It is not a fantasy. It is here, today, in many parts of the world. Sure, not ALL models, sure, not ALL regions and countries, but China and Europe is seeing it, and others are starting to see it as well. The parity just hasn’t reached the US yet.
And of course I mean in the same segment and comparable models. You’re obviously not getting a Cybertruck at the price of a Honda Civic.
Why not both? And no, it will be more like 20 kWh (or the EV battery) and I will give you a breakdown of what is going on in a couple of days. Patience, I need to get off work first
One thing to keep in mind though is that 98% of all minerals going into a battery can be recovered via recycling, but burnt fuel can never be recovered.
i love these conversations. people don’t know the majority of the US power grid is 100 years old. or that there are vast stretches of 100’s of miles of region with no electric infrastructure at all. or that 98% of the transport trucks are more than 30 years old. how bout our railways?
the ICE engine will be the MAJORITY use probably into 2050 in some regions. but there is also an intermediate step that i think will take off. do you know Topsy the elephant?
on solar specifically, it is also not a perfect solution out here, or wind. but again mostly due to the vast stretches of nothing and the difficulty in getting maintenance people in and out. there is more wind farms out here than solar, but it is still only a small percentage of the grid.
Just like nuclear material, it can be a force of good, or it could be a mass destruction weapon. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, but it should be an open process and most importantly, openly auditable. It’s not as easy as hiring space x or blackrock to make a satellite and send it to space, just because they have the capabilities.
Mobile operations usually involve stealth. Having a massive beam of light or other forms of radiation pinpointing your location goes against the whole concept of mobility. Even if you switch from visible or infrared laser to radio, it can still be spotted with pretty cheap devices. I could maybe see it in situations like using a massive railgun (which the US navy has): have on-board capacitors charged and ready, fire your first shot, then beam it up Scotty, to give more charges (so more shots). If you already fired a shot, you’ve kinda given away your location. But these massive warships and submarines already have nuclear reactors on-board, so for marine applications, the power beam would be redundant, but in a bad way.
For terrestrial combat, you have less options for massive installations. Sure, you can do a makeshift military base and have power delivered via some rad beams (pun intended), but just like before, your location / base of operation is going to be known. If that’s a problem, it’s not a good application. There might be cases where that’s not a problem (idk, frontal attack?), but I don’t think those are so frequent to not have stealthier alternatives.
Look up the Law of Comparative Advantage.
@ThisMightBeAFish I don’t disagree with most of what you said, but there’s a few points where I do.
If you read a little solarpunk “fantasy,” you can see how old technology that is somewhat “inconvenient” is actually way more sustainable. I’m actually thinking of changing my future plans to have a lower battery capacity. I’m worried mostly about my fridge and router, but my router can run off of a USB portable battery, which is cheap and easy to replace.
You don’t even need a battery to run your fridge. Just good ol’ thermal mass, in the form of frozen water, in a fridge it can help keep it running the whole night, as a pseudo-battery. You’re literally “charging” water with “cold” (by freezing it) and it trickle-discharges the whole night. Fridge0 can run for a few days with barely any sun, if you eventually get some sunlight. Looking up its stats, it has run for a total of an hour in 30 days.
Solarpunk people are kinda the new-age hippies, but they have some crazy good ideas. In Africa (I think it was Nigeria?), there’s a village that uses evaporative cooling to keep their tomatoes fresh. And some random French site called LowTechLabs had a demo of a clay pot within a clay pot, filled with sand in-between the walls and water (just like the big model from Africa) to help you keep your vegetables cooler, without having to put them in the fridge.
I find it very sad that people have become so dependent on external factors like the grid, which can stop at any time, which basically enslave them.
Because of their dependency on imports. Imagine if it wasn’t just a political sanction from the global policestate, but just that suddenly Russia ran out of gas (sure, unfeasible, but it can happen). People would’ve suffered the same and would’ve had to change energy sources just as well.
Instead, if they were less enslaved to their modern-day conveniences, like fully heated houses, they wouldn’t have to pay as much for utilities, as they have to now. The global “energy crisis” is self-made.
