With solar penetration increasing fast, and so much wind potential, it’s almost impossible not to transition off of fossil fuels rapidly. The economics are just too good to ignore. Storage isn't even an issue; we'll overbuild renewables and curtail as needed, which is cheap now (under 2 cents/kwh) and works until batteries come down in cost (which will happen).
What will stand in the way, at least for a bit, are interests that have tied their outlook to fossil fuels. In the case of transportation, its the oil industry down to the local gas stations.
I think we should work from the bottom up to turn this case around. Incentivize gas stations to install rapid chargers, which will help to shift car buyers' mindsets. IIRC, gas stations make very little margin on gas anyways.
I think about it the other way. Use land regulation to no longer permit zoning, permitting, or construction of gas new stations. If existing gas stations think they can compete as a place EVs will come charge, let them install vehicle charging hardware. More likely, gas stations lose out to places people will be at anyway to charge (grocery stores, work places, parking lots/structures, etc). I already Supercharge my Model S at the local grocery store if I've been driving more often than my 120V garage wall outlet can recover in range over a day or two (currently renting; when I buy, I'll pull 100amp service to the garage and never need to Supercharge locally again). Where do cars dwell for hours each day already (average vehicle isn't moving 90% of the time)? That's where you get chargers installed. The electricity and parking spots are usually already there, it's just a matter of getting the conduit, conductors, power conversion gear on site, installed, and painting and signing the parking spaces as EV only.
In an EV future, gas stations are (mostly) a relic (IMHO). Think of the real estate cost savings, the reduction in truck traffic to deliver fuel, etc!
> More likely, gas stations lose out to places people will be at anyway to charge (grocery stores, work places, parking lots/structures, etc).
This isn’t economically practical unless you have subsidized charging. It’s significantly cheaper to charge my car at home than it is to use some random public charger.
We're not comparing home charging to fast charging though. We're comparing fast charging locations to other fast charging locations. Home charging is absolutely going to be cheaper due to no demand charges, but for where people elect to fast charge, you colocate where they will already be. At work places, you would want to provide charging current rates as high as possible without incurring demand charges. This is not to hand wave away street parking charging! This is definitely an issue, but there have been great strides in developing charging stations for street use (integrated into light poles, for example). Does you locale have Dig Once policies (call to action: get involved locally if they do not!)? Throw some fiber in there while you're upgrading street power!
At home, I charge using power from Exelon's nuclear fleet at 1-6 cents/kwh (Time of Use plan). I want to stress: most people will plug in every time they arrive at home and charge at home. You will leave your house every day with a full charge by doing so. Supercharging costs me ~30 cents/kwh, so $10-15 for an 80% charge. Regardless, the costs are so low I don't care either way, I come out ahead versus gasoline (previously $40-60 per fill up) no matter how I charge. I literally don't even think about it when Tesla dings my credit card for Supercharging. It is annoying to use a J1772 public charger (install adapter, swipe Chargepoint card, troubleshoot why the station isn't providing current), so I avoid using those whenever possible.
In the US, you are never more than 150 miles from a Tesla Supercharger, and of course the network will continue to grow over time: https://supercharge.info/map
A motivating example for this is someone who drives the 80 miles from Austin TX to San Antonio to spend the day with friends.
With only a 150mi range EV, a 15-20 min fast charge would be enough to comfortably do the return trip that same day without range anxiety.
Existing gas stations (or parking lots) could serve that use case, which is fairly common in the US, where mid distance trips are almost completely car based.
Today, they could charge the same or lower price/mile-of-range as gasoline and make a large margin, since electricity is less than half the price of gasoline per mile (at retail prices, there's an even bigger difference with wholesale prices).
Why would you buy an EV with 150 miles today, in 2019, when EVs much better than that exist? The "standard" range Tesla Model 3 has 250 miles of range. The Long Range Tesla Model 3 cars is 310 miles whereas the long range Model S does 325 miles of range on a single charge.
You could comfortably do that entire trip on a single charge with existing EVs. Volkswagen is about to release their ID.3, which which has 3 variants ranging from 205-340 miles of range. In a year or two, the range anxiety "problem" with EVs will simply be a noop as EVs will have longer range than most ICE vehicles.
Disclaimer: I own a Model 3 AWD LR and am a big fan, but also own a 2011 Ford Fiesta
The standard Tesla Model 3 costs at minimum $10k more than the entry level Nissan Leaf (which happens to get 150mi range). That's a substantial amount of money for most of the world.
Standard Model 3 is the average price of a new vehicle in the US. 17 million new cars a year in the US, and I assume China is a big market as well with Gigafactory 3 coming online.
