We came within 3,000 MW today of supply exceeding demand, or about 3.75%: They don't usually let it get so close. Usually it's around a 7%+ margin at daily peak demand. I don't even think there were consumption warnings or recommendations issued today. Why? Probably because it was just cloudier than usual and the forecast was for clearer skies. There was some extra contribution from wind, but not quite enough to make up for the losses in solar. Farmer's Almanac predicts a very cold winter. Super.
Hope you’re enjoying the best seasonal weather of the rest of your life! :)
Know what's funny? Because of the variable nature of renewables, in their current forms, a larger grid is almost always physically superior, political and business issues aside, simply because it's far less likely to completely fail. And that. THAT alone is why Texas is stupid. A voluntary self-kneecapping, based in the fact that we have oil here, and the grid was entirely nonrenewables as recently as 20 to 30 years ago, so we could have electricity cheaper, if we isolationism'd. Add in the American exceptionalist's state-level exceptionalism. The TX grid is very likely doomed to fail, at some point, all things considered. I'd say like 35% odds within the next five years, with gradually increasing likelihood. Not super keen on market forces after hundreds of Texans froze to death while some energy companies were so, um, "incentivized" that they made literally billion$, and TX energy prices have since gone up, in part, to help gradually pay the debt back to the utility providers, who were somehow permitted to be charged absolutely ridiculous rates by energy producers. The lack of winterization and other regulations and a blatant disregard of climate change predictions, permitted by the same system, are what caused the near-total crash and rolling blackouts. Nothing has actually changed on the regulatory side. When borne out experimentally, the theoretical "financially incentivized to winterize for the next crisis" argument hasn't worked. Now I am thinking about the fascinating process of phase or frequency-shifting the Texas grid to sync up with the national grid. I think it'd be super location dependent, and you probably have to use retarded time (actual term), right? The delay of a light signal between East and West Texas requires consideration, it's probably about 0.1 degrees or so (of 360) out of phase. I think for the best efficiency, the grid should basically ring like a bell, with a 2D planar geometry, kinda analogous to the second (I think?) 3D spherical harmonic. Like electron orbital 2S (edit: nah, now I think it's a cylindrical harmonic mode. I need to revisit quantum). Like a drum head's response if you hit it dead center. That is to say, the larger phase shift to the continental grid could be as big as +/-180 degrees if the two both oscillate at exactly 60 Hz. Or, you could tactically wait(?), because if the grid frequencies are slightly different, which is more likely, they'd eventually align in phase enough to open power connections across the border periodically. Like using a beat frequency to time the exchange of opening connections between increasingly isolated pockets of the TX grid, to gradually bring the two grids in sync. And the precision required to drive the power generation stations or transformer stations (not sure if one or both) into the correct phases may not currently exist, I'm not sure. Service outtages may be required. Fun to game out, but I think it needs computation/modeling to do right, using the known grid architecture. Not having much luck Goggling for it. Hmm.
Synchronizing the grids is easy: at an open circuit breaker between the grids, put a transmission voltage to 115 V transformer on each side. Put two lightbulbs in series between the two sides. When the bulbs go dim, close the breaker. This is how it was done in the old days. The more modern way (maybe 1960s?) is to have a synch scope. Looks kind of like a clock and displays the angle between. Clock points up: close breaker. Today it's done with microprocessor relays that wait until the angle is small and then issue the close signal. The real issue is getting the system secure as fast as possible. This means multiple transmission ties ready to close right away.
Physicist: Engineer: Phase issues lower efficiency and there is no way to pass through an electrical component without altering its phase. This was the traditional engineer's argument against graphic equalizers: each one of those bands of equalization is a filter, and each one of those filters alters the phase of the signal going through it. The more you use equalization, the more you smear the phase of your signal through 180 degrees and the more transients you lose. So... i think it's awesome that you're discussing electron orbitals as they relate to power? But I also think you need to realize that PG&E has isolators and cables that have been hanging in one place since the Gold Rush and their phase performance wasn't assessed when new and has not improved since. AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Gelles makes the argument that the shift from "stakeholder capitalism" - whereby Ford builds a town for his workers and overpays them so they can afford to buy his cars, whereby Kodak promotes from within and preserves a flat hierarchy for 70 years, whereby GE was known as "generous electric" for their pensions and employee retention strategies - occurred because of the Friedman Doctrine, published in the NYT in 1970, because of Bork's "Antitrust Paradox", published in 1978, and the ascendancy of Jack Welch to chairmanship of General Electric in 1981. What followed was the financialization of industry such that earnings reports could always be synthesized to please shareholders and that shareholders were always pleased by "efficiency", IE firing workers and closing plants. Gelles follows this thread through the destruction of GE and the destruction of GM to the Boeing 737MAX. He goes as far as tracing it to the dominance of AB-InBev. He does not go all the way to This Fucking Abomination But the text is the subtext: "end-stage capitalism" basically refers to "end-stage shareholder capitalism" and it was a bad choice that fucked most of the world over and made an extremely limited group of individuals very wealthy and powerful. The problem with the Texas grid, as you yourself outline, is perverse incentives. Those incentives make sense under shareholder capitalism. They are an obvious maladaptation under stakeholder capitalism. The point of the book, fundamentally, is that shareholder capitalism was a bad idea and the world is waking up to this fact. You're right - people gonna die first. SEE: Boeing. Livelihoods will be destroyed. SEE: NAFTA. And while Marc Andreesen is perfectly within his rights to give Adam Neumann $350m (TO GET INTO APARTMENT RENTALS! WHILE AIRBnB IS EATING SHIT! WHILE RENTS ARE COLLAPSING!), the broader story is that Andreesen is seen as a chump for doing it, not a visionary. Ultimately, people like Marc Andreesen and Jack Welch spend other peoples' money. The market rewarded them for forty, fifty years. Game is changing, though. One of the arguments Wallerstein made towards the end of his life is the whole system is gonna collapse because there's no frontier anymore. Collapse? Or contract? Because ultimately? The solution to energy problems is to use less energy. If I have an i3 and I commute 40 miles to work and back every day, working from home saves 400kWh per month.Now I am thinking about the fascinating process of phase or frequency-shifting the Texas grid to sync up with the national grid.
