>Apparently, most shipping routes tend to hug the coast and make cargo or maintenance stops anyway, and so this won’t really be a big change from current practice.
It's hard to get a sense of what the majority is from that, but it seems like there's a lot of ships that are hugging the shorelines and a lot that aren't.
It's not clear to me. If you're able to estimate the fraction of cargo shipped on short-haul coastal routes from that picture, can you share what number you arrived at and how?
To me it looks like ships go either in straight shortest lines, some great circle or some known current. There appears to be lot of coast hugging, but there is actually very little stopping there.
That map actually makes me think the statement is true. Even if there are a bunch of ships crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific, the really thick streams of ships mostly stick close to land. The only heavily-trafficked routes that stray far from land are the Singapore - South Africa route and to a lesser extent the South Africa - Brazil routes.
There are certainly remaining routes that might not be well-served by the "electric short hop" strategy, but I think most of the world's shipping routes could be amenable to Fleetzero's electrification plan.
The author does not consider nuclear shipping vessels, while this is the right electric for long routes, such as Trans-Pacific: it allows for good utilization of reactor output, shave delivery times at no additional operational costs and it's nearly free from CO2 emissions (direct or indirect).
To my layperson self, it seems like that would be a bad idea.
We know how to secure a reactor on land, but the sea is a big, dangerous place - and it's only a matter of time before some cost cutting idiot blows up a ship because they wanted a bigger bonus.
Nuclear reactors are arguably a lot safer (in terms of meltdown risk) on the ocean than they already are on land, seeing as how they're in ships that float on a giant planet-wide heatsink that also happens to be exceptionally good at confining radiation.
The more pertinent risk would be piracy and the like; if thorium ever catches on, it'd probably help make that less of an issue.
There is never going to be a civilian-controlled ship with a nuclear reactor and nuclear fuel floating freely in international waters and docking at random ports. And no country's military is going to escort one around the world transporting consumer junk.
Regardless of cost, which itself makes this whole idea impossible, nuclear-powered container ships are simply not a possibility for this reason (and in fact the link you shared doesn't even mention them).
It isn't about the tech. Ice-breakers are owned and operated directly or indirectly by some military or government agency, and stay in remote areas in a country's own waters.
Do you think any Chinese or Russian-built nuclear container ship is going to be able to dock in the port of Los Angeles or New York (the two busiest in the country)?
Los Angeles not allowing a nuclear container ship to dock: this is quite likely, but can be either dealt with (for example, by transferring containers to small battery-powered container ships in international waters close to LA for the last leg) or by continuing emitting megatons of CO2 to appease Emotional Greens (as opposed to Rational Greens) in California.
(Edited to remove an incorrect statement - sorry!)
Hmm, I consider myself a “rational green” in favor of nuclear power, but I’m not sure I think nuclear reactors operated by foreign companies in a highly competitive industry that booms and busts with tight margins is a good idea.
I share the same feelings. The thing is that these foreign companies won't ask the US for permission. And if it's profitable, they will (eventually) do it.
Yes, such ships will likely have to stay away from the US territorial waters, but there's plenty of routes where this won't be a problem.
As for tight margins: fuel costs represent 50%-60% of overall costs ([1]) and if these expenses are replaced with CapEx (hopefully, benefiting from economy of scale), then the tight operational margins suddenly become amazing, and there's a room for quality.
> Yes, such ships will likely have to stay away from the US territorial waters
if it turns out that such shipping via nuclear reactors is much more cost efficient (including all currently externalized costs such as emissions), then the US will have no choice but to accept it - or be uncompetitive in the global markets.
I’m with you. It’s why I don’t look forward to autonomous airplanes. I firmly believe airlines would have “acceptable losses” that include passengers if they didn’t have two really hard to replace people sitting in the front.
A container ship can carry up to 24,000 containers. Even if they don't build to the max size, it still takes 1-3 days to unload an average container ship on the shore using the giant container cranes. I can't imagine how long it would take to unload at sea onto smaller vessels but there's pretty much no way it's going to be economical with technology available in the next 20 years.
I agree that the old way of doing things won't work.
How about hundreds of cargo drones capable of lifting containers to transfer them from one ship to another? Something like this: https://www.cognitiveseeds.com/395-2/
Don't forget - a nuclear-powered ship that's not moving has a lot of free electricity: enough to charge all the drones (likely, bearing supercapacitors, as their flight from one ship to another will be very short)
It's interesting how further up someone accused people of opposing nuclear energy for ideological reasons and then read proposals like this, which are completely removed from reality.