Right.. I'm very bullish on Tesla and on EVs in general but I was responding to "Why would anyone buy a similar, lower-range car that's 25% cheaper" which doesn't seem like a complicated question.
Because they are cheaper. And many will by high mileage EVs on the used market. A 200mi EV will have a lower usable range later in it's life, but otherwise work great. For example, I can imagine buying a used Chevy bolt for my kids to use around town 8 years from now.
GM doesn't even make the Volt anymore and it was only ever a car for compliance with federal emissions laws. It might be harder to get parts for it in 8 years as a result. In 8 years I suspect there will be a dearth of really good used EVs on the market, Teslas, Volkswagens, Fords, and Toyotas included.
But on the price you make a good point. That will come down over time as more and more companies make good EVs.
> It might be harder to get parts for it in 8 years as a result
A Volt is a PHEV, which is an ICE+EV, with the associated complexity and wear.
Pure EVs, however have far fewer parts to replace, and put very little wear on those parts. Most of the wearing parts are pretty generic, like tires and brake pads (the latter being replace rarely). AC induction motors also have a very long lifetime.
The most specialized part on an EV that wears the fastest, the battery, is reusable/replaceable.
Already today, there are people taking battery packs from totaled Teslas and installing them in classic cars like the VW bus. There is a shop in southern CA replacing drivetrains in classic cars w/ EV drivetrains [1].
So I can totally see replacement batteries being produced by aftermarket manufacturers for existing EVs in a number of years. Of course the vehicle manufacturers themselves probably won't supply those replacements, but cars aren't mobile phones, and I bet that right-to-repair will resonate with people a lot more with EVs.
How much money does a gas station actually make on fuel, anyway? I would guess most gas stations make more money on junk food than they do on gas itself.
And now compare that to the $0.40/kwh they could charge for a rapid charge session versus the $0.15/kwh retail rate.
Eventually of course that margin will decline as the stations become more common, but stations could also reduce their costs and peak dependence on the grid by using solar plus storage.
If you want to make the attempt as a convenience store, go for it. Drives down the cost of power conversion hardware, and someone else can buy it at auction if you don't make it work.
I enjoy never going to a gas station as an EV owner. It's unlikely I would ever charge at one. I would rather go somewhere I can grab real food while my vehicle charges, or a good cup of coffee, anything but a glorified vending machine that is most gas stations. I could be wrong, and if you can make a business out of it, more power to you.
Outside of the deep South and freeway rest areas in the US, nobody thinks of a gas station as a place you'd want to get food, because people think (perhaps correctly) that gasoline is toxic. Electricity isn't perceived the same way.
Mid to high end hotels and resorts have already installed chargers due to their clientele increasingly driving Teslas. This idea is to work from the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
But if one station is charging 3.69 and another is charging 3.39, should I assume that the one charging more actually paid 30 cents more a gallon, or have that much more for expenses? Or are they making an extra quarter gallon? right now I can go buy regular for anywhere between 3.20 and 3.80, for no apparent reason.
If the profit margin is really only a few cents a gallon, it seems like there should be a big incentive to simply charge an extra $0.05 a gallon.
I've also noticed some stations charge way more for regular, but the same for premium... They just don't have as large a spread, which would in courage people to buy premium.
This is an Oregon, too, where there is a unusual situation for gasoline since people aren't allowed to pump their own and it has resulted, for some reason, in significantly fewer filling stations.
> But if one station is charging 3.69 and another is charging 3.39, should I assume that the one charging more actually paid 30 cents more a gallon, or have that much more for expenses?
Probably a bit of both. Gas is often more expensive in more well off areas, which also usually have fewer gas stations in general, and the rents those stations pay are probably a bit higher too. It's also more near airports, because demand is high for rental car returns.
But part of the higher price is a function of your willingness to drive to a poorer or less convenient part of town to fill cheaper gas in your car. As a younger person on a limited budget I would do that frequently.
But depending on how far away the cheaper gas is (meaning gas used to get there), and the value of your time spent getting there, you might be better off paying a bit more to fill up closer to where you live. That's what I do now, even though it's a $.20 more per gallon.
The prices can somewhat be explained by rent, leaving the margin low. But if they're charging more in well-off areas, and with this spread, it seems quite likely stations can manage to slip another 10-20 cents in there as a profit margin.
Just as government put regulation in to require different standard octane ratings, phase out of leaded etc, I would hope government regulates that some percentage - say 50% of pump space must be devoted to vehicle charging. Requiring enough to cause irritation to ICE vehicle drivers seems an important nudge.