Half-intentionally baited you to weigh in with this framework, and now I will quote it, for emphasis, in the hopes that it encourages anyone unfamiliar with the concept of shareholder capitalism to familiarize themselves. Also debated including this, but I'm also a pretty firm believer in the value of in-person schooling. THE CHILDREN WILL BE SOCIALIZED PROPER-LIKE. Been half-rewatching 30 Rock recently, while falling asleep, with the (new, to me) knowledge that Alec Baldwin plays Jack Welch, who cameos in one episode (I think, too lazy to IMDB lookup). Boy, have I got another wall-o'-text for you elsewhere in this thread. edit: aaaaaaaand you've already found it.Those incentives make sense under shareholder capitalism. They are an obvious maladaptation under stakeholder capitalism. The point of the book, fundamentally, is that stakeholder capitalism was a bad idea and the world is waking up to this fact.
working from home
The solution to energy problems is to use less energy.
Cool thing about schools is they have school buses and are situated within school districts. Remember - 90% of the population of the United States lives within the greater metropolitan area of somewhere so education happens where you are, not where your parents' paychecks come from. I will, again, recommend Bill McKibben's "Eaarth" because the first half of the book, quaintly, is "global warming is real" and the second half is "the solution is to live locally." Which, granted, pretty much fucks the South, both east and west. But you know what? I'm fine with that right now.
Today was much more typical: 10,000 MW variance in demand between a Wednesday and a Thursday? I guess it could be as simple as "It rained quite a bit in Houston on Thursday afternoon". Expanding current battery tech production? We gotta think about that (source, REE = rare earth elements): Whatever company or government manages to mine or capture (orbitally) a sizeable rare Earth metals asteroid could generate several trillions of dollars. Ideally, we could do it in tandem with having it serve as a space elevator anchor, but I digress. I haven't looked into graphene/graphite capacitor-battery tech lately, but I guess it's still not economical enough for scalable production compared to lithium/REE stuff. Call me a Texan, but I'm still uncomfortable with overly-capitalistic solutions to EV or wide-scale battery production. We've traded minor improvements in affordability for an almost incalculable amount of risk. How 'bout this? Fuck car ownership altogether. We need to hasten a future of self-driving, Uber-like, and possibly partitioned cars (for carpooling) designed to meet capacity at rush hour, while expanding public transport, and restructuring cities to be denser. Even a feasibility study on implementing some of that would be great. Imagine if Andrew Yang's "Forward Party" (or anyone, for that matter) could come up with just a rough proposal to implement something concrete related to that instead of useless platitudes like "risk the imagination of a new possibility" and "common sense consensus". But nope, everything's a fucking cash grab. I also don't think we'll get self-driving cars without linking either a small handful of companies or the government to both infrastructure and automobile construction. Maybe they all work together, ideally. These are hard problems.
Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works [108] H. Berg and M. Zackrisson, “Perspectives on environmental and cost assessment of lithium metal negative electrodes in electric vehicle traction batteries,” Journal of Power Sources 415 (2019), pp. 83–90; M. Azevedo et al., Lithium and Cobalt: A Tale of Two Commodities (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2018).A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.[108] Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive.
First of all, OK, but instead of designing a plan to reduce consumption (maybe I'll tag you in my dumb, naive little plan I'll post later today or tomorrow?), because of climate change, you believe climate change is good, thus oil and gas are fine. Corrections welcome. 40,000 tones of ores x 100 million units annually = 4E12 kg ore annually. Earth mass = 5.972E24 kg, so there are mos def some viable years ahead, even if crustal veins of lithium are pretty damn rare. Make it to the mantle and it's EZ-PZ (see below link). It's an industry. Do you know how the battery industry(ies) breaks down as subsidized vs. profit? I don't. It seems complex, quickly changing, and perhaps even a bit intentionally obfuscated. Majority from profit? almost sorry for source. So yeah, also focus on reducing emissions and pollution from REE mining. We need more honest case studies in what carbon emissions vs. battery production looks like right now, but doing so probably conflicts with the interests of both sides of the argument, no? Know any good studies? At least there's tech like regenerative braking that is objectively cool.
