices will increase as much as 15 percent this year, Albemarle predicted last month. “Conservatively, Argentina will represent about half of global lithium production by 2020,”

The Age reports that Australian government MP John Alexander is pushing for a high speed rail or hyperloop link between Sydney and Melbourne as a solution to unaffordable house prices - High-speed rail and a Hyperloop: John Alexander's radical housing affordability plan.

High-speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne would be used to decentralise Australia's urban population and open up cheaper housing under a radical plan now endorsed by a parliamentary committee. ... The report also urges the government to monitor and, in future, assess the feasibility of Hyperloop, a supersonic tube conceived by Tesla founder Elon Musk that would potentially see passengers traverse Sydney to Melbourne in less than one hour.

Linking regional centres by rail would enable people to live in Goulburn, for example, and work in Sydney, and ease pressure on crowded city markets. It would "provide an abundant supply of affordable housing for many generations to come", Mr Alexander said.

The Economist has a look at the rapid growth prospects for electric vehicle sales - Electric cars are set to arrive far more speedily than anticipated.

Improving technology and tightening regulations on emissions from ICEs is about to propel electric vehicles (EVs) from a niche to the mainstream. After more than a century of reliance on fossil fuels, however, the route from petrol power to volts will be a tough one for carmakers to navigate.

The change of gear is recent. One car in a hundred sold today is powered by electricity. The proportion of EVs on the world’s roads is still well below 1%. Most forecasters had reckoned that by 2025 that would rise to around 4%. Those estimates are undergoing a big overhaul as carmakers announce huge expansions in their production of EVs. Morgan Stanley, a bank, now says that by 2025 EV sales will hit 7m a year and make up 7% of vehicles on the road. Exane BNP Paribas, another bank, reckons that it could be more like 11% (see chart). But as carmakers plan for ever more battery power, even these figures could quickly seem too low.

BNEF reports that the US EPA has required VW to build EV charging infrastructure as part of their settlement for cheating on vehicle emissions tests - VW subsidiary invests $2 billion to promote electric cars.

Volkswagen AG has formed a new subsidiary to manage the $2 billion it is required to spend over the next decade in support of zero-emission vehicles in the U.S.

The company, Electrify America LLC, will invest in the construction and maintenance of electric vehicle charging stations, including a “high-speed, cross-country” network of more than 200 fast-charging stations for electric cars. It will also install more than 300 chargers in 15 U.S. metropolitan areas and fund “brand-neutral” advertising campaigns to promote awareness about electric cars, among other activities, the company announced Tuesday.

VW agreed to spend the money on infrastructure and other projects to promote the adoption of zero-emission vehicles as part of a legal settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stemming from the company’s cheating on emissions tests for its diesel cars.

The Gurdian reports that Shell might be rolling out EV charging points at their UK petrol stations starting this year - Electric cars could be charged at Shell service stations from 2017.

The diversification into infrastructure for battery-powered cars would mark a new departure for the company, which has largely backed biofuels as a greener alternative to petrol and diesel in the past. It could also suggest a softening of stance from an industry which Telsa co-founder Elon Musk has accused of using misinformation campaigns against electric cars.

Dave Roberts has an excellent summary of the growth of the electric vehicle market up at Vox, noting EVs may start capturing the transportation market as quickly as solar power is capturing the power generation market - We’re probably underestimating how quickly electric vehicles will disrupt the oil market.

The article references the following studies and forecasts :

* Grantham Institute
* EIA
* BP Energy Outlook 2017
* BNEF
* GreenTech Media

If these forecasts play out, fossil fuels could lose 10 percent market share to PV and EVs within a decade. A 10 percent loss in market share was enough to send the US coal industry spiraling, enough to cause Europe’s utilities to hemorrhage money. It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors. “Growth in EVs alone could lead to 2 million barrels of oil per day being displaced by 2025,” the study says, “the same volume that caused the oil price collapse in 2014-15.”

Yet, according to the study’s authors, virtually none of big fossil fuel companies are taking the possibility seriously, or planning for it.

So EV forecasts range from modest to revolutionary. What should we make of this?

It seems to me that we don’t come to these questions with a clean slate. The very kind of models this study critiques are the ones that have consistently underestimated the growth of solar and wind. They use baseline scenarios that assume no further cost and policy changes when, in reality, cost and policy changes are both rapid and inevitable.

Multiple drivers (pardon the pun) are lining up behind EVs — rapidly falling battery costs, rising range, synergy with other new energy technologies, widespread international policy support, growing consumer interest, and (my pet dark horse) wireless EV charging.

Experience shows that markets at the center of this kind of interest and activity do not continue to grow on a steady, linear path. They take off, lurching into exponential growth. That shift is impossible to predict in advance with any precision, but at this point, we ought to know that it’s coming.

By now, we need not be neutral toward this range of projections. History has taught us that for new, distributed, consumer-focused technologies, unexpected explosive growth is … to be expected. Big oil companies and investors would do well to prepare.

Might be time to boycott all Ford products ? Seemed to work pretty quickly with Uber. CleanTechnica reports - Ford CEO Mark Fields Told Trump 1 Million US Jobs Are At Stake Because Of Fuel Economy Rules….

Fields apparently told President Donald Trump during a recent meeting that there are “about 1 million US jobs are at risk if fuel-economy rules don’t align with market reality” — this is Bloomberg‘s exact paraphrase.

Bloomberg NEF have revised their oil consumption forecasts as electric vehicles expand their market share - Graph of the Day: How EVs are driving the next oil crisis.

When Bloomberg published a story under a version of the above headline at around this time last year, it was based on data predicting that by 2040, 35 per cent of new cars worldwide “would have a plug.” Last week, a new graph based on new data by Bloomberg New Energy Finance has updated the details on how such a global shift electric vehilces might play out for the oil sector.

According to the graph, featured below, some 13 million barrels of oil per day will be displaced by electric vehicles by the year 2040 – an amount, BNEF says, that is equivalent to 14 per cent of the Energy Information Agency’s estimated global crude oil demand in 2016. ...

For the record, that’s slightly down on what BNEF forecast last year: that electric vehicles could displace oil demand of 2 million barrels a day as early as 2023. But we will leave you with Tom Randall’s closing comments on the February 2016 BNEF analysis: “One thing is certain: Whenever the oil crash comes, it will be only the beginning. Every year that follows will bring more electric cars to the road, and less demand for oil. Someone will be left holding the barrel.”

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Are you setting up a business related to clean energy technologies such as renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles and connected appliances? Then come along to the EnergyLab Acceleration Program Info Night and learn how we can help your business take off.

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