November 5, 2021: A bombshell announcement by Mark Lu, from the Taiwanese Industrial Technology Research Institute, that China is on the brink of banning lead-acid batteries for e-bikes, could have major implications not just for battery manufacturers but for the lead, zinc and silver smelting industries, ABC co-organizer Mark Stevenson said at the conference.

Low-speed electric vehicles are also being considered for a lead battery ban, Lu said in his presentation to delegates on Thursday, although any regulation was still at a draft stage.

“As far as I know, they will be banned for E-bikes in 2022,” said Lu. “With regard to low-speed vehicles it’s still a draft regulation and hasn’t been implemented so there may be some negotiation space for lead acid batteries.

“It seems like these may be kept for some years. But with E-bikes as far as I know they will be directly blocked from 2022.”

According to a Bloomberg report in April, there are around 300 million electric bikes in China now — and if the Chinese state-owned news medium Xinhua is correct and the number increases by 30 million a year, this will have major implications for the lead battery industry.

In Leoch chairman Dong Li’s presentation today, he said E-bikes made up 90% of the lead battery market in the motive power sector and was worth $9.6 billion a year.

“Our understanding or feedback from our members and some of our colleagues on the ground in China is that that’s still under discussion, and it’s not a done deal yet,” said Alistair Davidson, managing director of the Consortium for Battery Innovation.

“So there’s still a possibility of pushing off that restriction in the same way that we’ve been doing similar things in Europe.

“We get mixed messages about the E-bike market with some forecasters predicting that it’s going to fall off a cliff, and there’s going to be a big switch from lead to lithium batteries, with other forecasters painting a much more positive message.  These are saying that lead batteries will continue to take a huge portion of the E-bike market in China and that there’s a lot of growth opportunities in areas such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and southeast Asia.

“For ourselves, we are erring on the side of more positivity, our members are still developing new batteries, there’s been research going on for lead batteries for E-bikes and we think it could still be a growth opportunity or certainly a large market for lead batteries, but we have to be aware that there are still these restrictions hovering over us.”

Lu intimated that if the regulation did come in, lead batteries in existing E-bikes might have to be swapped for lithium ones.

“Advertising it as a drop-in is a little bit of a stretch,” said technical head of CBI Matt Raiford. “There are things like charging infrastructure, the actual connections in some of the electrical system on the bike itself – all of these things need to be considered for a different battery. There’s also the supply chain concerns related to switching over hundreds of millions of batteries in one fell swoop.”

Although Lu said a ban on lead batteries for low-speed electric vehicles had not been implemented yet, in March the news agency Reuters said regulators at a meeting in Tianjin had drafted documents with the ban in place.

Quoting a post on the China Automotive Technology and Research Center’s website, it said the decision had been made but not confirmed by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Reprinted from:https://www.batteriesinternational.com/2021/11/05/china-could-move-to-ban-lead-batteries-for-e-bikes/(If there is any infringement liability, please inform us in time, we will delete the content immediately, thank you.)