Time out. I think the wasoxygen is only saying that there are tradeoffs. And the mining of ridiculous amounts of ore (not to mention the current impossibility of mass battery recycling) is a tradeoff that the EV boosters just handwave over almost 100% of the time. ICE engines have beaucoup problems, but they're still the devil you know for the time being.
That's the intended gist of my second-to-last paragraph.
wasO has previously asserted just that, almost verbatim, but I've recently taken Donald Trump at his word, so it could take me several years to rebuild your trust. I understand.
Yes: Uh-oh. OK, OK, I have extrapolated from your uncertainty, and put some words in your mouth. And now, b_b will never love me. At least you were already never going to love me, no loss there. My obvious bias results from a belief that it is strange to ponder if there are significant economic benefits from climate change when compared to the costs. It boils down to sheer disruption. Disruption is costly. If the optimal latitude to grow crops of a certain type shifts by several degrees, one way or the other, that is disruptive. Shifting hundreds of millions to billions of people poleward within a generation or three is also quite disruptive. Wet bulb concerns, for starters. On top of the steady warming trend is the increased occurrence of climate change-related natural disasters stemming from increasingly wild atmospheric oscillations, producing increasingly ahistoric local weather events; in pressure, temperature, large-scale polar vortices fluctuations, El Niño, La Niña, precipitation, etc. Insurance companies have market-driven forces driving up insurance rates almost everywhere due to... liberal climate scaremongering? You have a hard case to make for climate change benefits. Not including more than one hyperlink; I think you'd dispute most sources. I also love how Ben Shapiro's like "sea level rise? just sell your house, dumbass!". So many hilarious fallacies in that take.I think it’s worth doing a cost-benefit analysis, as we should do for any big decision. As long as we are not allowed to count benefits of climate change, it won’t be an accurate accounting.
First I "don't believe in global warming," now I "like global warming," what could be next? Are you sure we actually disagree, given this degree of difficulty in communicating my position? For the record, I think we should avoid binary good/bad judgments and use cost-benefit analysis to consider better or worse alternatives. Why strange? Aren't you curious to see reality as it is? How can you correct for bias if you dismiss evidence that challenges your beliefs, concluding in advance that it will be too small to matter? Deaths are a relevant consequence of climate change. Every year people are killed by high temperatures. And every year people are killed by low temperatures. Which number is higher? It's not obvious. If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer? Or perhaps climate change will cause more deaths in both winter and summer, but we won't know if we don't look. Note: Source cites the Fourth National Climate Assessment which claims that "With continued warming, increases in heat-related deaths are projected to outweigh reductions in cold-related deaths in most regions" citing The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States which expresses the same claim, "The reduction in cold-related deaths is projected to be smaller than the increase in heat-related deaths in most regions" ("medium confidence") while recognizing that "Future adaptation will very likely reduce these impacts" i.e. people will install air-conditioning ["Very High Confidence"]. Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story. Relocating a farm doesn't sound easy, but agriculture is constantly changing, with higher yields reducing the amount of land needed. Smil points out that in a satellite image of Spain you can see a large white region at the southern tip. Almería is covered in greenhouses and produces vegetables which are shipped all over Europe, as far as Stockholm. To extend the growing season, some of the greenhouses are heated. (Greenhouses are also enriched with CO₂ to improve yields.) Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century. Outside of deserts, the hottest regions of the world are populated, and the largest uninhabited regions are cold. We have East African genes. No link so I won't dispute your claim. Climate change could certainly drive up rates, if real rates are in fact rising, but so could rising affluence (we have more valuable things to insure) or cost disease. Swiss Re says "By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12). The real comparison is to how much climate change mitigation would cost in total economic value. These numbers are all fairly speculative, but Smil makes a (rueful) case that mitigation is all but hopeless anyway. In Paris, about 50,000 people flew to the French capital to attend yet another conference at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark” — and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented” — agreement. Yet the Paris Agreement did not codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters. And even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), the Paris accord would still result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2030. Some landmark. Like Jamie Dimon, he recommends natural gas over coal as a realistic practical measure. "We can proceed fairly quickly with the displacement of coal- fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation."it is strange to ponder if there are significant economic benefits from climate change when compared to the costs
Disruption is costly.
the optimal latitude to grow crops of a certain type
Shifting hundreds of millions to billions of people poleward
Insurance companies have market-driven forces driving up insurance rates almost everywhere
The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies. Annual climate change conferences began in 1995 (in Berlin) and included much publicized gatherings in Kyoto (1997, with its completely ineffective agreement), Marrakech (2001), Bali (2007), Cancun (2010), Lima (2014), and Paris (2015).
