Plug-ins now one quarter of new car sales

 From CleanTechnica

Plugin vehicle registrations were up 9% year over year (YoY) in April, ending the month at around 1.6 million units. Interestingly, BEVs (+19% YoY) and PHEVs (-9% YoY) behaved very differently, with pure electrics back to double-digit growth while plugin hybrids remained in the red. This is the first time since 2019 that PHEVs remained in the red for four consecutive months.

This meant that, while the plugin YTD numbers are barely positive (+1% YoY), that is solely due to the PHEV blues (-10% YoY), because BEVs are already on the way back to normal (+7%).

And the different dynamics between pure electrics and plugin hybrids are reflected in the BEV vs. PHEV share of plugin sales — in April, BEVs represented 72% of all plugin sales, or about 1.15 million units, one of the best results of the past few years. That led the YTD breakdown to be 70% vs. 30% in favour of pure electrics, which is touching the ceiling of BEV share of the past 12 years. Since 2014, BEVs have floated between 70% and 50% of the total plugin share.

With numbers out of the red zone, it is undeniable that globally, this year started slow. But there is one easy explanation for this — incentives. Or the end of them.

The end of US incentives last October, added to the partial removal of incentives in China at the end of 2025, had an expected impact, as these are the 3rd and 1st largest EV markets, respectively.

Actually, if we remove China and the USA from the tally, EVs jumped 50% YoY globally in April, with BEVs surging +63% YoY, their highest growth rate since June 2023.

Funny enough, PHEVs are also underperforming in this metric, as the 23% PHEV growth rate in April, excluding China and the USA, is the lowest for the technology in over a year. It is starting to look like PHEVs’ current slowdown is more structural than expected….

Just because certain media-friendly markets are down, that doesn’t mean that all markets are down.

Here are a few examples of fast growing markets:

• BEVs jumped 157% in Australia, to 16% share;
• In Italy, BEVs surged +99% YoY, bringing their share to 9%;
• In Argentina, BEVs experienced exponential growth, going from less than 100 units in April 2025 to over 1.300 units last month;
• As for Ireland, BEVs doubled their sales to 3,000 units, or 27% share;
• In South Korea, BEVs surged 160% YoY, to 36,000 units, or 24% share;
• In Vietnam, BEVs tripled to 26,000 units, or 43% share;
• As for Japan, BEVs more than doubled their sales YoY, to 7,000 units, or 2% share;
• In Indonesia, EV sales were up 93% to 15,000 units, or 18% share;
• Finally, in Malaysia, BEVs jumped 104% YoY to 6,000 units, or 8% share;

So, Keep Calm and Carry On — the EV revolution is in good health, and with what is happening in the Middle East, ICE vehicle sales are going to melt even faster.

The charts below use CleanTechnica's data, but my seasonal adjustment and trend-fitting.

The slowdown in global sales can be clearly seen, as well as the recent pick-up as the Iran War drives people to buy EVs and PHEVs.  

 

EVs/PHEVs 31% of German car sales

 From CleanTechnica

September saw plugin EVs at 31.1% share in Germany, up from 23.7% share year-on-year. BEV volume increased by 32% YoY, while PHEVs grew 85%. Overall auto volume was 235,528 units, up some 13% YoY. September’s best-selling BEV was the Volkswagen ID.3.

Since 2024 was a low baseline, let’s look at the YTD progress vs. both 2024 and 2023. Combined plugins are now at 28.4% YTD, with 18.2% BEV and 10.3% PHEV. 2024’s respective figures were 19.3%, with 13.1% BEV and 6.3% PHEV. 2023’s respective figures were 23.9% with 18.1% BEV and 5.8% PHEV.

So although 2025 is looking much better than 2024, with a 9.1% additional share of the market going to plugins, it is only marginally better than the same period in 2023. All of that marginal improvement is down to the growth of PHEVs over the two intervening years.

What’s also different since 2023 is the lack of BEV incentives now (after being cancelled in December of that year). In short, the transition has recovered from that trauma and is now advancing under its own steam (a more robust path than relying on incentives) – and is less vulnerable to future setbacks.

PHEVs are back to a share they last saw in 2021 and 2022, but the difference this time around is that the new generation of PHEVs have an electric range of over 80 km in most cases (vs. mostly under 50 km previously). This generation is thus more likely to contribute to “mostly electric km” of the overall vehicle fleet during their 15+ year lifespan. As Germany’s transition continues over the next couple of years, PHEVs will plateau and then fade away, as they did in Norway.

EV subsidies ended at the end of 2022, hence December 22 spike.

In China, more than 1 in 2 cars sold is an EV

EV and PHEV sales in China continue to motor ahead.

The first chart shows EV and PHEV sales in absolute terms, seasonally adjusted (by me), and plotted on a log scale.   A log scale shows a time series with a constant growth rate as a straight line.  The line on the chart below has been gradually levelling off, implying that the growth rate trend is gradually slowing.

This is confirmed by the chart below.  There are wild swings over the covid period, but the trend growth rate has slipped to 30% per annum over the last 3 years.  That's still a high growth rate, which would lead to a doubling of EV sales every 3 years.

The growth rate of EVs remains much higher than the growth rate of petrol cars.  In fact, petrol car sales in China peaked in 2018/19, recovered partially after the Covid lockdowns, but have since resumed their decline.  The chart below shows EVs/PHEVs as a percentage of total car registrations.  It is not plotted on a log scale.  Note the occasional spikes, which occur when EV sales go up and total sales go down.  This happens when government incentive schemes change, or when Chinese New Year moves, or simply because of random swings in the time series--one zigging up and the other down in the same month.  (Seasonal adjustment of monthly time series in China is tricky because of the peripatetic new year.)  There is no fundamental reason for the spike in April, or for the decline in May and June, and I expect to see it reversed over the next few months.  EVs will continue to gain market share, because battery prices continue to decline fast, and even despite government attempts to reduce very competitive conditions, EV prices are likely to remain under pressure.

