Thirty battery-powered motorbikes that a Japanese firm provided for trial research with normal bikes - Photo: Courtesy of ECC-HCMC

Battery-powered bikes will help save as much as 90% in gasoline costs compared to normal motorbikes but it is not easy to replace bikes running on petrol, heard a seminar in HCMC on Thursday.

At the seminar on greenhouse gas emission reduction via usage of electric bikes, Huynh Kim Tuoc, director of HCMC Energy Conservation Center (ECC-HCMC), presented comparison indicators between battery-powered and normal bikes.

A survey of 100 households using motorbikes in HCMC shows that traveling 30-50 kilometers consumes one liter of gasoline on average, he said.

Meanwhile, each battery-powered bike running 26-30 kilometers consumes an average of one kW. With the current fuel price, a normal bike costs VND544 for a kilometer, while electric vehicles only cost VND43.1 a kilometer. Notably, motorbikes discharge 2.297 kilos of carbon dioxide with one liter of fuel while battery-powered bikes discharge a mere 0.5764 kilos of carbon dioxide per kWh.

As such, using battery-powered motorbikes helps save up to 90% in expense in comparison with vehicles running on fuel, while carbon dioxide emissions of electric vehicles are lowered by 75% compared to normal bikes.

According to Tran Anh Duong, deputy head of the environment department under the Ministry of Transport, as Vietnam is involved in a few international conventions, the local transport industry needs to gradually shift to using vehicles running on clean fuels in the next few years.

Tomomichi Hattori, director of Japan’s Myclimate Company, noticed huge potential for using battery-powered bikes in Vietnam. Recent research of Honda revealed that there are about 25 million motorbikes in circulation at present, with almost every family owning one. Given the current poor infrastructure, local demand for motorbikes is expected to remain high in years to come.

Despite the good points of the battery-powered vehicle, many experts attending the seminar insist it is too difficult for locals to use these types of bikes.

Speaking with the Daily on the sidelines of the seminar, a lecturer of the HCMC University of Technology who declined to be named said it was easy for battery-powered bikes to come a cropper in flood-hit areas citywide. This kind of vehicle is very pricey as well, at around US$4,000 a unit, and it will take up to four hours to charge its power for only one-hour of travel, he noted.

The Saigon Times Daily