I assert a consensus-aligned view: The eventual economic costs of climate change for anyone currently 10, 20, 30, maybe even 40 years old or younger could be debilitating if we don't respond more drastically ASAP. Reducing the nuance afforded by a cost-benefit analysis, which, yes, can e.g. inform a course of action over some span of time, to a binary judgement is useful in my rhetoric here because it reflects my perceived magnitude of your misjudgements. Since you have expressed an inclination to do almost nothing, coded as "let The Market sort it out", your position is indistinguishable from a climate change denialist or someone who thinks that climate change is generally good. Hopefully that will help you understand some of my confusions regarding my perception of your position. Action-wise, they are all currently the same position. The idea that the market will naturally provide appropriate economic incentives when the most significant costs are incurred only far in the future flies in the face of the way economics is now conducted. Amazon et al. have come to define the most long-term-est business model, at least in America, which says that a project has about 10 years to corner an entire emerging market sector and become profitable via monopoly. Almost every large-scale and established corporation, which are admittedly driving most of the economic landscape, demands a much more immediate 10% annual or equivalent quarterly growth. Because they seem to routinely disregard expert and consensus opinion when convenient, the financial-class folks don't always offer a maximally-informed funding landscape. And VC is still the most long-term-minded funding model in the extra-governmental economic landscape? Troubling. Missing: A list of climate change benefits that don't pale in comparison to the costs. Oddly reminiscent of your "since covid just spiked up the death rate, less people should die later" argument from two years ago-ish. As of March 2022, nope. joke about wasO's popularity in nursing homes The distribution of people vs. latitude is difficult to summarize in sweeping statements, except that "white" and wealthy countries skew very much towards the mid-latitudes already (and Northern hemisphere, but that's a landmass and history thing, largely). At least in the short term, the average human's latitude set to move further close to the equator, because that's where the population growth is, specifically in central Africa. Lo and behold. Another reason to consider whether lingering Western dismissiveness regarding the seriousness of climate change is related to systemic racism. Your favorite two words. The distinction between voluntary choices and involuntary impacts renders the point null. But on top of globally heating up overall and localized anomalous heat events (and drought, and flood) of increasing frequency, weather patterns unfamiliar to the people native to any particular location are disruptive if the people don't have the know-how and infrastructure capable of handling new types of "natural" disasters. Not just heat deaths. Unpredictability in weather is also costly for the energy sector, and as we have seen, can jeopardize the integrity of an electricity grid. Eventually, incorrect predictions of increasing frequency from atmospheric neural network models trained on historic data will help further reveal the destablizing and inherently unpredictable nature of climate change. If it hasn't measurably happened already. And if the fine folks in Manhattan suddenly take a strong hurricane to the nose for the first time ever, but Florida's underwater? Everybody loses. All 10% of the economic contraction occurs IN ONE YEAR, after 29 years of unhindered economic growth?? No: It shaves the compounding 1.03 down a bit. It's also fantastic news to hear that there are no overall economic contractions in the future and climate change ends in 2050, instead of continuing to worsen like the climatologists are warning, even if we achieved a carbon neutral US and Europe by then. The effects will get worse after 2050, either way. My biggest fear is that climate feedback loops push us towards system collapse. Coal to gas is a relatively minor concession almost certainly intentionally designed to fend off meaningful progress. Should we still do it? Sure, in addition to many, many other steps. And previously, you wanted proof of overpopulation, right? Global warming is it. I would say "Maybe you have a point, and we wouldn't have to consider the Earth overpopulated if we can make significant cultural changes", and then you're like "We should definitely not change our lifestyles very much at all, it would have immediate costs that I and the billionaire class have decided are too expensive for us, personally". Unless you're secretly a billionaire, that argument makes way more sense for you than them (they have a few spare dollars), but they're funding the brand of information you prefer to consume. Do you acknowledge that? If you decide that climate change only will only cost the world one or two trillion dollars between now and 2050? And there's a very good chance that if you threw significantly less than a trillion dollars (this fucking graph AGAIN!?) at fusion you'd get a technology that has one of the best chances at saving our skins instead of basically mothballing it 50 years ago? "Economic incentives" have failed us already, and were assuredly responsible for lobbying government to de-fund fusion and maintain the status quo. Again, the inability of economics to address long-term problems rears its ugly head. As you can see elsewhere in these comments, I think the case could be made that switching to increasingly battery-centric energy solutions will likely lead to an unsustainable ravaging of the planet. On top of curbing energy demands, we must de-carbonize if the planet is to remain habitable. The response of Earth to such a high CO2 concentration will continue until the CO2 is decreased. Fusion is the best path to do it. Throwing up our hands Jamie Dimon-style is not an option. It's not what a majority of us want, either. The inability to appropriately respond to climate change is an indictment of economic fetishism and the economic incentives that got us this far into the hole in the first place. Btw, this is also related to your strange conviction that profitability automatically confers net benefit or value, in an economic environment where e.g. Andrew Tate can make a shitton of money championing domestic violence and Jordan Peterson rakes in the dough from worrying about all of the transsexual genitals he'll never see. Many more caveats abound, but I digress. Meta: What does it say if you prefer a cost-benefit framing through the lens of a perspective overly hostile to expertise and institutional trust, and then decide that properly addressing climate change ultimately costs you too much money, in this moment? It says we can't abolish tax law, because you can't be trusted to properly vote with your money, which undermines your entire vision for society.Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story.
If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer?
Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century.
"By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12).