Solar power is literally a way for people to take back control into their own hands.
I think you mean egotistic.
Do you think that all the people who are off-grid would just let the world burn? Check out stories from Texas a few years back when the grid shut people off during a winter storm. Many people were coming together, sharing a large space and keeping each other warm. Sure, there’s a limit to how many lives you can save in such a situation and you should be picky about who you choose to help, but many people in that situation helped others nonetheless.
If I was off-grid and my neighbor was out of grid power for a prolonged period, I would gladly help move the fridge to my place (or its contents if I have space in mine). If a lot of people had that problem and I had enough solar generation, I would stop my AC and give everyone extension cords up the the electrical limit of my inverter and wires (I wouldn’t want to burn my own house down).
Yes! It’s a good step forward if you want the convenience. Returning to conditioning a single room, instead of a whole house, is a good idea. IMO, it’s even better if you keep the thermal comfort of the person, not the room (heated pads or hot water bottles in the cold weather and ice packs, wearable mini-peltier modules and fans during hot weather - blood is a very good thermal transport and balancing method).
You can easily make a small grid on the ground. It’s safer and cheaper and you can do it yourself. Because you live in a hurricane area, you want to make sure you bury and anchor the supports pretty deep in the ground. Or you could easily install them on the shipping containers, given that you install beams from side to side (where the containers have the most strength) so you distribute the load properly.
How about just good ol’ thermal mass? While you have sun outside, freeze lots of gallons of water and slap them where you want cold air, then use a fan to circulate cold air in the rooms (I suspect the bedrooms are a priority at night). You don’t need large batteries to operate fans.
Rocket stoves are a thing and they do not release as much nastiness in the air (because they burn at high temperatures → cleaner). There’s also some 2-layered room heaters that have a 2nd burning chamber (to burn the gases that didn’t get burned properly), which are called smokeless wood stoves.
Burning wood is cleaner than burning coal, gas or other trash (most of which is also petroleum-based, 'cuz muh plastic). I’m not saying we should go back to burning wood en-masse for our heating, but if we would consider wood to be a renewable material, we’d be having tree farms all-over (well, in the US there’s some woodlands with trees planted at equal intervals - if you see any of these, that is a commercial endeavor and that neatly arranged forest will eventually be harvested, then the soil left to rest, then new trees will be planted there).
I have to agree on that. Cars aren’t getting cheaper. There’s a low-end segment that’s getting filled up by slowly growing companies that make electric rickshaws. Everything from 3-seated vehicles without steering wheels or pedals, but with bike controls, to small trucks / haulers that can have an open bed. Their range sucks ass, but they’re the perfect size for city dwellers (and people who live at most 25-30 miles away from a city) and cost upwards of $10k. Compared to a new car, it doesn’t have as many creature comforts, but it’s somewhat affordable (particularly if you look at the insane prices of old cars in the US that won’t go 1000 more miles without breaking down).
The only reason they’re so cheap is because they’re classified as bikes or mopeds and they get around a lot of the regulatory capture of car manufacturers. I don’t see cars becoming cheaper without severe deregulation.
But if you own an electric car, you literally have a battery on wheels, which you can use for transport and as a backup during cloudy days. Not many people are aware that you can use your electric car as a big battery bank (V2H). I don’t own one, but if I had that ability, I’d definitely make use of it and an electric car would become more attractive to me.
There’s also some concept small cars and electric carts that only get charged with solar panels on top. One is a dutch mini-road train (it’s a small electric hauler with a lot of small cargo trailers attached to one another). Others are concepts like Drew from DrewBuildsStuff does, like his “infinite range” cart (not really infinite, but going 150 miles on just solar at poorly picked day hours is quite an achievement compared to the meager 60 miles range that the electric rickshaws I mentioned above have).
The solar panels are about 25% the price of the installation, so bad hail will kill it, but bad hail is infrequent. In a recent example of a solar installation getting damaged by hail in Texas, hail took out about 1 in 4 panels. So 6% of the installation price to repair it.
Europe is definitely not seeing it. Most sold care in Germany is the VW Golf.