Building drones that can lift containers from cargoships requires electricity/energy storage densities that are so far beyond anything realistic. A container can weigh up to 28 tonnes, there was exactly one helicopter that could carry this kind of load the Mil Mi-12 and that looked really more like a plane. Moreover if we would have those kind of densities why would we even use nuclear ships?
>It's interesting how further up someone accused people of opposing nuclear energy for ideological reasons and then read proposals like this, which are completely removed from reality.
Let's see. There are two variables here in regards to power subsystem: power and energy capacity. Let's start with the power:
>A container can weigh up to 28 tonnes, there was exactly one helicopter that could carry this kind of load the Mil Mi-12 and that looked really more like a plane.
According to ([1]), we need around 0.28 kW/kg of thrust. Assuming that the drone weights twice more than a container, we need to have a lift of around 84 tonnes-force minimum, and ~100 tonnes-force in reality. That translates to 0.28 * 10^5 kW = 28 MW. This is close to what Mi-12 had (19.2 MW).
LTO batteries from Toshiba ([2]) advertise 3.5 kW/kg of energy density, which gives us 28 MW/3.5 kW/kg = 800 kg of batteries. Reasonable, given that our budget for drone dry weight is 56 tonnes.
Let's consider the energy capacity. To transfer a container from one ship to another standing 200 meters apart moving at 10 km/h, we would need 144 seconds for roundtrip. Let's make it 300 seconds for redundancy.
28 MW * 300 seconds = 2333 kWh. At 84 Wh/kg ([2]), we get 27.8 tonnes of batteries. Not great, but within out weight budget of 56 tonnes.
The gotcha here that I see is the longevity of these batteries (they are rated for 8000 cycles). Do you see any other issues? I mean, basic physics seems to allow for such drones (not saying it's trivial to make).
Issue number 1 is cost. At $100 per kwh, each of these drones will cost a quarter million dollars (just for the batteries). Also, since each trip will require recharge, if we assume that the batteries can charge at 500kw (which is really high), it will take about 5 hours to transfer 1 container. That seems pretty much untenable.
Cost on its own is rarely an issue. The thing that matters is payback time.
If one container move generates $10, and the drone moves 12 containers per hour, 12 hours a day, it will only take 6 months to earn the quarter of million mentioned.
Also, it might actually sound like a very cheap option compared to the ship-to-shore container cranes, which cost $20M-$40M each: https://www.freightcourse.com/port-cranes/
As for recharging: if our power train is 28 MW, why not charging it at the same speed as we discharge it? Why settle on 500 kW, which is really low? For comparison, Tesla supercharger is up to 300 kW, and a car is a much smaller EV.
25 MW charging sounds great, but that does restrict you to 4 drones charging at a time per nuclear reactor (comparing to reactors used on carriers), which might be a little bit limiting (not to mention that making a battery that can be charged this quickly without overheating would be a triumph of engineering). Also your example of 12 containers per hour 12 hours a day for 6 months would be 26000 recharges, which is roughly 3x as long as the battery will last given current battery technology. In other words, this workload would require spending somewhere around $1M per year in batteries for a drone that takes roughly 12 minutes to unload a container. For comparison, a port crane, can unload 30 to 50 containers an hour, and will use far less electricity since it is lifting 1/3rd the weight (and isn't hovering).
Yes, the battery lifespan is the big issue (as pointed out in my original post).
As for charging at 28 MW: might work, given that the battery is physically larger, so there's more space to dissipate heat. I agree that it's not proven by the napkin math that it's doable.
What I really suspect is that if Los Angeles refuses to accept nuclear container ships, Mexico would let them in, and then the regular railway will be used to move them to the US. A much simpler solution. :)
I know this has been a couple of days ago, but still meant to reply. Regarding your numbers, not that that ~3.5 kW of _power_ density is for 10s when the charge is _at least 50%_. Moving back and forth between two ships is also likely more than 300s, they can't just let the containers drop, they have to be carefully placed. A bigger issue is that you can't just scale the numbers of a 500g battery up to 800kg, I mean just getting the heat away will require significant effort. There is a reason the Tesla battery is ~500kg.