Hey, I almost forgot, remember when we let economists play epidemiologist? The most likely interpretation is that expert economist Kevin Hassert didn't actually believe his own bullshit, and instead sold his repute to the White House to help Trump minimize what we were facing with covid-19. Surely, this time, with the even more complicated system of the Earth's climate, the economists aren't minimizing the scale of what we're up against to protect the ruling business class that employs them, right? The idea of Jamie Dimon receiving accolades from attendees on his conference call after he graciously announces his support for switching the types of fossil fuels we're burning is fucking hilarious. Also Dimon: Our thick skulls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy But this time? This time, surely, big business and the economists to whom they pay exorbitant amounts of money have prescribed the correct plan of action, and are deserving of our trust. Yes, natural gas produces ~50% less CO2 than coal. Smil, at least, is a vocal advocate of reducing overall energy demand. Dimon's position is basically "And that solves it!". Smil is right that de-carbonization is a huge problem. Maybe we should actually get started in on it instead of (once again) pretending bullshit like "carbon offsets actually work". De-carbonization is inherently not profitable, so I will assume you're against it, no? Smil also thinks our current requirement of economic growth must end. I agree. So much for 1.03^29. Revisiting this; I don't think you're actually arguing in good faith. What a waste of my time. Later."Why can‘t we get it through our thick skulls, that if you want to solve climate [change], it is not against climate [change] for America to boost more oil and gas?" Dimon reportedly said.
Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day.
It's actually a better take than many conservative voices. Arguing this is a problem with a solution (no matter how facile) is better than arguing it's not a problem. And also, yeah, stop moving to Florida, so he's right on that point. I live in Global Warming Paradise (no natural disasters, more abundant fresh water than anywhere on Earth, save for maybe Lake Baikal, mild temperatures, ~600-800 ft above sea level), so I'm expecting a rebound of the Great Lakes region after decades of decline as one small regional benefit. One could argue that my property value nominally rising isn't that great of a benefit to humanity relative to 100,000,000 people dying of thirst, but I'm a glass half-full sort of dude.I also love how Ben Shapiro's like "sea level rise? just sell your house, dumbass!".
Fair 'nough, on your end. Self-interested, market-guiding Keynesian handjob. Shapiro's take still ignores the fact that the cycle-of-poverty contingent are almost 100% renters, and can't simply flip a property they don't own to offset thousands of dollars in costs to move their family of 5 or 6 or 7 at will. Or that nobody wants to buy an underwater property. And the problem skews heavily non-white, because wealth skews white, because the U.S. more or less bailed on reconstruction and reparations. Not sure how this idea is still controversial for a huge subset of the U.S., apart from intentional propaganda to the contrary. (oH iT's SiMpLy CuLtuRaL bAnKruPTcy uNrElAtEd tO the EChoEs of SlAvErY) Thanks, Ben Shapiro!
JP Morgan Chase Research, in their preface to their study on the economic effects of Hurricane Harvey on Texas in 2017, said words to the effect of "natural disasters are terrible for the economy but great for GDP." Their argument - and the fact that they have to make this argument says a lot about capitalism as practiced currently - was that the wholesale destruction of existing goods is obviously terrible for the human beings within capitalism but that the need to replace everything that had been destroyed was great for sales. I am really coming around to the idea that the externalization of "human beings within capitalism" is the original sin of modern American capitalism and that it is not a Democratic viewpoint, not a Republican viewpoint but a human viewpoint that the economic system should work for the bulk of the people subject to it. The Republican argument for renewables is "energy independence" "jobs for the heartland" and "exportable technology." The Republican argument for environmental protectionism is "keeps farming jobs from moving to Canada." The Republican argument for immigration is "weakens our adversaries by siphoning off their best, brightest and most motivated." I think the core issue of the American Right is they're entirely beholden to a populist ideology (white christian males over all in all things) in order to get the votes to support an oligarchic business strategy (all proceeds to the 1%). It was never going to work forever, it was always going to end in a messy messy way, everyone just kicked the can down the road in hopes they'd be out of office before it exploded. It exploded Jan 6 2021, and now we get to see what the cleanup looks like.
Absolutely (alt. title: One of the richest fuckers on Earth realizes climate change disproportionately impacts the poors negatively, which is fine, as is continuing to bolster petrolstates). Both the Harvey-specific and generalized climate calculus contain a disregard for a dynamic that enables further wealth disparities. Weird, coming from a wealthy guy! Pedantic squabblings, for posterity (as always, there's just so many goddamn lurkers here): "white christian males over all in all things" is much more of a racist than true-blue populist ideology. "all proceeds to the 1%" makes it even more transparent. Agree with your interpretations here almost completely.