China produces ~1/3rd of the world's cars, and EVs/PHEVs make up more than half of them.  By the end of this year, that ratio will prolly be 60%.   It's worth remembering that in January 2014, only 0.2% of cars sold in China were EVs or PHEVs.  And notice the surge in the percentage of EV sales over the last five years, from 5% to 55%.  (Just a personal note:  most analysts got this acceleration completely wrong.  Prof Ray Wills and Tony Seba got it right.  And luckily, I believed them, so I did too.)  This is a classic S-curve, but it shows no signs of flexing over, yet, though as EV sales head towards 80 or 90% of total sales, that has to be imminent.

[Data sources:  José Pontes at CleanTechnica; Prof Ray Wills, China's NBS (National Bureau of Statistics); my seasonal adjustment (tweaked X-11 variant); my smoothing, using a 13-term Henderson curve.]

China's consumers to buy 10 million plug-ins this year

 From CleanTechnica, with my charts below.

March signals the end of the low season in the Chinese EV market — due to the timing of the New Year celebrations. This year, plugins scored almost a million units in the last month of the quarter (in a 1.9-million-unit overall market). They had a 39% growth rate, a positive outcome in a total market that expanded 12% YoY, especially considering that ICE sales dropped some 76,000 units YoY in March.

ICE deliveries down, EV deliveries up — looking good….

Digging deeper into the numbers, BEVs were the fastest growing technology, going up by 51% to 646,000 units, while PHEVs grew 25% and EREVs grew 4%.

This pulls the year-to-date (YTD) tally to over 2.4 million units. So, we should see plugins end the year well above 10 million units. In China alone….

Share-wise, March saw plugin vehicles cross the 50% market share threshold, reaching 52%! Full electrics (BEVs) alone accounted for 34% of the country’s auto sales, while PHEVs had 27% share and EREVs 8%, making BEVs the best selling powertrain in China, above petrol vehicles and HEVs

This good result in March pulled the 2025 share up by three percentage points, to 48%. BEVs alone also jumped by 3% share, to 30%. Expect to see plugins above 50% and BEVs at around 33% in the first half of the year.

(Could China finish the year above 60%?)[At the current growth rate, yes!]

10 million plug-ins sold to December 2024.  And another 10 million this year.  It took 15 years to get to total cumulative sales of 10 million, and will take just one more year to get to 20!   The energy transition is really speeding up.  Note that these data do not include exports, which are growing even faster.

 

Pakistan's solar shock

From CleanTechnica

Pakistan isn’t the first country you’d expect to crash the global solar party. But by the end of 2024, it quietly rocketed into the top tier of solar adopters, importing a jaw-dropping 22 gigawatts worth of solar panels in a single year. That’s not a typo or a spreadsheet rounding error. That’s the kind of number that turns heads at IEA meetings and makes policy analysts double-check their databases. It certainly made me sit up and take notice when I first heard about what was happening in mid-2024.

It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.


To understand how improbable this cleantech surge really is, you have to go back to the beginning. Pakistan was born in blood and migration—wrenched from British India in 1947 in a Partition that triggered one of the largest and most violent population exchanges in history. Millions of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs fled across hastily drawn borders, and up to two million people didn’t survive the chaos. The new nation was split in two—West Pakistan and East Pakistan—separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory and political dysfunction. That arrangement collapsed in 1971 when East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh after a brutal civil war and military crackdown that left deep scars.

Then came the Cold War. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the launchpad for American-backed Mujahideen fighters. Guns, dollars, and militants flowed through the border for a decade, and when the Americans packed up in the early ’90s, the extremists didn’t. The U.S. came back in 2001 with another invasion, and again, Pakistan was drawn into the fire as a frontline state. For over 30 years, it was a nation perpetually reacting to someone else’s war, absorbing millions of refugees, and fending off blowback from its own intelligence games. That any sort of coordinated energy transition could emerge from that geopolitical wreckage is not just surprising—it’s remarkable.

Pakistan’s absolute greenhouse gas emissions remain modest on the global scale—roughly 490 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent as of the late 2010s—putting it well outside the top ten global emitters. But that figure masks a more nuanced story. On a per capita basis, Pakistan’s emissions hover around 2 tonnes per person, dramatically lower than the global average of over 6 tonnes and far below the 15–20 tonnes per person typical of the U.S., Canada, or Australia. It’s a similar story when you look at historical emissions: Pakistan has contributed less than 1% of cumulative global CO₂ since the Industrial Revolution.


But when measured against economic output, the picture shifts. Pakistan’s carbon intensity per unit of GDP is significantly higher than that of most developed countries—meaning it emits more carbon for each dollar of economic activity. This reflects its fossil-heavy energy mix, inefficient industrial base, and reliance on aging infrastructure. In effect, Pakistan is both under-emitting in human terms and over-emitting in economic ones—a country still trying to lift millions out of poverty without locking itself into a carbon-intensive development model. The clean tech boom now underway is a rare opportunity to shift both metrics in the right direction.

How does a country once considered a textbook fragile state leapfrog into solar hyperscale? You can’t make sense of it without going back two decades. In the early 2000s, Pakistan was better known for insurgencies and instability than infrastructure upgrades. Terror attacks were frequent, electricity shortages were the norm, and governance was, to put it kindly, patchy. Political cycles flipped with the military’s mood, floods battered the countryside, and inflation hollowed out public services. Not exactly the backdrop for a clean tech success story.

But something changed. Slowly, unevenly, Pakistan started building institutional muscle. The terrorism that plagued the country for over a decade was brought under control through a combination of military operations and negotiated truces. Civilian governments, for all their dysfunction, managed peaceful handovers of power. The technocratic class—policy analysts, engineers, civil servants—began steering the country toward energy pragmatism. It wasn’t a revolution. It was governance on hard mode, with better outcomes.