VW Golf starts at 7k lower than the ID 3. ID3 has far worse interior than the Golf.
One of the cheapest cars you can get is a Dacia.
Dacia Spring electric and Sandero are at the same price level. But, the Spring electric is again far, far worse from a quality standpoint and you have to stomach the 30kWh DC “fast” charging and the 145km (best case scenario) or 75km (freezing) highway range.
So no, it is not here today.
PET can also be recycled. Why does nobody do it? Why is Coca Cola only at 15% rPET?
Sure. Problem is that nobody wants inconvenient. That is why we want to be enslaved to modern-day conveniences like fully heated houses like you say it.
Why?
No, and I never said so. My point is that self sustained is a hobby for the rich middle class. It reminds me of the South Park episode smug alert. It is the same, just PVs instead of hybrids.
This isn’t about squads or stealth at all. Currently the military has to lug around fairly large sized diesel generators when they need forward power for an outpost. They do this quite often. It takes 4 people to carry the diesel generator crate and another couple for the gas tanks to deploy at a forward base or command post. I am not talking about mobile power like battery backpacks one person in the squad has, but an actual “we are setting up camp here” operation. This isn’t for squads. A beam trying to follow someone around is ridiculously impractical not to mention dangerous for their health. The concept behind changing to beamed power in the field is that they no longer have to have a group of people lugging around this big crate and gas tanks for it. Instead one person can haul the receiver dish and it can provide power without any fuel need.
I have a reservation for an aptera. It is an autocycle, 3 wheels, but not a rickshaw as it has a top speed of 110mph. 10miles per kwh, 45kwh battery. 400 miles range, list price with most requested options 35k. 40 miles of solar charge a day from the sun.
It is a car designed by engineers for efficiency and function over form, though the resulting shape has its own appeal.
To get back a little bit to the PV discussion, let’s talk about peak grid again.
This is some mostly unscientific fun with numbers
Let’s make some very basic and simple examples. Imagine we have the city “Fantasy City”.
Fantasy City is not connected to the grid.
Fantasy City has a the following power consumption over the day:
For 6h power consumption is at 5MW
For 12h power consumption is at 6MW
For 6h power consumption is at 7MW
With that fluctuation, Fantasy City is a pretty typical US city.
Fantasy City has a natural gas power plan.
That power plant is able to produce 7MW.
It can easily shift down and up.
Now Fantasy City has decided to move away from fossils and wants go use PV and batteries.
Let’s assume a best case scenario. Fortunately, all companies offer charging possibilities for their employees. So EVs are not charged at night, but during peak PV production. So the 7MW peak happens during the day, when PV can produce the needed energy and no battery is involved.
I haven’t found good scientific numbers on daily production (but for yearly we will take a look later on). So to make it simpler, I just generously assume 100% peak production for 12h.
So we assume that we don’t need a battery for the 6h 7MW and for 6h of the 6MW. We are left with 6h 6MW and 6h 5MW.
To cover that, we need a 66MW battery. That battery needs to be able to offer 6MW and to be charged at 5.5MW. And we need to install 12.5MW PVs so we can charge during the day.
What do you think such PV and battery combination costs compared to a 7MW natural gas power plant?
It is the same game if we look at it yearly. Here we have better numbers.
Let us use the same numbers from above. Fantasy city uses 144MW daily or 4320MW monthly.
If we look at your monthly usage of 4320MW, we can install 4320 / 140 = 30MW PV peak to cover that.
During the winter days, we need 4320 / 30 = 144MW PV.
Now can decide to install 144MW and overproduce in the summer or we can try to shift energy to the winter months with batteries.
If we assume we install 60MW PV peak, which is massive overkill, that would still be less than 50% of what is needed in the winter. But to be generous again, we say 50%. To cover the three winter months with 50% of 4320 for 3 months, we would need a 6480MW battery.
TLDR: Fantasy City has three choices.
Run a 7MW natural gas plant
Install 144MW solar
Install 60MW solar and a 6480MW battery
Just look at the numbers. To you really think that the price of number two or three comes even close to number 1?