But the biggest issue is is recharge, you can't recharge every 5 min. I mean how many of those drones are you going to employ? I mean a panamax class ship has 5000 containers. So either you need 5000 of those drones (good luck with them managing the off-onloading in 5 min) or some small subfraction, which then need to be recharged. Even if we assume we need to only move 500 containers (and use 500 drones), That means we either need to recharge 500 2333kWh batteries in 300s, how are you going to do that out on the ocean, or more likely you have 5 drones operating which need to work for 100 times as long, which increases you weight by 100. It just doesn't add up.
I assume that the majority of the cost would be to design and build nuclear ships. And it's still worth it, as fuel is 50%-60% of operational costs.
As for drones to handle cases of ports which don't allow nuclear ships to dock: this is just a potential workaround. I kind of guess, that they will just focus on other ports first, and then eventually (like, in 5-10 years timeframe) everyone calms down and just allows such ships to dock in LA / NY / other US ports.
It's one thing to do something completely counter productive like using gasoline powered drones to unload/load your electric ship. It's another to assume that the same capability can even be offered by electric drones.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with port cranes.
Yes, port cranes are much better, if they can be used. The drones are suggested as a potential alternative to handle "LA does not allow nuclear ships to dock", so that a transfer from a nuclear- to battery-powered container ship happens in the international waters.
As for can be offered: we're talking about moving a container from ship to ship which stand just hundreds meters away. The physics / math works, see my other comment.
Why though make batteries the size weight and shape of shipping containers charge them in ports then the ships can replace empty batteries with charged batteries just like they do containers. I think the world would prefer that over a few thousand nuclear powered ships 1 ship wreck away from making the world sea nuclear contaminated. Which if you understand the water cycle would mean the whole world is nuclear contaminated
I don't think you realize just how big the sea is and how good it is at containing radiation. Heck, we're even figuring out how to mine uranium from seawater, because it's already in there.
I guess if you get the design to where it acts like a giant battery that is nearly impossible to tamper with it could work fine. Of course the political will to even try to do that doesn't exist.
The problem isn't building them it's operating them. This is not a technical problem and there can be no technical solution to it.
If you have the access and ability to safely operate a nuclear reactor you also have the access and ability to operate it very unsafely if you choose to. There is no way around this that doesn't also remove your ability to operate it safely.
Your second paragraph is phrased as a fact, but it's an opinion. It's probably true today, but it can't actually be a factual statement, because we don't know what we don't know.
The Chinese and Russian ships will dock in their own ports and the ports of poorer countries until the rich westerners get over themselves and realize it's not that bad.
The link I shared is about a Chinese nuclear icebreaker that is supposed to lead container ships behind. Then there's no difference in terms of security if there's just one nuclear ship in a caravan or all of them.
Like I said in another comment, every single such vessel in existence (the container ship you linked and all the ice breakers) is owned and operated by the Russian government and operates in Russian-controlled waters (or has an escort). This is not a model that can be used for global shipping.
You have a point. Let's wait until China deploys their fleet. Going to be a long wait (15-20 years), but it is my strong belief that they will do it. I might be proven wrong, of course.
As suggested in a sister comment, a nuclear reactor is such a highly sought piece of tech that you need an aircraft carrier built around it to protect it from snatching by somebody who wants to start building nukes.
You can, of course, use nuclear energy to run your ships, and even trucks and planes.
Use the nuclear energy (both the electricity and heat) to produce fuel from CO₂ and H₂O. Use this fuel in your jet engines and colossal diesel motors. Burning it is carbon-neutral.
Oil should become much more expensive though, and building of nuclear facilities, much more cost-efficient, for this to become economically viable.
State != military, though. For instance, all France nuclear power plants are operated by Électricité de France (EDF) that is substantially owned by the French Government, with around 85% shares in government hands ([1]).
I don't see a problem having nuclear container ships to be operated by civilian governmental agencies / state-owned enterprises. This might not work for the US, but we often have very unique ways of doing things.
i suppose these ships only use Soviet / Russian ports, and mostly don't operate in high seas. Icebreakers do operate in high seas, but getting close to them is a bit hard due to ice and polar weather.
The more interesting example is NS Savannah [1], which indeed crossed oceans unattended, and was accepted at European ports.