I'm conveniently ignoring any practicality of adequate electricity supply to the petrol station in my sweeping generalisation. :)
There are a number of misunderstandings when it comes to wind and solar I wish more people were aware of.
Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Regardless of whether solar cells become cheaper, it makes energy more expensive as a whole because it makes the energy system more complex and as many might have learned in physics, starting up something take more energy than when it's up and running. This is true for coal plants too and with wind and solar being highly fluctuating and with highly fluctuating demands on the backup sources.
The use of fossil fuel is increasing not decreasing more than wind and solar.
You can't make either windmills or solar cells without fossil fuel.
Wind and solar is only 1% of the worlds energy not projected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040.
Electricity can replace most energy needs. Whatever is left should be minimal (~5% total oil consumption, air travel, chemical processing, steel coking, etc). Coal and nuclear are already not cost competitive, if natural gas can't compete with batteries, it too will be left as a stranded asset. Natural gas is a perfect fit now for renewables, it throttles very fast and ramps every night for the steep duck curve in California. Batteries are even faster. Hundreds of GWs of annual battery production coming online across the world.
Fossil fuels are used for thousands of products everything from medicine to concrete to asphalt to pesticides, to solar cells, to windmills and machinery and manufacturing, etc.
We are not even close to having the battery technology that will work with most things we use fossil fuels for today let alone replace the other products that come from fossil fuels.
Fuel Cells are not even on the drawing board let alone at scale.
With regard to nuclear, it's expensive because it's being demonized which creates all sorts of extra requirements which is part of what make it more expensive. Furhtermore nuclear is calculated at actual cost neither wind or solar is.
Electricity currently supplies 20% of our energy needs.
Please outline how you are planning to, in the next 20-30 years, scale world-wide electricity production, as well as the capacity of the electrical grid by 5x.
Nobody has even the foggiest plan for how that is going to be done. I understand that it's easy to just shrug, and say: "Someone will figure it out". That isn't very comforting to me.
Especially as solar and wind are not consistent (clouds and windless nights etc), so you need to overbuild by large factor, and considering that there is no viable way to store energy, that requires insane overcapacity, on the order of 10-20x of current electricity use.
It's not quite as bad as that, as electricity is a more efficient fuel source for many applications, including heating if you have a heat pump and the cold side isn't a lot colder than your target temperature. For transport it's much more efficient - 1kWh of electricity will get you a few times further than fossil fuels containing 1kWh or energy.
But your point is still valid, we certainly need to more than double grid capacity if we want to rely on electrification to avoid lifestyle changes.
> Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
It depends on how you look at it. Solar and wind energy is absolutely used for growing crops for example. Oil also, of course, for creating fertilizers.
> Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Not really. Availability might be an issue for onshore wind but not for offshore. 200 meters up in the air, out in the North sea it blows a lot! In addition, hydro power can be used to balance out the supply.
One can always conjure some "perfect storm" scenario in which it isn't windy so no wind power, cloudy so no solar power and not enough water so no hydro power and ask what happens then? But what is the probability of such a situation ever occurring? If it is incredibly low, then I don't think it makes sense to consider it.
Do you have any source showing that wind turbines in the north sea can deliver electricity on demand 365d/24h.
Renewable energy is all nice and fine but when it comes to having electricity available at any given time there is a reason why germany has so many coal plants to compensate the slack or why UK taps in France nuclear capacity when brits turn on their water kettle during the ad break.
No electricity source has 100% availability. Nuclear tops out at about 90% so tough luck for the poor Britons that want to drink tea during the remaining 10% of the time.
Modern offshore wind farms features huge wind turbines built dozens of kilometers out in the sea on spots chosen by computer simulations to have optimal wind conditions. They can reach up to 60% utilization meaning that 60% of the time they produce electricity at full capacity. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/04/5-stats-about-offs... Of course that is still lower than nuclear's 90% so what you do is that you build many wind farms. Especially if augmented with hydro power they can be a just as reliable electricity source as nuclear power.
Nuclear tops out at about 90% so tough luck for the poor Britons that want to drink tea during the remaining 10% of the time.
This is extremely disingenious. A particular plant might have 90% availability, but collectively with a handful of plants hitting five-six nines should not be a problem. The crucial thing is that the performance of nuclear plants is uncorrelated: if one plant is not producing power, there are not many situations in which other plant aren't producing power either at the same time. On the other hand, with solar or wind, correlated performance is typical: winter tends to happen to the whole country at the same time, bad weather covers huge swaths of the country, etc. This might be worked around to some degree if your country is huge (like US), but if you're, say, Austria, your only option is nuclear or depending on the neighbors on the most crucial thing you need.