It wasn’t just Pakistan. As Kishore Mahbubani points out in Has the West Lost It?, this is part of a broader Asian playbook—one that prioritizes order, competence, and steady economic gains over ideological grandstanding. Across Asia, countries battered by conflict and colonial hangovers have been converging on a kind of strategic calm, building quietly and governing smarter. Pakistan may have taken longer to join the club, but its trajectory—fighting its way out of chaos and into functionality—is just another chapter in the region’s larger story of post-crisis, post-colonial increase in resilience.

That’s what set the stage for the current explosion in solar power. For years, Pakistan’s grid was a source of national frustration—rolling blackouts, wild tariff swings, and a chronic overreliance on imported fossil fuels. The tipping point came when utility-scale and industrial solar started making simple economic sense. With Chinese panel prices crashing through the floor and diesel generator costs spiraling out of control, even small business owners started doing the math. The answer was always the same: buy solar. Add batteries if you can afford them. Cut the grid loose.

In 2024, that decision calculus went mainstream. Import records show 22 gigawatts worth of modules flooding into the country, with many going to private-sector installations behind the meter. Warehouses, textile mills, farms—anything with a flat roof and a balance sheet. The government barely needed to nudge the market. It just removed tariffs, approved net metering, and got out of the way. Good governance.

This isn’t just a solar story, though. Wind has been building quietly in the south for years, especially in the Gharo-Jhimpir corridor. Hydropower continues to play a big role, and bagasse from the sugar industry chips in some renewable electrons too. Battery storage is the next act, mostly in the form of hybrid inverters and lithium-ion packs tucked into homes and businesses. They aren’t grid-scale yet, but they’re everywhere you’d want resilience—factories avoiding outages, households tired of flickering bulbs. The pieces are in place for a distributed energy system that doesn’t wait for the grid to catch up. Which is good, because Pakistan’s grid is not remotely ready for this volume of variable generation. Utilities are already reeling from the revenue shock as high-value customers opt out of dependence. No one likes selling electrons when your best clients are making their own. That looming utility death spiral? It’s not theoretical in Lahore or Karachi.


No clean energy narrative in 2024 is complete without a few billion dollars earmarked for electrolyzers and green ammonia export fantasies. Pakistan has joined the chorus, announcing plans for a 400 MW green hydrogen project tied to solar and wind inputs. On paper, it all looks impressive: local renewables, domestic production, value-added exports. In practice, this has all the telltale signs of falling into the hydrogen-as-energy trap. Hydrogen is a lousy carrier of energy for most end uses, with terrible round-trip efficiency and a host of infrastructure headaches. But it can make sense in industrial processes, especially for fertilizer production—something Pakistan actually needs. If policymakers keep the focus on decarbonizing ammonia and refining, rather than dreaming of hydrogen cars and home boilers, they might just avoid the detour that’s tripped up wealthier nations.

Pakistan’s electric vehicle transition is picking up momentum too, driven by a mix of foreign investment and homegrown innovation. Chinese companies have taken the lead in setting up large-scale operations, with firms like BYD announcing plans to open a production facility in Karachi and the ADM Group committing $350 million to build EV manufacturing capacity and install thousands of charging stations nationwide. These moves dovetail with Pakistan’s goal to convert 30% of all vehicles to electric by 2030.

But the real action is happening closer to the ground, where indigenous startups are rolling out electric two- and three-wheelers at a pace that could reshape urban mobility. Companies like Jolta Electric and Vlektra are assembling locally made e-motorcycles that target the country’s massive base of two-wheeler users—millions of whom rely on scooters and bikes for daily transport. With soaring petrol prices and worsening air quality in cities like Lahore and Karachi, these electric alternatives are fast becoming the obvious choice. The economics are simple: lower fuel costs, less maintenance, and in many cases, the ability to charge with rooftop solar. While car-scale EV adoption remains limited, the grassroots uptake of electric bikes and rickshaws—many of them assembled in Pakistan—is proving that the EV revolution here will likely be led from the bottom up.

All of this hardware only matters if it’s backed by credible climate policy. For a long time, Pakistan was a spectator in the global climate arena—vulnerable, poor, and preoccupied with security. But its stance shifted after joining the Paris Agreement. The initial emissions target, a 20 percent reduction from business-as-usual by 2030, was cautious and heavily conditional. Then came the 2021 update, and suddenly Pakistan was talking big: a 50 percent reduction from its projected 2030 emissions, with 15 percent of that unconditionally promised. That’s not a trivial shift. It meant serious buy-in from ministries, financing plans, and coordination across sectors.

Pakistan’s energy transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s part of a broader pivot toward climate consciousness that has taken root in both policy and politics. One of the most visible symbols of this shift is the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, an audacious reforestation campaign launched to combat deforestation, restore degraded land, and absorb carbon emissions. It builds on the earlier Billion Tree Tsunami in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was once met with skepticism but ended up exceeding planting targets and winning international praise.

Now scaled nationwide, the initiative isn’t just about trees—it’s a public signal that the country sees climate as a front-and-center issue, not a side project. In a nation hammered by floods, droughts, and record heat, this kind of program isn’t ornamental—it’s survival strategy. More importantly, it reflects a shift in how state capacity is being applied: not to suppress or control, but to regenerate. For a country that spent decades managing crises at gunpoint or through donor dependency, the sight of civil servants mobilizing for climate resilience marks a profound change. It’s not perfect—no national program this ambitious ever is—but it’s real, it’s scaled, and it’s rooted in the same quiet competence now driving Pakistan’s clean energy boom.


The real beauty of this story is how unglamorous it is. Pakistan isn’t trying to become a Silicon Valley of solar. It’s not chasing unicorn valuations or plastering press releases with blockchain buzzwords. It’s solving energy poverty with sunlight and silicon. It’s trading diesel for distributed storage. It’s moving from grid collapse to gridless competence. It’s trading petrol for electrons. And it’s doing it at a pace that should embarrass countries with ten times the GDP.