Of those, the icebreakers have been commercially successful due to logistics of fueling in the attic and the heavy fuel needs of ice breaking (both solved by a reactor that only needs to be refueled once every few years).
Assuming you mean for shipping containers, I think one issue there is that sailboats tend to tilt a lot, which you can't do if you have a lot of containers on your deck. Might be possible to design container ships where all the shipping containers are inside the ship instead.
Good, but I wonder if there isn't still a moment/torque reaction to cause some tilting, and those towers also preclude packing the deck with containers.
I've seen vaporware like this since I was a kid in the 90s. Talk is cheap, slick renderings are cheap. Is there _any_ mostly-wind-powered vessel in active, revenue-generating, trans-oceanic cargo service? Container or otherwise? Maybe something like the Maltese Falcon / Black Pearl?
Yes, there are also cargo ship kites, but those only work as a small adjunct to a big diesel engine.
Whoever wants to work on a project like this should build a scale model IMO. Start with a small remote-controlled thing, then build a small ship that carries just one or a handful of containers or trucks to demonstrate the principle.
To go back to the lawnmower; 4 wheel drive is something that is entirely possible with electric, where most have 2 wheel (front wheel is cheapest) open drive. Come to an angled hill and they slip. Electric and a small computer for the wheels and you can lock a differential or 2 without causing irreversible load on the single motor.
There induction stove improves compared to the gas stove, but touch buttons go too far.
Ebikes and scooters are definitely capable of reimagining transportation, if we can get the scary cars reduced on the same infrastructure.
Electric is the future. Everything can be electric AND good.
Bought a house a year ago. The house (oddly enough) had a huge propane tank out back wired exclusively for the two stoves.. in addition to oil heat. So, when I moved in, my house had oil, propane, and electric service. No gas line. (Eastern Massachusetts, so, winter low temps around 0F but rarely below 5F).
My propane tank emptied after a month and the company said the tank itself was at end of life. A new tank would not be cheap. So I decided to cut the cord and replace my two stoves with electric ones.. and they’re awesome! I don’t think they’re quite as good as gas, but I can boil water in minutes, and I won’t blow my house up. The safety trade off is worth the reduced responsiveness.
Heat- installed a heat pump and it’s WAY better than the oil heat radiators. So much quieter and I can control each room independently. I like my office at 72, my wife at 68, that’s completely doable. Oh, and I’m saving a fortune on oil, plus I get air conditioning.
What kind of stove do you now have? I’ve had coil (trash), ceramic (still trash) and induction (amazing, and way better than gas, at the cost of needing compatible cookware) - I’d never voluntarily to back to gas.
It’s resistive. Not sure the exact tech. All I know is, I’ve had electric stoves that suck ass, and this one does not. It heats up fast, and I’m not noticing a huge performance difference over my old gas range.
The biggest difference is that you can nor just cut the power like gas. You need to (horror of horrors!) move the pan off the heating element to dramatically cut the heat.
This is going to be a continuing issue for companies unless they agree on some proper tech branding. (I don't get why they haven't yet) There's a ridiculous difference in various types of electric stoves and people with good/bad experience with them rarely say which one it is beyond "electric". But with the available options it feels like "I had a yellow car, and really liked / didn't like it".
Modern induction stoves really are a massive leap from things you could get a decade ago. You can even get ones that work with woks. A trip through a few newer airbnbs on an island with very few gas lines was a serious revelation for me. From the article:
> except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive
Which basically ignores modern induction stoves which also don't heat up and are more responsive for thick-bottom pans! Which is the essence of the article - going further than "we'll make the job hot but with electricity".
Not op, I agree that open coils are trash, IR are usable, induction is nice, but I can't say it is better than gas. A gas stove designed for wok use is amazing. I bought a house with electric and had the gas line extended into the kitchen for a new stove.
The stove I bought has great dynamic range, which is helped by a safety feature that monitors conductivity through the plasma between the igniter and the frame, and re-lights the gas if it blows out.
Of all the electric stoves I've used I've liked the open coils the best, although I've never used an induction one.
Now I've a fancy glass top with one burner that takes forever to warm and then blasts through the desired temperature and incinerates the food, and three anemic burners that do very little.
Thermador Gas Cooktop 30" Stainless Steel SGSP305TS [1]
I was not planning to spend that much, but I'm glad I did. I was replacing an obsolete 32 inch cooktop, which had a roughly 31.5 inch cutout in the counter. I found out that this 30 inch cooktop actually covers about 31 inches of counter, more than any of the others that I saw. I epoxied a stainless steel shim to narrow the opening on the far side of the cooktop. It looks good and works well.