No it is not disingenuous! The point is that the standard of reliability that you require for renewable energy cannot be higher than the one you require for nuclear energy.
You say that a handful of nuclear plants can hit five nines of reliability. Sure, but then you must also consider a network of thousands of wind parks that can also hit five nines of reliability without breaking a sweat. Even assuming a high correlation in wind conditions.
You say that import is not an option because electricity is so critical. But then how come all the world's nuclear power is dependent on imports of uranium from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia? Not to mention oil and food imports.
Is wind power the perfect energy source? No. Is it better than what we have? YES.
It's not low that is the status quo. Wind and solar have a capacity factor of 20-40% why do you think you always need backup from coal, gas, oil or nuclear?
> With solar penetration increasing fast, and so much wind potential, it’s almost impossible not to transition off of fossil fuels rapidly.
How rapidly is it, really?
Solar, wind, and geothermal currently supply 6% of global on-grid electricity consumption.
But on-grid electricity is only 20% of our energy consumption.
Every year, the rate of growth in coal and oil energy is greater than that of all solar deployment world-wide.
The rate of growth in natural gas energy consumption is greater than that of all wind deployment world-wide.
Let this sink in. The increase in the amount of fossil fuels that we burn, year, over-year, is greater than that of all existing solar and wind energy deployment.
Wind and solar deployment is growing fast. But you know what's growing an order of magnitude faster? Fossil fuel use.
Email in profile. I am happy to discuss at length the path forward, but this thread is not the forum. Boils down to market forces and public policy. We are awash in clean energy.
Plastics, other chemicals, and energy density are problematic. I am a huge proponent of renewables but density, distribution, and inability (as of yet) to economically replace chemical feedstocks are the biggest issues I see.
We can also use the excess energy to do carbon capture as I think world moving off carbon wont be fast enough so using excess renewable energy in the future to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
While I would love for that to happen,I still haven't seen an obvious plan on how we're going to manage millions of electric cars in high density cities.
It seems it will take decades before we have a pervasive enough grid, or effective charging techniques.
They’ve already got wind turbines and offshore oil rigs. The compressed air as stored energy under the sea idea uses Kevlar bladders anchored to the sea floor with a hose or pipe going to the surface. It’s not really that far fetched.
How much time have you spent underwater? Such schemes are totally unrealistic maintenance nightmares due to corrosion, encrustation, storms, and difficulty of site access.
The density of water is so much higher than that of air (if you are comparing subsea potential energy storage with compressed air storage onshore). And there is a lot of unused space at the bottom of the sea.
I dont think there's any unused space at the bottom of the ocean, we keep the ocean down there. If you fill that space with air bladders you'll have just raised the sea level by whatever amount of space you inflate the bags with.
Sure, it's not a solution that will scale. As is wind energy: if we cover all the oceans with it, it will influence our climate and probably slow down the rotation of the earth, etc. The point is that a relatively small such storage plant can already store a huge amount of energy - enough to help balance a lot of offshore wind.
You are aware, are you not, that there is 3x as much sea floor as land?
And raising the sea level would take more air than has ever been breathed by the entire taxon of primates. You would never store more air than needed for a day or two of power generation.
> Heat lost to the water (maybe half of the energy input to compressed air) could be reclaimed as the pressure is released, with simple heat exchangers.
Heat lost to the water is lost. If you want to try to avoid that you need to save that heat energy after the compression stage.
I see that you have not thought this through. Yes, some of the heat will not be recoverable, but controlled expansion of highly pressurized air creates a large temperature drop that would readily absorb heat from the ambient water.
As a fun aside, the largest offshore wind farm in the world has just been opened off the UK's east coast. Just a single rotation of one of the 174 turbines can provide an average house with its electricity needs for a day.
That's the Daily Mail's windmill size picture, set beside the Abraj Al-Bait. My hobby is pointing out the existence of this building to people. Please forgive the jpg artifacts and the horrible photoshopping, but the point is, this is to scale. (give or take a few %)
Now, it's not the worlds tallest building per say, but certainly the most collosal thing ever made by mankind. Of course (where else) in Saudi Arabia. As shown schematically in the image, its dimensions are insane x nuts x wtf.
Wow that's ugly (the Saudi hotel not the wind turbine). Totally worth demolishing an ancient fort and levelling the hill it stood on to make room for it. Saudi seems to have no interest at all in preserving any heritage or significant sites.
Newest build turbines are 220m diameter, so 50% larger than that. Those will be used on the Dogger Bank windfarm that, IIRC starts construction next year. I dread to think what will be a state of the art diameter in 2029.