That 22 gigawatts isn’t the result of perfect governance or unlimited funds. It’s what happens when global markets make disruptive energy products that fit in containers dirt cheap. Every country should be opening their borders wide to Chinese solar, batteries and EVs. Even Pakistan gets that, so clearly no major western country would be so foolish as to close their borders instead.

This pattern plays out across the sun-belt developing world: poor electricity infrastructure, frequent black-outs, privately-owned diesel generators, all leading individuals and business to install solar.  With diesel back-up already in place, the fact the solar only works in daylight doesn't matter.  Installing solar halves your diesel bill.  And in a couple of years, batteries will start to supplant diesel.  

This chart (hat-tip to John Hanger) shows how the percentage of electricity from solar has gone up 10-fold in 6 years, from 2.5% in 2019 to 26% in 2025.  Can it continue growing this fast?  It's an S-curve, so yes, but what is the peak?  Prolly around 65-70%, since hydro and nuclear together make up 30%. So Pakistan could reach 100% carbon-free electricity within 10 years.

Source: EMBER

Brazil's EV/PHEV sales up 55%

 From CleanTechnica

EV sales in February grew by 55% year over year in Brazil. The country broke record after record. In 2024, it sold more than 100,000 EVs, making it one of the few countries worldwide to have reached that number. In February 2025, it sold over 10,000 EVs for the fifth month in a row; and for the third month in a row, Brazil achieved an EV market share of over 5% (5.4% in December, 6% in January, 5.6% in February, making it the fourth most advanced Latin American country in the path towards electrification!

As Brazil market exploded in late 2023 and early 2024, and we had outrageous headlines talking about 1,100% growth year on year (YoY), it was clear at some point growth would have to moderate somewhat. That time seems to have come now, but even so, 45% growth from a relatively high base seems like very good news, and more so as Brazil has been able to consistently maintain over 5% market share in the last few months. In an overall market just shy of 200,000 units (not including motorcycles), EV sales seem to have stabilized in the short term around 10,000 units a month.

My seasonal adjustment and smoothing
Note log scale

Brazil’s market remains heavily skewed towards PHEVs, something I’ve [i.e, Juan Mojica, not NPT] already commented on. Brazil, having bet big on flexi-fuel engines (capable of running on ethanol or ethanol-gasoline mixtures), and by far the largest country in the region as far as landmass, is naturally going to be more interested in PHEVs than the rest of Latin America.

Market share has been steadily increasing, even if the times of meteoric growth seem to be over (April 23 to January 24). My [JM's] bet, however, is on high growth returning in the near future as BYD, Chery, and GWM start churning out their BEVs and PHEVs in the coming months.

Brazil also has a category for “flexi-fuel HEVs,” which even if not EVs by any metric, could still make a significant difference as far as oil consumption goes. However, the best-case scenario for ethanol is to be paired with PHEVs and long-range EREVs, as that would allow for electric-only use in the cities (powered by Brazil’s increasingly clean generation) and for ethanol use in hyper-efficient powertrains during longer trips.

My calculations.  Total car registrations from Anfavea

 [Read more here]   Note how BYD and Chinese brands in general dominate the EV/PHEV market, which would be typical of poorer countries, where Teslas are too expensive.  Moral of the story:  EV prices are no longer an issue, at least where Chinese brands dominate.

EVs plus PHEVs now 28% of world new car sales

 From CleanTechnica

Plugin Vehicles Grew to a Record 1.84 Million Units in November!

Global plugin vehicle registrations were up 32% in November 2024 compared to November 2023. There were 1.84 million registrations, which is a new record month, the 3rd in a row. EVs were up by 22% YoY (year over year), to a record 1.2 million units. Plugin hybrids did even better, jumping 55% YoY, its 6th record month in a row!

In the end, plugins represented 28% share of the overall auto market in November (18% BEV share alone).

Year to date, plugin electric vehicle market share was up to 21% (14% BEV), or 15.3 million units (of which 9.6 million were BEVs). Add in the 14% market share of plugless hybrids, and over one third of all car sales in the world have some kind of electrification!

Full electric vehicles (BEVs) represented 64% of plugin registrations in November, slightly above the year-to-date average (63%).

Taking a closer look, if we remove China from the November tally, plugin sales were up a more moderate 7% YoY, but instead of PHEVs pulling the numbers up, it’s pure electrics doing so. BEVs grew by 9% YoY outside of China, while plugin hybrids grew by just 2%.

So, when people say that “EV sales are falling” and “People don’t want EVs,” they are pushing a deceiving narrative, BUT …

It is true that, if we remove the Chinese market, and Chinese EV makers in general, from the picture, numbers are much more sluggish, especially on the PHEV side. So, maybe the reality is closer to this: while China is gaining scale in the EV game, the others are stalling. Most of the conquest/growth sales are going to Chinese EV makers, leaving legacy OEMs and Tesla behind.

Proof of this trend is the increasing share of EV sales happening in China. In November, that market represented over 70% of global sales.

The chart below is constructed from a variety of sources.  I have seasonally adjusted and smoothed the data.  The time series is plotted using a logarithmic scale, which shows a constant growth rate as a straight line.

My seasonal adjustment; smoothed using 13-term Henderson Curve.

Growth rates have slowed over the last year, in the US and Europe, but not in China.  European sales fell because Germany removed a sales incentive for EVs, and because of a protective import tax placed on imported EVs (Chinese EVs/PHEVs are the cheapest in the world.)  Import tariffs in the US had a similar effect.   In addition, in both markets Tesla sales were down, and since they have been such a large percentage of the total market, this pulled down total sales.

The chart below shows the YoY percentage change in smoothed sales.  There is some tentative sign that sales are picking up.