Again, I am not saying we should not do it nor that it is impossible. And of course it gets better if you combine it with wind. But it won’t cheap and certainly not free.
Alternative 3 is the cheapest of them all, from a city perspective, but not from an absolute perspective. The reason for that being, the city only pays for roughly 500 MWh storage. The rest is distributed into city blocks and neighbourhoods with 10 000 homes each having a 20 kWh battery and each block having a spare 20 MWh battery outside of that.
This kind of tiered storage system is pretty cheap to build, eliminates a ton of required storage that would otherwise have to be built, and is not only theoretically possible, it is already happening. I’ll try to do a full writeup with diagrams tomorrow, if my schedule allows.
This. And even if the panel production seems useless (low output under clouds) the EV battery gets trickle charged. If you’re stranded you just wait a few days to a week and you’re fully charged again.
Cars sit uselessly in parking lots a lot of the time, I am sure a 50 to 400 W panel would provide a nice “booster” to have the AC running while doing grocery shopping.
attempting to get to full rate production in the worst economy ever. They are ahead of their targets but behind where they actually wanted to be by now
The excess energy from heat can be used to produce more electricity.
Smog is mostly induced by burning materials like coal, car tires friction with the ground, generated dust. I don’t know if you have seen the old Beijing or Shanghai photos of how it looked like when cars were allowed to drive every day. Electric cars also create friction and micro dust, but don’t pollute through an exhaust.
You know that Photovoltaic efficiency is increased in locations with more sun (longer hours where the sun is in the sky and closer), right? Just around the equator on the northside would be it. As you have the yearly tilt that is benefitted in the summer and close enough to the equator to get sun in the winter. So mostly the southern states of the USA.
Exactly, the idea is to stop air pollution in cities as luxury metal waste. Also cars are very loud, I can’t open my windows because it is so darn loud through the whole day.
We maybe should stop destroying the nature here on earth first or more like at the same time.
They switched away from the in wheel hub motors to an inverter/motor/gearbox that honda has been using in one of their vehicles for the past year.
They have several of the the stamped panels that have been qualified, and have been shipped to their factory. The team from the manufacturer are coming next week to train them on panel assembly at their facility. They were going to assemble them in Italy then ship them assembled, but then the cost of sending a shipping container from Europe quadrupled (Panama canal drought), so now they are looking into sending them flat packed and assembling them in California.
They have the money to start production. And have 3 frames that they are starting to test fit on.
So we both agree that’s the problem. But I suppose our solutions are kinda polar opposites.
So people are more self-sufficient. We can argue outside this thread whether that’s a good thing or not.
It’s surprising that’s how you see it. The higher middle class usually just spends money on crap for convenience and to increase the value of their properties. Most of the people that are trying to be self-sufficient live simpler lives (at least as far as I can tell). People who grow their own food, can their food, live off-grid and try to be self-sustaining don’t seem to be rich to me. That’s why I kinda jokingly compared them to hippies. It’s kind of a choice to live simpler and with less of the modern conveniences.
I didn’t mention squads at all, I was referring to portable campgrounds, which include trucks, tents and other equipment, including small assemblable radio towers (which I was thinking in addition to that, a similarly modular tower beam receiver).
Never mentioned tracking around. That sounds just as ridiculous to me as it sounds to you. And I’m aware of the health concerns, a high power beam would either char you pretty instantly, or boil the water in your body. Either way, not a pleasant way to get unalived.
IDK about cars (although I live in a relatively small city, compared to places like NYC), but the loudest things are definitely bikes, lawn mowers and leaf blowers.
As adults, people should be planning their trips, instead of ending up stranded somewhere. Yes, that can work, but it’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone (goes without saying I guess).
But yeah, the big advantage to cars with panels on top is the fact that they trickle charge anywhere (even if there’s no charging station around, as long as there’s sun). So if you have a 40 mile trip to work, but only a 60 mile range, with a panel on top, if you work 8 hours (with an hour break), you might be able to squeeze 20 more miles on a cloudy day (and charge back to full on a sunny day).