>Totally worth demolishing an ancient fort and levelling the hill it stood on to make room for it.
1780 CE isn't exactly ancient. As to whether it was "worth it," I imagine the intended benefits were more about providing somewhere to accommodate 8 million visitors to the city than the aesthetic preference of skyscrapers to forts. (Though personally, I don't see how it's 'ugly'.)
More recent than I remembered when the reports of the hill being flattened were doing the rounds when it was built, but it doesn't stand alone. Saudi has quite some considerable track record of clearing significant Muslim and historic sites to build yet another slab sided monstrosity[1].
Ugly is subjective, but to my eyes it's a large McMansion. Which would normally imply trying to look more expensive than it is, using random features and jarring or anachronistic details, but in this case with colossal budget that clearly doesn't apply. :)
How many offshore wind farms are there in the US? I heard a radio story a while back about some homeowners in New England pushing back against a proposed wind farm for aesthetic reasons -- not a surprising development but I must say I didn't consider it when thinking about proliferation of turbines.
As of September 2019, the American Wind Energy Association claims there is only one. [1]
> The U.S. currently has one operational offshore wind project with many more on the way. The nation’s first commercial offshore wind project, the Block Island Wind Farm, came online in December 2016. Developed by Deepwater Wind, the Block Island Wind Farm is a 30 megawatt (MW) project with five turbines located three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island.
> According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has a total project pipeline of 25,434 MW of offshore wind energy as of June 2018. This pipeline includes 3,892 MW of project-specific capacity and 21,542 MW of undeveloped lease area potential capacity. Out of this pipeline, project developers have announced that roughly 2,000 MW of new offshore wind capacity is expected to be operational by 2023. States including Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have completed solicitations for nearly 1,770 MW of offshore wind energy, and additional soliciations are planned for the near future.
> The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued twelve active commercial wind energy leases to date. Another four projects have submitted unsolicited lease applications to BOEM, while four demonstration projects have obtained exclusive development rights to a site from federal or state authorities. While a majority of the nearer-term activity is concentrated in the Atlantic off the Northeast coast, projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, in the Pacific off of California and Hawaii, and the Great Lakes.
> With stable policies in place, the Department of Energy found the U.S. could develop a total of 22 GW of offshore wind projects by 2030 and 86 GW by 2050. As we continue to develop this homegrown resource, costs will continue to drop, value to consumers will grow, and the U.S. will see new jobs and investments in manufacturing and port infrastructure.
> I heard a radio story a while back about some homeowners in New England pushing back against a proposed wind farm for aesthetic reasons
That is practically a non-issue with offshore wind. (Yeah, sometimes you can see them from the cost, but really small usually because they're too far out.)
Repealing environmental and permitting laws that allow powerful and wealthy beachfront property landowners to block wind installations is critical toward converting to a green economy.
I was in Maine for 6 months and the takeaway I got was: environmentalists in ME/NH/VT don’t want wind power, don’t want a new power line that would bring clean Quebec hydro power, and they want to shut down the only clean generating nuclear plant in the area. So basically they don’t want electricity.
Is the headline figure here actually kind of small?
| The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of <<cumulative>> investment by 2040.
Averaged over the next 20 years, that's $50 billion per year, or 2.5 percent of oil and gas revenues in 2017[0], or 7 percent of what was invested in oil and gas supply in 2016[1]. I could be thinking about this wrong but it seems like there numbers could have been much more encouraging.
Out of curiosity, what would happen to you if you were swimming in the water nearby and a transmission cable was exposed to seawater? What path would the electricity take in the vastness of open sea?
There would be no electricity, since the automatic safety systems should detect such a failure and break the circuits, similar to what should happen if a cable fails in your bathroom. But assume not, to make it interesting. The way of shortest resistance is probably still through the cable. Or it would all go into the ground. I doubt that there would be any danger to a swimmer (that is not too close). Note that such cables are buried in the ground to protect them, or rocks are deposited on top of them.
When you look this up, you find more estimates than actuals. Wikipedia shows world offshore wind capacity at 18GW as of 1997. If that's nameplate capacity, average output is less, maybe half. There are at least 10 individual nuclear plants in the world with 4GW output or more.
Offshore wind is cheap, but you need dispatchable power or really big batteries somewhere. Tesla's big battery in Australia is about 129MWH. That's enough storage to replace a 12 hour wind lull for 5 large offshore turbines. The battery to wind turbine ratio needs to increase if wind power provides a large fraction of energy.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadI think we should work from the bottom up to turn this case around. Incentivize gas stations to install rapid chargers, which will help to shift car buyers' mindsets. IIRC, gas stations make very little margin on gas anyways.