7 months ago, EVs & PHEVs made up just 18% of the global market.  At the current 33% per annum growth rate, the 28% EV/PHEV market share will reach 37% next year, and 50% the year after.  But that growth rate depends on falling prices in Europe and the USA, and given the ramped up protectionism, prices aren't likely to decline.  However, EV sales outside the US and Europe are booming.  For example, EV/PHEV sales were up 133% in Brazil in 2024, Colombia 159%.  And Europe's EV/PHEV sales do appear to be recovering from the price shock (see my next piece)

Calculated from my seasonally adjustment of CleanTechnica's data

Nuclear is usually late and over-budget

I found this chart in an article by Michael Barnard on CleanTechnica

The likelihood of the enormous capacities of wind and solar successfully getting built on time [in China], on budget and hitting benefits targets is immensely higher than that of this [Chinese] nuclear build out. That’s a key learning of Professor Bent Flyvbjerg and team from their global dataset of megaprojects, something that Flyvbjerg has been building since the late 1990s and is now over 16,000 strong, with over 150 nuclear generation projects.

Nuclear reactors have lots of risks that, if they trigger, cause very significant time and budget overruns. Wind and solar have very few risks that cause significant time and budget overruns if they occur. The results are clear in the data. If you want to hit targets and achieve benefits, build wind and solar. China is doing that incredibly well.

China added 274 GW of wind and solar capacity to their grid in 2023. They are on track to build a lot more than that for each of the next seven years. The chart at the top of this article is just going to get worse and worse for nuclear as its line gets flatter and flatter to allow wind, solar and water generation additions to fit into it vertically.

While China has a lot of nuclear in construction and a bunch more approved, that’s not the takeaway that other jurisdictions should learn from its energy efforts. If anything, there are three lessons: 

One, that wind and solar are the right choice for the vast majority of jurisdictions. 

Two, that China’s failures to stick to a single proven design for nuclear and build lots of it are a warning related to national and regional nuclear programs. 

Three, that unless a country is big enough and rich enough to build dozens of identical reactors as well as to achieve the rest of the conditions of success, or is able to join a bunch of other countries to achieve critical mass with a guarantee of singularity of design and the rest of the success criteria, nuclear shouldn’t be on the energy policy agenda.

[You can read the whole article here]

Should we all just drive a plug-in hybrid and be happy?

M20A-FXS 2.0-liter in-line 4-cylinder engine and Plug-in Hybrid set up in right-hand drive orientation. (Photo supplied by Toyota Motors Corp., Japan)

From Steve Hanley at CleanTechnica

I have been writing about the EV revolution for well over a decade now. When I started, battery-electric cars were few and far between. The BMW i3 was the eighth wonder of the modern world, and the Nissan LEAF was just beginning to attract buyers. In 2008, the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid appeared and ignited the debate about which was better, a fully electric car or one that had both an engine and a battery? The Volt seemed the perfect answer for a time when there were few if any public chargers available. No charger? No problem. Let the gasoline engine do the work until you could plug in somewhere, usually at home.

Then along came the Tesla Model 3 and later the Model Y. Coupled with the outstanding Tesla Supercharger network, drivers of electric cars could now go pretty much anywhere they wanted without worrying about running out of battery power. Volkswagen pivoted from a purveyor of diesel dreams to an electric car proponent. Soon it was joined by Mercedes, BMW, Ford, GM, a reluctant Stellantis, and the Hyundai Motor Group, all promising they would build massive new factories to supply the world with battery-electric cars. The Volt was taken out of production and replaced by the fully electric Bolt and it seemed the sun had set on plug-in hybrid cars.

There are two kinds of PHEVS, series and parallel, and most consumers have little idea what the difference is between the two. In a parallel hybrid, both the battery and the engine power the wheels. Think of the standard Toyota Prius. The engine in that car runs almost constantly to move the car forward from a stop, to climb hills, or to pass another car. In a series hybrid, the engine is simply a generator to keep the battery charged or to power the electric motor. When you mash the throttle, the engine doesn’t leap into action. The car operates very much like a true battery-electric car until the battery is depleted, and then the engine turns on to supply electricity to the electric motor.

Driving in a parallel plug-in hybrid feels very similar to driving in a conventional car. There is the same engine sound much of the time and the same gear changes from the transmission. It’s not uncommon for people to wonder what all the extra hybrid bits and pieces are for. It drives like a normal car, it shifts like a normal car, and it brakes like a normal car. The only difference is an increase in fuel economy in city driving.

Driving a series plug-in hybrid, which some call an extended range hybrid, feels like driving an electric car most of the time. There is the same seamless acceleration, the same regenerative braking, and the same lack of a transmission always hunting for the correct gear. For those who don’t drive long distances every day and plug in each night, it is exactly like driving a battery powered car except any lingering concerns about range anxiety are eliminated.

Just under a third of plug-in hybrid sales in China last year were extended range plug-in hybrid vehicles, similar to the original Chevy Volt. They had an average range of 127 kilometers last year and the trend in China is for longer ranges with each new model year. Chinese customers simply won’t tolerate plug-in hybrids that can only travel 50 km or less on batteries alone, which is the norm for plug-in offerings in Europe and North America. BYD recently touted a new plug-in hybrid model it says can drive for a total of 2100 km on a combination of battery power and onboard range extender engine.

Globally, the plug-in hybrid sector has enjoyed the highest compound annual growth rate — +65% — over the last five years, according to Bloomberg. Sales in China are primarily responsible for that increase. The CAGR for battery-electric cars during the same period was +57% and for conventional hybrids +18%. While total sales of battery-electric cars globally are more than double those of plug-in hybrid vehicles, PHEV sales were almost as high as conventional hybrids last year.

One big improvement in plug-in hybrid offerings, especially in China, is the ability to use DC fast chargers to replenish the batteries, which are getting larger in order to increase how far the cars can drive on battery power alone. Previously, plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt were normally charged by plugging into a conventional wall outlet and waiting hours for the process to finish. Now many plug-in hybrid drivers are able to take advantage of fast chargers so they will spend more time driving on electrons and less time driving on molecules.

