THE Xuejiadao Electric Bus Charging Station, the biggest of its kind in the world, started trial operation July 11.

    The station located at Huangdao Exit of Jiaozhou Bay Undersea Tunnel was completed in June.

    The EV charging station with an investment of 290 million yuan will provide battery recharging and replacement services to a total of 280 electric buses to be put into service in the city.

    With a monitoring system in place, the station will trace the buses and replace their batteries automatically. It will take only 6-8 minutes to replace the battery set of a bus.

    All the batteries will be rented to bus owners so that they won’t worry about the high cost of buying them. And all the batteries will be maintained and rotated in use by the station so that they can have longer life spans.

    “Promoting the use of electric vehicles will benefit our society,” said an unnamed official with the Qingdao branch of the State Grid Corporation of China.

    Some 200 electric buses expected to be running in Huangdao by 2014 will reduce about 15,700 tons of carbon emission each year. If Qingdao reaches its target of having 13,000 electric vehicles running on its roads by the end of 2015, 186,000 tons of carbon emission can be reduced each year. (Chen Ting, Lin Gang)