In an EV future, gas stations are (mostly) a relic (IMHO). Think of the real estate cost savings, the reduction in truck traffic to deliver fuel, etc!
This isn’t economically practical unless you have subsidized charging. It’s significantly cheaper to charge my car at home than it is to use some random public charger.
At home, I charge using power from Exelon's nuclear fleet at 1-6 cents/kwh (Time of Use plan). I want to stress: most people will plug in every time they arrive at home and charge at home. You will leave your house every day with a full charge by doing so. Supercharging costs me ~30 cents/kwh, so $10-15 for an 80% charge. Regardless, the costs are so low I don't care either way, I come out ahead versus gasoline (previously $40-60 per fill up) no matter how I charge. I literally don't even think about it when Tesla dings my credit card for Supercharging. It is annoying to use a J1772 public charger (install adapter, swipe Chargepoint card, troubleshoot why the station isn't providing current), so I avoid using those whenever possible.
In the US, you are never more than 150 miles from a Tesla Supercharger, and of course the network will continue to grow over time: https://supercharge.info/map
With only a 150mi range EV, a 15-20 min fast charge would be enough to comfortably do the return trip that same day without range anxiety.
Existing gas stations (or parking lots) could serve that use case, which is fairly common in the US, where mid distance trips are almost completely car based.
Today, they could charge the same or lower price/mile-of-range as gasoline and make a large margin, since electricity is less than half the price of gasoline per mile (at retail prices, there's an even bigger difference with wholesale prices).
You could comfortably do that entire trip on a single charge with existing EVs. Volkswagen is about to release their ID.3, which which has 3 variants ranging from 205-340 miles of range. In a year or two, the range anxiety "problem" with EVs will simply be a noop as EVs will have longer range than most ICE vehicles.
Disclaimer: I own a Model 3 AWD LR and am a big fan, but also own a 2011 Ford Fiesta
Because they are cheaper. And many will by high mileage EVs on the used market. A 200mi EV will have a lower usable range later in it's life, but otherwise work great. For example, I can imagine buying a used Chevy bolt for my kids to use around town 8 years from now.
But on the price you make a good point. That will come down over time as more and more companies make good EVs.
A Volt is a PHEV, which is an ICE+EV, with the associated complexity and wear.
Pure EVs, however have far fewer parts to replace, and put very little wear on those parts. Most of the wearing parts are pretty generic, like tires and brake pads (the latter being replace rarely). AC induction motors also have a very long lifetime.
The most specialized part on an EV that wears the fastest, the battery, is reusable/replaceable.
Already today, there are people taking battery packs from totaled Teslas and installing them in classic cars like the VW bus. There is a shop in southern CA replacing drivetrains in classic cars w/ EV drivetrains [1]. So I can totally see replacement batteries being produced by aftermarket manufacturers for existing EVs in a number of years. Of course the vehicle manufacturers themselves probably won't supply those replacements, but cars aren't mobile phones, and I bet that right-to-repair will resonate with people a lot more with EVs.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neYuohLzVdg
Eventually of course that margin will decline as the stations become more common, but stations could also reduce their costs and peak dependence on the grid by using solar plus storage.
I enjoy never going to a gas station as an EV owner. It's unlikely I would ever charge at one. I would rather go somewhere I can grab real food while my vehicle charges, or a good cup of coffee, anything but a glorified vending machine that is most gas stations. I could be wrong, and if you can make a business out of it, more power to you.
A model are the gas station restaurants of the deep south USA:
https://www.southernliving.com/travel/gas-station-restaurant...
Outside of the deep South and freeway rest areas in the US, nobody thinks of a gas station as a place you'd want to get food, because people think (perhaps correctly) that gasoline is toxic. Electricity isn't perceived the same way.
Mid to high end hotels and resorts have already installed chargers due to their clientele increasingly driving Teslas. This idea is to work from the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
If the profit margin is really only a few cents a gallon, it seems like there should be a big incentive to simply charge an extra $0.05 a gallon.
I've also noticed some stations charge way more for regular, but the same for premium... They just don't have as large a spread, which would in courage people to buy premium.
This is an Oregon, too, where there is a unusual situation for gasoline since people aren't allowed to pump their own and it has resulted, for some reason, in significantly fewer filling stations.
Probably a bit of both. Gas is often more expensive in more well off areas, which also usually have fewer gas stations in general, and the rents those stations pay are probably a bit higher too. It's also more near airports, because demand is high for rental car returns.
But part of the higher price is a function of your willingness to drive to a poorer or less convenient part of town to fill cheaper gas in your car. As a younger person on a limited budget I would do that frequently.