When it comes to prices, there is China and then there is the rest of the world. Bloomberg says the average prices of a plug-in hybrid in China have fallen steadily in the last five years, taking them from the most expensive option to being fully cost competitive with gasoline and battery-electric models. In the US, by comparison, they are now the most expensive drivetrain option, costing around $20,000 more than the models available in China.

Why there would be such a disparity between prices in China and prices in North America is unclear, but volume undoubtedly has something to do with it. American manufacturers are offering few plug-in hybrid models, although General Motors claims it will have several new PHEV models for sale in a few years. The new US tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles may do a wonderful job of insulating American automakers from competition by Chinese companies, but they also mean American consumers will face higher prices for electric and plug-in hybrid cars for years to come. Tariffs, in most cases, are a double-edged sword.

Bloomberg suggests the surge in interest about plug-in hybrid technology may be here to stay, or a blip on the radar screen. The determining factor will be how often they are driven in electric-only mode. BNEF analyzed all the research available on this topic over the last decade and the results are mixed. For private owners, studies found between 26% and 54% of all kilometers driven in PHEVs were done in electric mode. Some of the largest studies, involving millions of cars in China, were toward the higher end of that range.

For company cars, which are a common business perk for executives in Europe, the story is much different. In that situation, BNEF found the electric motor was used exclusively just 11% to 24% of the time. That is mostly because many of the drivers of company cars do not pay the fuel costs for their vehicles, which means they have little incentive to plug those cars in at the end of the day. That’s where policies in one area — company cars — may have negative effects in another area — reducing emissions from transportation.

Bloomberg says it is not clear what cars the buyers of plug-in hybrid vehicles would have bought if they had not purchased a PHEV. The EV purist view is that every plug-in hybrid purchased is a missed opportunity from an emissions and oil demand-reduction point of view. But if those buyers were never going to purchase a battery-electric car anyway, then buying a plug-in hybrid is a net positive from an emissions point of view. The latest trend suggests that as plug-in hybrid technology improves, more consumers are considering a PHEV.


Most CleanTechnica readers believe a plug-in hybrid is a poor choice. Studies show they have the highest number of vehicle fires and mechanical issues, largely because they have two powertrains for things to go wrong with. They also are costly in North America and Europe, which begs the question of whether more people would consider purchasing one if they cost the same as a normal car, as is the case in China. For those of you who still support the EV revolution, there is a ray of sunshine in the latest BNEF report.

It finds that battery-electric cars will continue to increase their market share to around 33% globally by 2030 and nearly 60% by 2035, so the trend is up strongly despite distractions like hybrids, plug-in hybrids, tariffs, and the like. It estimates plug-in hybrid sales may get to about 10% of the new car market before falling out of favor as battery prices decline, making battery-electric cars more affordable. Are the folks at Bloomberg on target? “We’ll see,” said the Zen master.

Plug-in hybrids eliminate range anxiety, and (if they're properly used) cut emissions significantly.  On the other hand, they have two engines.  As more and more EV chargers get installed, the demand for plug-in hybrids will prolly decline.

EVs and PHEVs now 18% of world car sales

From CleanTechnica

Global plugin vehicle registrations were up 25% in April 2024 compared to April 2023. There were 1.2 million registrations. BEVs were up by 14% YoY, while plugin hybrids jumped 51% YoY.

In the end, plugins represented 18% share of the overall auto market (12% BEV share alone). This means that the global automotive market remains in the Electric Disruption Zone.

Year to date, plugin electric vehicle market share was up by 1%, to 17% (11% BEV).

Full electric vehicles (BEVs) represented 65% of plugin registrations in April, pulling the year-to-date tally to 64% share.

Globally, BYD is now way ahead of Tesla with a 20.7% market share, compared with Tesla's 7.6% (though Tesla makes no plug-in hybrids).  Part of the reason for the slowing growth shown in the chart below is because Tesla's sales are going backwards.  Partly it's because EV sales in Europe have temporarily stopped growing, which in turn is partly due to Germany cancelling all EV buying incentives.    Over the last 12 months, Germany made up 27% of Europe's car registrations.  Over 2021 & 2022, Europe's EV/PHEV sales grew by 180%, so this slow-down is perhaps to be expected.  

The collapse in battery costs will drive EV costs lower, and sales will pick up.  Growth rates fell in 2019 and 2020, when China removed EV incentives and Covid lockdowns crushed sales, but they recovered strongly in 2021 and 2022.  EV/PHEV sales in China have already started to accelerate again, so I feel reasonably confident forecasting a 30% per annum growth rate for the next couple of years.   

 In 2017, when EV/PHEV sales were just 2% of global car sales, I forecast that EV/PHEV car sales would reach 40% of global car sales this year.  But Covid delayed that schedule by a couple of years.   And US and European tariffs on EVs and batteries will also slow the transition down some more.  We prolly won't reach 40% for another two and a half years (extrapolating a 30% per annum growth rate).  On the other hand, most analysts were forecasting much lower numbers, because they were extrapolating the trend linearly, instead of exponentially. 

For legacy car makers, this point is key: EV growth was exponential, and their puny forecasts meant they kept on scrambling to catch up.  BYD is the world's biggest EV/PHEV manufacturer.  It's just produced an EV costing less than US$10,000.  An EV this cheap will accelerate EV take up.  S-curves rule.   For me, I didn't allow for Covid.  I'll try harder next time.

China plug-in share reaches 44%

 From CleanTechnica

 

Plugin vehicles are all the rage in the Chinese auto market, with plugins scoring 703,000 sales (in a 1.6-million-unit overall market). That’s up 27% year over year (YoY).

Looking deeper at the numbers, BEVs were up 10%, while PHEVs did even better, jumping 65% in April. Breaking down plugin sales by powertrain, BEVs had 59% of sales, below this year’s average of 65%, proving the rising popularity of plugin hybrids in this market.