Alternatively, if you size your car right for the trips you need to take, you can use your car’s battery at night, say discharge it from 80% to 60%, then drive it to work for another 20% (so down to 40%), charge it to full during the work hours, discharge it to 80% on the way home and repeat the cycle.
Are you looking at it from a central planning perspective? Because if that’s so, that’s kinda different than (what I think) this thread is about.
As much of an alternative energy enthusiast as I am, for the general grid, I still believe nuclear is the only sane (and clean) option. And as you might’ve noticed from my previous replies, I believe natural gas generators combined with solar and wind are the best option (because these are quick to start and stop and take over when there’s no production on those).
But for the layman, if one wants to save money and is a large consumer, it makes a ton of sense to go solar. But IMO people shouldn’t go the professional installation way, unless they can afford it outright (going into debt for it might not pay off very soon and interest is likely to get you).
The expensive part about solar is not the solar panels themselves, but upgrading the roofs (if people do it on their houses) and the mounting hardware (and that’s still excluding labor costs). But if people can go with the alternatives (frames mounted near, as opposed to on the house), there’s a lot of money to be saved.
My favorite one is the solar installation from Land to House. It’s literally a couple 4x4s with the panels mounted on a slope (so snow falls down naturally). It uses a lot of space, but if you have the money or the skill, there’s some better ways that make use of elevation (stacking panels up to 3 stories tall) to save horizontal space.
I’ll stand my ground on the hippie ideas. Things like fridge0, compressed air as “battery” storage, evaporative cooling for less quickly perishables, like vegetables (in places that permit it, since it doesn’t work well in places like Florida), simple comfort add-ons like heated or chilled water (or wax) bottles, heated tables with long tablecloth-blanket combos for really cold places, good old thermal mass and all getting augmented by solar power (both photo-voltaic and water heating type). There’s some solar kettles I’m kinda interested in getting, which keep the water hot for a long time and can get water close to boil in just around 2 hours of morning sunshine, even in cold conditions (because they’re well insulated). Tom from Switched to Linux has some videos on those on his Tux Traveler channel.
Battery power is mostly a convenience, but I don’t think it’s as sustainable and will get expensive when demand for them starts going up. I’m actually surprised how well solar technology advancements go - even with both higher demand and inflation, prices on PV panels are dropping. And it’s not the US doing the R&D on them (at least not directly).
Unless your city occupies a small island in the middle of the Pacific, there is no reason whatsoever to think that you need to be self-sufficient for power. Running a static wire to one of your neighbours is going to be cheaper than most — if not all — of the other options, and has ongoing costs orders of magnitude lower as well.
I do not see how it makes sense to crunch numbers for a scenario (isolated city) which almost never happens and is likely a 3-sigma statistical outlier. For the discussion to be meaningful, shouldn’t more realistic and common scenarios be used instead?
If you connect to the grid, then the grid becomes your battery.
Tell me about it. But when there are few options aside from making something reliable yourself from scratch, everything is mass-produced and has a failure point.
My solar charge controller that was going strong for 4 years just randomly grenaded itself last month. I delved in to solar panel tech and discovered a way to directly connect the panels to a 12V battery while protecting them individually from surge currents. This ended up being more efficient in many ways at the cost of more wiring and larger guage copper.
ECM’s, fusebox boards will burn themselves out with something as simple as a bad frame ground causing a voltage drop that’s not enough to kill the system but enough to overheat the capacitors and boards.
Nothing has really been built to last (other than solar panels lol). It really pays off to know 100 different ways to achieve your goal.
I even had AAA fight me one time when a mechanic was monkeying all over my vehicle and left it in shambles. You can’t trust anything or any service out for its own bottom line.
but on that note… upgrading from 12V to 24V or even 48V eliminates a lot of failure points since the wiring isn’t really subject to corrosion at that voltage.
Please expand, that’s the first time I hear this argument / pro for >12V systems. I’m already pretty sold on 48v, but this might make me change my mind on the small 12v additional system - although I don’t care as much about wire runs, because my plan is to centralize everything as close as possible, to avoid having long wire runs (so to prevent voltage drops as much as I can). Not a big deal for 48v, but for a smaller 12v, pretty important to keep cables short and everything close by.