Nobody truly owns electric cars. For 50-70k you get a License to access their ecosystem complete with garbage software and lots of bugs. The manufacturers can ota upgrade your car to be a brick at any time they feel like you should upgrade. It’s truly the worst of both worlds, ownership costs without ownership rights.
wasoxygen That's not just an electric cars problem though. BMW subscription model seat warmers, John Deere's proprietary electrical subsystems, and right to repair and software issues with smartphones come to mind. I'm talking about something way more radical. We can install 20 gazillion solar panels and batteries, get an asteroid, whatever, sure, but focusing solely on improving efficiency in the renewables sector avoids a yuge slice of the problem. Ultimately, I think we need to curb energy consumption, and I'll make the case that it can be baked in to generally positive lifestyle improvements. We should have a different model that we can apply to city-specific and country-specific conditions, but what follows is for U.S. cities. I've no idea about Africa, South America, or the Middle East, for starters. If we were capable of collective action, whether through the free market or otherwise, we'd realize that if less than 50% of all cars are in use even during peak demand, we could all "buy" about half as many cars, and spend the money we saved on other things. "Buy" in quotes b/c it'd then be a (private non-monopolistic) service(s) that'd cost ~50% (probably ~60%, more realistically) as much as monthly car payments, on average. There could be subscription tiers, but on average, it'd be maybe a little less or equal to the cost people typically spend on maintenance of their paid-off cars, but for a better car, and no maintenance inconveniences. The cars could be stored and recharged in centralized and/or smaller, quasi-centralized garages with more efficiency, and people could convert their house garages to another room. Home value goes up. It would also radically diminish the amount of area devoted to parking lots adjacent to businesses and apartments. A way to increase population density. Population density goes up, including business density, along with restructuring, specifically targeting green space, all creating less demand for automobiles. Downtown and University of Bern are five minutes' walk from the station of a one-hour 160mph bullet train to inside of the Zurich airport terminal, halfway across the country (OK, it's a small country). European cities were built before automobile demands existed. They are superior places to live for it. To be fair, implementing and optimizing a self-driving carpool system algorithmically, especially if you're trying to incorporate public transportation and carpooling, sounds like the most NP problem I've ever heard of, and it could lead to e.g. you getting screwed on a random Tuesday morning commute that's three times as long as the usual when you have an important AM meeting that day. It does kinda hinge on self-driving tech being fleshed out, obviously. Humans are expensive, but should be. And if EV batteries aren't at houses, you'd need to have another battery module built. Sounds bad, but there are some benefits to not needing to design a battery to travel 80+ mph on the underside of a car. You're still not too much higher than the same number of batteries anyway, because there exist only half as many cars. Apartments have bigger and probably more efficient batteries. Even besides somehow wrestling policy-making away from the oil & gas companies, there's a LOT of other problems with this idea, honestly, but it's fun to try to think what's possible thirty or forty years from now. Like: you're putting anyone who drives anything out of a job, :(, and almost assuredly nowhere near enough battery/solar maintenance tech jobs to make up for it. Simply switching oil combustion schemes to electric, and only using a battery/solar scheme will probably eventually run into some kind of diminishing returns. Curb demand regardless, and enrich our lives in the process. ASAP. inb4 the idea that using a government in tandem with private industry to this specific end is somehow insultingly socialist (code for: "cost the always-sacrificing, always-suffering, increasingly-wealthy class too much money, and btw get the fuck back to work"). Tear my arguments apart, any and everyone. Have fun.
This is an interesting 'solution' to the problem of fuel-burning, car-based transportation. Unfortunately it relies on a lot of technology that doesn't exist yet. There's another solution which reduces driving, using just technology that we already have. Building walkable cities again. If we allow more people to live in local communities where they can accomplish their life necessities with just walking, biking, and transit, then we can drastically cut transportation emissions without strip-mining the whole earth for minerals.
You're lucky you shared this, I was just about to suggest killing gen-X'ers to hasten progress for us millenials
Build power plants and power lines. It's century old technology limited by politics and public acceptance.
If you use spot rate metering for evs it will be fine for quite a while they can charge at night. If you screw it up and allow people to charge right as they get home you will have problems. Luckily states can force manufacturers to push all sorts of updates over the air for evs.
It's long been foretold that the biggest update to the grid that nobody saw coming 40 years ago will be distributed energy storage. Right now, it's envisioned that the car in the garage is the energy sink; for people of means, another battery ends up being security and convenience. A Model S has a 100KW battery pack. That's $30k retail right now. Throw some subsidies and incentives at that and it's around the cost of an HVAC system. It also happens to be more power than this house can consume in 5 days. Besides which, California has had time-of-use pricing for nearly a decade and plenty of other states are following. You can use your fancy SUV whenever you want, you just pay more to charge it up during the day.
I'm aware of variable pricing, but how variable does it need to get to truly discourage usage? If we're already butting up against capacity, that suggests that only a few people need to make a choice to pay a higher price to really fuck shit up. The variable rate will have to be extreme to make a difference when you're talking about millions of EVs all deciding when not to charge simultaneously.