The year-to-date (YTD) tally is around 2.5 million units, a significant rise over the 1.9 million in the same period of 2023.

Share-wise, April saw plugin vehicles hit 44% market share! Full electrics (BEVs) alone accounted for 26% of the country’s auto sales. This pulled the 2024 share also to 40% (26% BEV), and with the market still with plenty of room for growth, the first half of the year should end above 40%. (And maybe above 50% by year end?) [At this growth rate, EV/PHEVs will reach 100% market share with 3 years. 2027!!!!]

China's car market is roughly 1/3 of the global car market. The way China goes will drive the way the world goes, even though the USA and Europe impose protective tariffs. CATL's reduction in li-ion battery pack costs to US$56/kWh and the introduction of na-ion (sodium-ion) battery packs at around US$40/kWh (in 2020 battery pack costs were $160/kWh, meaning the cost of a typical battery pack has fallen from US$10,000 to $2,400), plus aggressive competition, will drive down down EV and PHEV prices and drive up the market share, which is likely to reach 100% long before 2035.

Growth in the US and Europe is likely to pause for a year or two, unfortunately, because of protective tariffs. But a new Tesla giga-factory in Indonesia, and probably also India, shows how the shift will happen. Legacy carmakers in Europe and the USA will go on losing market share, and eventually they and the politicians will be forced to face up to reality.

EV sales growth in China slowed last year because of the state of the economy. They have picked up this year as can be seen in the chart, but if, as I believe, growth will slow again later this year, EV sales growth will likely slow. However EV/PHEV market share will continue to rise.  In January 2014, EV sales in China, seasonally adjusted, were 3760; in April this year 914,000.   

My seasonal adjustment; smoothed using a 13-term Henderson curve.

Oh, and need I mention the dread words, "peak oil"?

EVs/PHEVs/HEVs now 25% of global car sales

 From CleanTechnica

Global plugin vehicle registrations were up 41% in July 2023 compared to July 2022, rising to 1,104,00 units. In the end, plugins represented 16% share of the overall auto market (11% BEV share alone). This means that the global automotive market is firmly in the Electric Disruption Zone. Add close to 900,000 units coming from plugless hybrids and we have one quarter of global registrations having some form of electrification!

Year to date, plugin electric vehicle market share was stable at 15% (10% BEV).

Full electric vehicles (BEVs) represented 69% of plugin registrations in July, keeping the year-to-date tally at 70% share.

Only two legacy manufacturers made it into the list of top 20 models sold globally for the month, and the dominant manufacturers were BYD and Tesla.   The legacy car-makers are being left in the dust.

The chart below shows global EV + PHEV (plug-in hybrid) sales using the original (i.e., not seasonally adjusted) data from InsideEVs and CleanTechnica.  I've seasonally adjusted and smoothed the underlying data. Note that the chart has been plotted using a log scale.   In January 2014, global EV/PHEV car sales were 14,512.  In July this year, monthly sales were 1,152,657 on a trend basis.   Ponder that for a moment.

In Q1, EVs and PHEVs made up +-16.9% of global car sales (my calculations; I'm busy improving my global car sales data); in 2018 (just 5 years ago!) they made up 2.9%.   The S-curve continues to flex up.  

In 2017, I forecast that EV/PHEV sales would make up 22.5% of total car sales; we'll reach that by the end of this year.  (My forecast then was that we'd reach 100% by 2031, which still seems likely.)  I estimated that by this point, the annual decline in petrol (gasoline) sales would be 3.7% as the ICEV car fleet was replaced by EVs/PHEVs.  The same can't be said about diesel, as we're only just at the beginning of the switch-over to electric in the heavy-duty lorry sector.  In 2020, 48.6% of oil produced was used for road transport in the OECD, but that excludes China, one third of the world's car sales, where the EV revolution is much further advanced.  Peak oil, anyone?

Sulphur-selenium solid state battery

There is a ferment of new and advancing technology in batteries. Some will go on to be commercially successful; others will not.



From CleanTechnica

Most of us have little idea what NASA — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — has been doing since the Apollo moon missions ended. We know it is responsible for Tang and space blankets, but what has it done for us lately?

It turns out, the “aeronautics” part of its mission includes advances in airplanes, and that means finding alternatives to conventional fuels that will leave fewer emissions behind during flight. As any EV advocate knows, vehicles powered by batteries and electricity are far more efficient than conventional cars powered by last century internal combustion technology. But batteries are heavy and bulky — two words that aeronautical engineers never want to hear.

But what if batteries had two or three times more power than today’s best lithium-ion batteries? And what if they also had no liquid or semi-liquid electrolyte inside that could burst into flames? “Fire” and “airplane” are two words that should never be used in the same sentence.

The promise of battery-powered flight is very much on the minds of airline executives who are under pressure to slash emissions from their flights. It also fires the imagination of those who want to bring air taxis into commercial use. The latest news from NASA should be of interest to both groups.

For years, NASA has been researching battery-powered flight as part of its Solid-state Architecture Batteries for Enhanced Rechargeability and Safety program. “SABERS continues to exceed its goals,” said Rocco Viggiano, principal investigator for SABERS at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland in a press release last year. “We’re starting to approach this new frontier of battery research that could do so much more than lithium-ion batteries can. The possibilities are pretty incredible.”

Viggiano says a battery is like a bucket that stores energy. More energy storage is like having a larger bucket. NASA says its sulfur selenium prototype battery has an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, which is about double that of conventional lithium-ion batteries.

But aircraft need enormous amounts of power to get off the ground. Until recently, lithium-ion batteries were able to discharge their stored power much more quickly than solid-state batteries could. Now the SABERS researchers, with help from partners at Georgia Tech, have found a way to make their solid-state batteries discharge ten times faster than when the research started. Then they achieved another five-fold increase after that. So now they have a larger bucket that can be emptied rapidly when needed.