But depending on how far away the cheaper gas is (meaning gas used to get there), and the value of your time spent getting there, you might be better off paying a bit more to fill up closer to where you live. That's what I do now, even though it's a $.20 more per gallon.
I'm conveniently ignoring any practicality of adequate electricity supply to the petrol station in my sweeping generalisation. :)
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/26/773446805/gas-station-convert...
Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Regardless of whether solar cells become cheaper, it makes energy more expensive as a whole because it makes the energy system more complex and as many might have learned in physics, starting up something take more energy than when it's up and running. This is true for coal plants too and with wind and solar being highly fluctuating and with highly fluctuating demands on the backup sources.
The use of fossil fuel is increasing not decreasing more than wind and solar.
You can't make either windmills or solar cells without fossil fuel.
Wind and solar is only 1% of the worlds energy not projected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...
In other words, fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
We are not even close to having the battery technology that will work with most things we use fossil fuels for today let alone replace the other products that come from fossil fuels.
Fuel Cells are not even on the drawing board let alone at scale.
With regard to nuclear, it's expensive because it's being demonized which creates all sorts of extra requirements which is part of what make it more expensive. Furhtermore nuclear is calculated at actual cost neither wind or solar is.
Electricity currently supplies 20% of our energy needs.
Please outline how you are planning to, in the next 20-30 years, scale world-wide electricity production, as well as the capacity of the electrical grid by 5x.
Nobody has even the foggiest plan for how that is going to be done. I understand that it's easy to just shrug, and say: "Someone will figure it out". That isn't very comforting to me.
But your point is still valid, we certainly need to more than double grid capacity if we want to rely on electrification to avoid lifestyle changes.
It depends on how you look at it. Solar and wind energy is absolutely used for growing crops for example. Oil also, of course, for creating fertilizers.
> Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Not really. Availability might be an issue for onshore wind but not for offshore. 200 meters up in the air, out in the North sea it blows a lot! In addition, hydro power can be used to balance out the supply.
One can always conjure some "perfect storm" scenario in which it isn't windy so no wind power, cloudy so no solar power and not enough water so no hydro power and ask what happens then? But what is the probability of such a situation ever occurring? If it is incredibly low, then I don't think it makes sense to consider it.
You can't take fossil fuels out and do the same.
Intermittency and capacity factor is always an issue also for offshore plus the actual loss of energy over large distances is a real issue too.
Modern offshore wind farms features huge wind turbines built dozens of kilometers out in the sea on spots chosen by computer simulations to have optimal wind conditions. They can reach up to 60% utilization meaning that 60% of the time they produce electricity at full capacity. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/04/5-stats-about-offs... Of course that is still lower than nuclear's 90% so what you do is that you build many wind farms. Especially if augmented with hydro power they can be a just as reliable electricity source as nuclear power.
This is extremely disingenious. A particular plant might have 90% availability, but collectively with a handful of plants hitting five-six nines should not be a problem. The crucial thing is that the performance of nuclear plants is uncorrelated: if one plant is not producing power, there are not many situations in which other plant aren't producing power either at the same time. On the other hand, with solar or wind, correlated performance is typical: winter tends to happen to the whole country at the same time, bad weather covers huge swaths of the country, etc. This might be worked around to some degree if your country is huge (like US), but if you're, say, Austria, your only option is nuclear or depending on the neighbors on the most crucial thing you need.
You say that a handful of nuclear plants can hit five nines of reliability. Sure, but then you must also consider a network of thousands of wind parks that can also hit five nines of reliability without breaking a sweat. Even assuming a high correlation in wind conditions.
You say that import is not an option because electricity is so critical. But then how come all the world's nuclear power is dependent on imports of uranium from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia? Not to mention oil and food imports.
Is wind power the perfect energy source? No. Is it better than what we have? YES.
So yes its pretty disingenuous . Nuclear is a backup for wind and solar, not the other way around.
How rapidly is it, really?
Solar, wind, and geothermal currently supply 6% of global on-grid electricity consumption.
But on-grid electricity is only 20% of our energy consumption.
Every year, the rate of growth in coal and oil energy is greater than that of all solar deployment world-wide.
The rate of growth in natural gas energy consumption is greater than that of all wind deployment world-wide.
Let this sink in. The increase in the amount of fossil fuels that we burn, year, over-year, is greater than that of all existing solar and wind energy deployment.
Wind and solar deployment is growing fast. But you know what's growing an order of magnitude faster? Fossil fuel use.
My guess is that it won't even be 2% by 2040.
It heats the salt up to 1050 degrees where it is essentially a liquid and uses that to produce steam to turn a turbine.