I think there's too many variables here to really have an argument. When I lived in North Hollywood, it was me and 7 families on Section 8, parching in the sun and running 30-year-old window-rattlers 24-7. We were uncomfortable and were consuming 1500 watts 24-7. My buddy up the street in Sherman Oaks? had a 3-ton AC unit cooling his 2000sqft home that also pulled down 1500 watts... half of the time. The Section-8ers don't have storage batteries. They're renters, and their power is never not running their AC. Sherman Oaks? That's a tax write-off. The more money you throw at this, the more class warfare you're practicing. Especially since Sherman Oaks is gonna buy Smart Chargers that discharge your battery pack into the house during peak hours to cut your electricity usage. Especially since Sherman Oaks is gonna buy solar panels that are going to sell power during the day and buy it back at night. Especially since this is all going to be managed by LADWP, the most scandal-ridden utility this side of PG&E. But I mean, "millions of EVs" aren't going to happen all at once. What will happen is rich people will buy them due to tax benefits and general richness and they'll steadily trickle down. Poor people will be the last to own them because my Section 8 building isn't going to add parking lot charging until it makes economic sense - Vera was a nice lady, but she was clear-eyed about the service she provided. Theoretically? Outfits like Solar City should middle-man this stuff to make it work better. Practically? The only firms getting money are grifters rolling mortgage arbitrage. Which is a long way to say "here's a guess." IF: LADWP charges you 24 cents a kW/h during the day and 20 cents at night AND IF: you use 50kW/h in your Tesla getting to work and back THEN you save $40 a month charging at night. If you fuck up and need to charge during the day, it's going to cost you $2. I would argue that the goal isn't to ensure nobody ever charges during the day, the goal is to shape behavior. Presume you use 100 kW/h - basically 4000W every hour, averaged over 24. That's a 3-ton AC unit and a toaster going all the time. If you've got a 50kW/h battery in the garage, you cut your power in half during the day and double it at night - you're saving $4 but spending $2. That's going to save you $750 or so every year. Not a slam-dunk? But if those batteries cost you $15k they're a break-even over 20 years. Will they last 20 years? No. Will rates go up? Yes. When I was in LA, power was 12c. It's now 24. It's been seven years. Who benefits the most from this? THE POWER COMPANY. Frankly, I feel like we're on the cusp of capitalism solving this problem.
But, practically speaking, that's not how people use variable rate charging. In the vehicle's setup menu, you can choose to "Charge when fees are lower" or "Charge immediately when plugged in" or set a specific timeframe to charge, which is usually late at night. Most people, when charging at home, have a fast charger installed, so even the largest battery is fully charged from fully drained in about 4 hours. And something like 90% of EVs never go below like 40% battery, or some crazy stat like that? (I can't remember the exact number, but it was something like 40-45% battery.) Then you never ever, in the life of the vehicle, EVER open that menu again. You completely forget that setting ever existed. In some model vehicles it is possible to adjust that setting via a mobile app ... but I suspect that is rarely used by anyone but the most passionate hypermilers. Practically speaking, electric cars are just cars you put less gas into. You don't drive them differently. You don't interact with them differently. They are just cars, in the end. And setup menus are opened the first week you have the car, and - if you remember - the last day you have the car (to make sure you delete your personal information and home address before selling it!).
I have never not been in a Tesla where the driver isn't constantly fucking with something. I will grant you - it's only the charging menu when they're in the garage. Point taken, though - that's a failing of Tesla, not a fundamental problem of the charging experience. I will say that in 1994 we learned in vehicle design that a thousand pounds of batteries was not only forty thousand dollars, it was also the energy density of a gallon of gas. Then cell phones came out and it became ten thousand dollars and three gallons of gas. By the time the Nissan Leaf came out it was three thousand dollars and five gallons of gas. And by the time I was test-driving used Nissan Leafs, the battery packs were half-dead and it was more like two gallons of gas. Practically speaking, electric cars should be "just cars you put less gas into" but every other electric car ride I've ever taken has been a "will we make it" dance. They definitely have their place, and that place gets bigger every day, but "we have to stop in Hawthorne to charge up for an hour because I passed too many cars on my way from Newport to DTLA" is not something non-electric drivers say.
I drive a 2017 BMW i3 with a gas-powered range extender. It has a 33 kWh battery. I bought it used. If I drive at 70-75 mph on the freeway, I get about 100 miles of electric-only range before the range extender needs to kick in. If I drive slower, or have a higher mix of city driving, I can reliably get 120 miles. If I'm only driving in the city, that number can go even higher. And I'm not a hypermiler--I drive it like the hot(ish) hatchback it is, though I'm very good at using regenerative braking. I (believe I) am a typical car commuter. On office days, my commute is about 40 miles round-trip. On the weekend, it's not uncommon for me to have a 100-mile day in the car--charging outside the house is optional. Based on my last year's worth of driving, my little go-kart is about 96.5% EV (14,000 miles driven). I burned about a dozen gallons of gas last year (including 2 road trips >250 mi). I'd say 96.5% of my driving is not a "will we make it dance". For about $10k more I could've had a 2019 i3 battery-only EV with a 42 kWh battery with 150 miles of range and accomplished the same thing with a dozen fewer gallons of gas. For the same price, I could have had a new Chevy Bolt with 250 miles of range. I think people tend to buy cars for their edge use cases (I'm going to go on so many road trips!) and over-index on convenience (but right now I've got a 500-mile gas tank! I only have to go to the gas station every 10 days!). Yes, it's easier to say because I park in a garage at night where I've got a level-2 40A charger, but a $25k (new!) Chevy Bolt with 250 miles of range could be fast-charged (DC/level-3) once a week in the time it takes you to do your grocery shopping.
