Jonathan Xavier Weinert 2008

May, 18 2006:  So, as some of you know, I’ve been on a quest for the past four years seeking out a form of transportation that doesn’t pollute our cities, that’s energy efficient, and that doesn’t depend on oil. I had high hopes that I’d find this in fuel cell and hydrogen technology, thus I embarked on my “fuel cell trek”. This trek has led me from the world’s automotive heartland, Detroit (though maybe not for much longer), to the world’s center of innovation, California, (where semi-conductors and boy-bands were born), and finally to the world’s manufacturing mecca, and rising global consumer of cars, China.

Well, after four years of looking, I finally found it in a very unsuspecting place. In the 1,000 year old village in the Shanghai countryside, where people live on a couple dollars a day and the average home lacks even a toilet, it hit me (well, almost). I was crossing the intersection and nearly got blind-sided by a surprisingly quiet…zero-emission… Electric Bicycle.

(my all-time favorite ebike picture: A guy riding his ebike...carrying another guy...carrying another ebike...while onlooker stares in disbelief!)

While this was my very first encounter with this intriguing technology, it definitely wasn’t the last. It’s kind of like when you sit down on the sidewalk in summertime and start staring at the ground, first you see one ant… then a couple more… then you realize the whole ground is swarming with bugs. That’s how electric bikes are in China. Once I started noticing them, I noticed that they’re everywhere and the numbers are growing fast. In 2000, 330,000 were sold in all of China. By 2005, they were selling 10 million a year. (picture below of guy taking a heavy load by ebike)

Being a graduate student researcher, it’s my job to ask questions that will keep me in school a little while longer (joke^_^), so I starting inquiring into WHY this is such a big phenomenon in China, while in the rest of the developed world, the car is the mode of choice. Well the first obvious reason is that these bikes and the fuel they consumer are dirt cheap. You can buy one for the price of an average cell phone here ($100-$250 USD), and to charge the battery for a month's worth of commuting (3-40 km/day) is a whopping $1.25. Another big reason is that cities have started banning gas powered scooters and motorcycles in some city centers to reduce air pollution. Ebikes came in to fill the void. Another reason is the strong history of bicycle use in China. China has an estimated 450 million bicycles, and most people (besides the extremely poor) have at some point in there life used a bike to go to work or school. There’s more reasons, which I’m beginning to explore and which will ultimately form my dissertation. I’ll bore you with the details at a later time.

The important point is that, in terms of sustainable transportation for developing countries, this is a really interesting technology!

Why:
- You can go 100 km on 1.5 kWh, equivalent to 1,362 mpg gasoline equivalent (33.5kWh=1 gal gas equiv)
- It's a zero-emission vehicle (important for urban cities, though pollution is still generated at the power plant, which is usually coal in China)
- The fuel can be made from renewable energy

These three reasons alone make e-bikes a homerun for cities plagued with poor air quality and governments worried about energy security and future oil supply. No need to even mention the benefits to congestion, parking, and the increasing mobility it's bringing to working women and the elderly.

The even more interesting question is: what will e-bikes lead to? The world is watching (while nervously biting their nails) while China buys more and more cars and gasoline. This will inevitably drive up oil prices around the world, not to mention the environmental disasters that loom ahead from the CO2 and other pollutants emitted by a billion more cars.

Will battery technology develop faster because of this huge new market and possibly open the door to completely electric (or at least strong hybrid vehicles)? Will the super-cheap Chinese ebike and rising congestion in cities “drive” people out of their cars and onto an e-bike? Will a Chinese-specific new all electric mini-car evolve from this?

Hydrogen:
So what does this mean for hydrogen (and more importantly, for Hydrogen Boy ;-), see my Halloween 2004 costume). Well, as some may say, I guess I’ve jumped off the hydrogen wagon, at least for now. It just seems so far away. I’ve been involved pretty heavily for the past 3 years, and of course there’s been some great progress, but realistically, there’s some huge technical challenges that need to be overcome (namely in reducing cost and durability of fuel cells). In China, these problems are magnified by the even greater pressure for cheap and reliable transport. I’ve been going to fuel cell and hydrogen conferences and events for years which was pretty much the only place I could catch a glimpse of the the technology in action. I just went to my first ebike trade show last week in Shanghai where hundreds of exhibitors were showing off their ebikes or batteries, motors, etc. My friend, upon leaving the show, hopped on his e-bike to head back home. I can’t wait for the day when people are actually driving fuel cell cars to fuel cell conferences, but it seems still a long way off.