It seems it will take decades before we have a pervasive enough grid, or effective charging techniques.
But the maximum potential for offshore wind production is more than 120,000 gigawatts, or 11 times projected global electricity demand in 2040..
Heat lost to the water (maybe half of the energy input to compressed air) could be reclaimed as the pressure is released, with simple heat exchangers.
No it's not. It's a solved problem.
Has been at least since way back when I was at Halliburton.
In fact, they're almost the same pumps, mechanically speaking.
You are aware, are you not, that there is 3x as much sea floor as land?
And raising the sea level would take more air than has ever been breathed by the entire taxon of primates. You would never store more air than needed for a day or two of power generation.
Heat lost to the water is lost. If you want to try to avoid that you need to save that heat energy after the compression stage.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-w...
The size comparison: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/06/13/14/4D2F6ADC000...
That's the Daily Mail's windmill size picture, set beside the Abraj Al-Bait. My hobby is pointing out the existence of this building to people. Please forgive the jpg artifacts and the horrible photoshopping, but the point is, this is to scale. (give or take a few %)
Now, it's not the worlds tallest building per say, but certainly the most collosal thing ever made by mankind. Of course (where else) in Saudi Arabia. As shown schematically in the image, its dimensions are insane x nuts x wtf.
EDIT: fix image link
Newest build turbines are 220m diameter, so 50% larger than that. Those will be used on the Dogger Bank windfarm that, IIRC starts construction next year. I dread to think what will be a state of the art diameter in 2029.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/01/worlds-l...
I'll follow his line, and call the Markaz al Mamlaka in Riyadh a Saudi Orthanc for completeness
1780 CE isn't exactly ancient. As to whether it was "worth it," I imagine the intended benefits were more about providing somewhere to accommodate 8 million visitors to the city than the aesthetic preference of skyscrapers to forts. (Though personally, I don't see how it's 'ugly'.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajyad_Fortress
Ugly is subjective, but to my eyes it's a large McMansion. Which would normally imply trying to look more expensive than it is, using random features and jarring or anachronistic details, but in this case with colossal budget that clearly doesn't apply. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_early_Islamic_h...
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d0/80/35/d08035e818165925562b836e7...
> The U.S. currently has one operational offshore wind project with many more on the way. The nation’s first commercial offshore wind project, the Block Island Wind Farm, came online in December 2016. Developed by Deepwater Wind, the Block Island Wind Farm is a 30 megawatt (MW) project with five turbines located three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island.
> According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has a total project pipeline of 25,434 MW of offshore wind energy as of June 2018. This pipeline includes 3,892 MW of project-specific capacity and 21,542 MW of undeveloped lease area potential capacity. Out of this pipeline, project developers have announced that roughly 2,000 MW of new offshore wind capacity is expected to be operational by 2023. States including Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have completed solicitations for nearly 1,770 MW of offshore wind energy, and additional soliciations are planned for the near future.
> The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued twelve active commercial wind energy leases to date. Another four projects have submitted unsolicited lease applications to BOEM, while four demonstration projects have obtained exclusive development rights to a site from federal or state authorities. While a majority of the nearer-term activity is concentrated in the Atlantic off the Northeast coast, projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, in the Pacific off of California and Hawaii, and the Great Lakes.
> With stable policies in place, the Department of Energy found the U.S. could develop a total of 22 GW of offshore wind projects by 2030 and 86 GW by 2050. As we continue to develop this homegrown resource, costs will continue to drop, value to consumers will grow, and the U.S. will see new jobs and investments in manufacturing and port infrastructure.
[1] https://www.awea.org/Awea/media/About-AWEA/U-S-Offshore-Wind...
That is practically a non-issue with offshore wind. (Yeah, sometimes you can see them from the cost, but really small usually because they're too far out.)
Repealing environmental and permitting laws that allow powerful and wealthy beachfront property landowners to block wind installations is critical toward converting to a green economy.
| The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of <<cumulative>> investment by 2040.
Averaged over the next 20 years, that's $50 billion per year, or 2.5 percent of oil and gas revenues in 2017[0], or 7 percent of what was invested in oil and gas supply in 2016[1]. I could be thinking about this wrong but it seems like there numbers could have been much more encouraging.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030915/what-percent... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iea-energy-investment/ele...
Offshore wind is cheap, but you need dispatchable power or really big batteries somewhere. Tesla's big battery in Australia is about 129MWH. That's enough storage to replace a 12 hour wind lull for 5 large offshore turbines. The battery to wind turbine ratio needs to increase if wind power provides a large fraction of energy.