That's the Pareto Principle right there, though - 80% of the time, you won't use that last 20%. I've long argued that any fool can do 80% of someone else's job. I don't care what that job is. Clearly, Tesla's Autopilot will get you there safely 80% of the time. It's that last 20% that fucks you over, and there's no way around it. That's why Tesla rolled out their autopilot while Google's self-driving technology remains a lab curiosity 10 years later: Tesla and Uber are perfectly happy to sell something that will do the job in anything but an emergency while Google knows emergencies are where lawsuits happen. An electric car would get my wife to and from work 99% of the time. It's the home visits that might be a problem, but not realistically. Now - what if we want to drive out to the coast? That's gonna be 300 miles, realistically, and if we have to do it in my Porsche I will be the only one having fun, and that fun will last until we make it and recognize just how much luggage we had to leave behind. So I could buy my wife an electric car? But I'd also have to either (A) pay for an extra car for when we want to get somewhere or (B) get rid of my car so we probably won't be buying one. And that has been my experience with electric cars, and with everyone I know with electric cars: they're awesome if you have a fallback because it fucking sucks to have to rent a car just to take a road trip and makes you feel like a choad. Is that going to change? Undoubtedly. Will there come a time when I don't hate every electric vehicle I could buy? Probably. Will it be a Dodge Charger? Definitely not. I built my first and second electric cars in 1995. I worked on them off and on through the '90s. They've come a long damn way - longer than we ever imagined back then, thanks solely to the advances in battery technology engendered by the Razr and iPhone. Hybrids? I mean the difference between a Prius and a Chevette is the smugness. I think the future is bright? But I'm not ready to say the future is here. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go attempt to rationalize an Aptera deposit again.I think people tend to buy cars for their edge use cases
I'm off for three days and you guys start talking about EV charging. Literally doing 1200km in two days in a 66kW Hyundai. A few points to add to the discussion: 1) you charge where you park. You top up in quick breaks when you need to go further. Nobody wants to fastcharge, so we expect it to become a much smaller part of driving than gas stations are now. Over here we expect just 13% of all EV charging to be at (highway) fast chargers. Imagine if you could fill up your car with water. Would you really opt to fill it up at a random industrial parking lot you could also drop a hose in it on your own driving lane and at work for half the price? How about your employer realizing they could make money by offering you free charging when you allow them to use your car as a battery storage? Opportunity charging, which is that you charge when your car is standing still anyway, is the inevitable way forward. 2) The US is dearly lacking in both fast and destination chargers. Range anxiety disappears once those two are remotely reliable - I know this from first hand experience and from a bunch of studies done on the Dutch charging station network, which happens to leave every other country in the dust. As soon as it's a common sight for there to be a charger in a parking lot, people stop complaining. Because I already have the luxury of a dense and reliable network of destination and fast chargers, I almost never have to worry, and I also almost never fastcharge. Colleague of mine has a charger at home and at work and he's never even used a fastcharger. Because if you leave full and can charge at your destination, that's two charging stops eliminated. So a <car range> mile trip both ways is made possible by just one charger at my destination, that happens to also be a decent way to make money for businesses with a large energy connection. Tesla drivers love their Superchargers, but normal people will avoid them if they can. And if you do need them - for most people, as soon as your EV can do 100+ kW of fast charging, which is "most new models and probably whatever first model upper class people will buy", nobody minds the stops because you'll be ready to drive another 150-200 miles right when you're done taking a piss or grabbing a coffee. Especially when you factor in that charging is cheaper per mile than gas. 3) What will drive the change in chargers? Well, the business case for EV destination chargers is decent. The case for rapid chargers is VERY good as soon as you hit a certain level of daily users. There is less overhead and less insurance than a gas station. It never needs refills, and you can basically just plop one down and wait for your investment to pay off. Even a small station can draw traffic, or can boost sales. The number of rapid chargers that aren't Tesla has doubled in less than eighteen months over here. We fully expect every supermarket, DIY store, McDonalds and Starbucks (any place that you will park at for more than 20 minutes and that owns the land it's on) to follow suit. 4) Smart charging capabilities have been made mandatory on all public slow charging stations here. The collective energy use of EVs will be a hit on the grid, but it's in the form of "small spikes in many places", which is something that grids are in theory perfectly capable of handling if dimensioned correctly. The real problem that will fick things up are heavy vehicles. They consume a factor 10-15 more energy than cars per km and require near 1MW chargers if you want to top them up along the way. The energy use of industrial zones can easily increase by TWh's if adopted widely, which is not the case of personal vehicles. And the TCO, which is nearly always the main driver of any EV adoption rate, however is good enough that the trucks will be here before the infrastructure is upgraded. 5) I still dream of a V2G system of energy brokerage whereby we can delay daily power use with cars and home batteries. The realities are complicated, and the rise of EVs seems to be going just a bit too fast for V2G to catch up. My city is one of the first to realize what you guys are theorizing about. But it's the result of one incredibly entrepreneurial dude who's been at this problem for 8 years. Wider adoption... I don't know. I hope so.
I hear car crashed and drained it’s 12v battery so and it needs to go to the service depot for a software reload is also a common ev problem. I’ve never had any of my gauges fail but my Tesla owning coworker has only had it happen around once a month. He loves it though and so do the mice that are eating his wiring