That bucket is also up to 40% lighter because of more innovations discovered by the SABERS team. Their sulfur selenium battery cells can be stacked one on top of the other with no casing around them. Eliminating the casing around individual cells means more energy storage within a given amount of space — a huge advantage when trying to fit batteries into the structure of an aircraft. It also means the cooling systems for the cells can be smaller and lighter.

There are other advantages as well. The massive amounts of energy needed at the beginning of any flight can cause temperatures inside battery cells to spike. The solid-state sulfur selenium batteries from NASA are able to withstand temperatures twice as hot as conventional lithium-ion batteries. In addition, they are less affected by changes in pressure, which occur rapidly after takeoff and while landing. So far, it’s all good news for electric flight advocates.

Are there any drawbacks? Cost is a big factor. And the testing protocols before new components get approved for use in commercial aircraft are far more rigorous than they are for ordinary vehicles.

BYD reaches 900K BEV sales in 2022

From CleanTechnica

BYD has released its December and full-year 2022 sales numbers, and they are massive. 

Overall, in 2022, BYD sold 911,140 pure electric vehicles. Tesla was the first automaker to surpass 1 million BEV [battery electric vehicles, or EVs] sales in a year, scoring 1.31 million sales in 2022, but BYD is not that far behind and will surely be the second automaker to do so.

Looking at all plugin vehicles, which are now the only vehicles BYD produces, the company had 1,863,494 sales in 2022. Crunching the numbers, that means 49% of BYD’s 2022 “new energy vehicle” (NEV) sales were BEV sales.

BYD’s NEV sales were up 209% in 2022, and its BEV sales were up 184%. That’s quite a year for BYD!

In the month of December alone, BYD sold 235,197 plugin vehicles, a new monthly record for the company. That was also the 4th month in a row in which BYD sold more than 200,000 plugin vehicles. If you multiply the December total by 12, a crude way of extrapolating an annual forecast for 2023, you get 2.82 million sales. If you assume 50% are BEV sales, you get 1.41 million sales — a bit more than Tesla delivered in 2022.

Zimbabwe micro-grids

Harare, Zimbabwe

From CleanTechnica

For the last couple of decades, Zimbabweans have been subjected to electricity rationing due to several reasons, such as frequent droughts affecting hydropower generation and regular breakdowns at the country’s aging coal power plants. This means most businesses operating in the commercial and industrial sector as well as in the mining and agricultural sectors generally have diesel back-up generators (DGs).

As the price of solar panels dropped significantly over the last decade, more firms in these sectors started to install solar PV onsite to complement the grid. Most of these installations are simple grid-tied solutions, meaning that they would automatically switch off when there is a grid power outage. To allow the safe operation of onsite solar in island mode during a power cut, some firms have started integrating their PV plants with their existing or new diesel back-up generators. In this mode, the PV works with the DGs and helps reduce the diesel usage.

Technological advancements in the battery storage sector and the subsequent price reductions have now made the business case for incorporating battery storage more appealing. We are starting to see some firms adopting battery storage. Going forward, this means that we will start to see more of these grid connected microgrids that have solar PV, battery storage, and diesel back-up generators. To unlock the full potential of these microgrids, looking at them independently behind the meter initially, and then in the next phase, as aggregated distributed energy resources acting as virtual power plants, smart energy management systems backed by AI powered forecasts, monitoring, analytics and control, will help underpin the value proposition of these grid-edge solutions.

NeedEnergy, an energy-tech startup that leverages data, innovation, and modern technology relevant to the provision of sustainable and clean energy solutions, wants to lead the drive to get businesses in Zimbabwe to adopt technologies and platforms that will enable Zimbabwe to get closer to the grid edge.

After successfully completing a number of trials with several firms in Zimbabwe over the past 2 years, NeedEnergy, together with Inno-Tech, a local solar engineering, construction, and procurement company (EPC) led by Founder Richard Werrett, have this week launched their first commercial project. They have deployed a 30 kW PV plant coupled with 60 kWh LFP battery storage [given solar capacity factors, that's about 4 hours of storage]in a grid-tied hybrid microgrid operating at the edge of the grid in a first for Zimbabwe. A 60 KVA diesel generator is also part of the microgrid. The installation is at a new small shopping center in the upmarket Borrowdale area, in Harare.

The solar microgrid is currently meeting 100% of the load demand and there are intentions to further scale the microgrid to a 60 kW/120 kWh system as more tenants take up shop space at the new small shopping center. An English-style pub is also due to open at the shopping center soon. The owner of the shopping center said he wanted to incorporate solar, battery storage, and cutting edge energy management systems from the get-go as an example for other developers to follow. He has even installed high temperature heat pumps for several tenants, including the hair salon that uses a lot of hot water.

Zimbabwe is one of the few places in the region that allows and promotes net metering. The new shopping center is looking to join in on the net metering and unlock more value from the microgrid. They have applied for this and are in the queue. With several sites in the area looking to install similar microgrids as well as advanced microgrid management systems, NeedEnergy understands that it may as well be the first to take advantage of this and is ready to deploy the first virtual power plant in Zimbabwe in this neighborhood. It will be one of the few VPPs in the region as it brings these capabilities to the microgrids through its platform.

Load shedding is happening throughout Southern Africa, but is also a serious problem in other countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan.   Allowing private businesses and farms to use net metering to add their surplus electricity to the grid is an innovative way to reduce blackouts.  Diesel-powered backup is normally much more expensive than grid electricity, and enterprises only use it as a last resort.  They won't be feeding diesel-generated power into the grid. But they will feed surplus electricity from solar panels into the grid.  Each micro-grid will produce more electricity than it needs, and the surplus will be available for others.   Each set of rooftop solar panels produces only relatively small quantities of electricity, but thousands add up:  in South Australia, for example, rooftop solar provides nearly 20% of total electricity demand.