Technological direction prediction for battery electric bus under influence of China's new subsidy scheme

Abstract

Battery electric buses (BEBs) play a very important role of reducing urban tailpipe emissions in transportation sector for China. The national strong incentive policies place China at the forefront of the BEBs' market in the world. However, challenges are even more severe owing to the negative effects of national subsidies on the BEBs industry and technologies’ option. The abovementioned problems indicate that the subsidy mechanism is not scientific and systematic. Therefore, this research focus on the comprehensive evaluating method of addressing the inner influencing principle of technological specification mentioned in new subsidy scheme on the technological development direction of BEBs. The evaluation indicators in the method include cost-benefit and electricity consumption rate and for different size BEBs. The scenario of maximum subsidy obtaining target based on the optimal install battery estimation is set up; then, the potential direction of the BEBs market penetration was investigated. The cost-benefit and energy consumption estimating models are set up to examine the economics of all size BEBs and the difference between BEBs and equivalent conventional bus. Furthermore, the potential positive and negative effects of the technological requirements in the subsidy scheme are investigated The results show that normal-charging BEBs, the market for light-duty BEBs will shrink greatly owing to significant reduction in the subsidy amounts. However, the market penetration of 12 m BEB will increase significantly. LFP batteries will dominate the normal-charging heavy-duty BEB market in near and medium term, but NCM–type traction batteries will gradually be dominating the energy storage market for normal-charging BEBs owing to increasing demands in terms of the energy density of traction batteries. However, the market penetration of fast-charging-type BEBs will growth more rapidly than ever before due to the great increasing in its cost-benefit.