I chose this model in particular since it has a high power center burner. With a lightweight steel wok you can make great stir fry with good temperature control.
You can buy an induction stove/burner designed for wok use too… These aren’t as popular in the states because - surprise - most people don’t cook with woks.
Why not hydrogen? Hydrogen's weakness is volume and cost; but for shipping neither of those is a huge concern. Batteries are more efficient but given the scale for shipping that may not be as much
Shipping is more likely to use methanol, which is derived from hydrogen, than anything else. Cargo ships are already in the process of being converted over.
With this concept, you could replace the shipping containers containing batteries with ones containing hydrogen fuel cells. That way, as the technology improves the source of power can change.
Agree with the general principle, but it is important to identify what aspects of a current product's design is shaped specifically by fossil fuel dependency and what evolved independent of it.
If you threw away all preconceived notions of how a car should look and feel and spent an unlimited amount of time and money to design a new perfect one based around electric power, it would...still look very similar to any other car on the market today. The reason is that the design of a passenger car (and all of the infrastructure around it) has evolved over many centuries independent of its power source – from a horse drawn carriage to a Ford Model T to a Tesla.
Barring the power source, you'll still have a beefy suspension and a bed in the back with a squashed looking frontend to keep the exterior dimensions reasonable on a truck.
Part of the reason why all cars seem to look the same nowadays is that maximizing aerodynamics, passenger safety, interior volume, and comfort doesn’t leave the designer a lot of room to work with. Very little of the “sameness” is driven by the propulsion mechanism; EVs are already becoming similar but with a frunk.
Yes and honestly, I think many people are not interested in buying and driving around in a "weird looking" electric car. Tesla, Ford, et al have been improving this and consumer acceptance. (Well unsure about the Cybertruck)
You can look at a Smart car to see what a minimally viable passenger compartment looks like. VW made Beetles and buses with rear engines. A lot of modern cars don't have very big engine compartments, you need crumple zones, and aerodynamics are probably better with modern shapes, so yeah, I don't see cars looking all that different.
To your point, they're not even that different from stagecoaches--two people across, similar size.
A minor correction. Much of the design of cars is about projecting the concept of safety - people buy escalades and other big cars because they feel safer in them - that fear is driven by the 30k deaths per year and many more serious injuries. I believe that safer designed roads and slower speeds would lead to very different vehicles.
Personally I think a 30-40kph speed cap within the city would save thousands of lives, make cars cheaper and smaller, make everyone less stressed out, allow more people to be comfortable using alternate modes of transportation (bikes, scooters, etc) and would probably add well under 5min to most journeys (traffic being the limiting factor 90% of the time)
Well, we do this with passenger trains as well. American trains share track with with heavy freight trains (and might collide with), and so are built to much different standards than European passenger trains that have dedicated tracks (or new exclusive use while they are running).
The German rail system is also built with the assumption of tracks being shared by passenger and freight trains, with very few exceptions.
Trains are generally not really designed to collide with anything at all (except maybe the occasional suicidal deer or human, but I doubt that this requires any particular design considerations), certainly not "train A is only designed to deal with stray passenger cars whereas train B should be able to deal with heavy freight".
What might be a design issue, more for the network and operation procedures than for the rolling stock is confidence about not meeting anything like a stray car. Different approaches exist, including train-side boxes on the last car or axle counters in the network.
> Trains are generally not really designed to collide with anything at all
American trains seem to suffer this more than others. Given that freight trains have priority on most of America's rail lines (which the freight companies own), that might have something to do with it.
I suspect if you threw away all preconceived notions of local mobility and started with maximizing {effectiveness/efficiency/carbon/infrastructure costs/real estate/ healthcare/economic benefit/commute times/ opportunity costs} rather than an individual car you would end up with rapid on demand transit (think publicly funded ride-share minivans, light rail, bus rapid transit, autonomous golf carts, e-bikes and biking infrastructure) for moving people by default. Beyond that, you'd also see 15 minute neighborhoods where essentials are all walkable, and remote work for many commuters. Networked local mobility, denser mixed use planning, and hybrid work all do better at some of the same jobs that cars do today.
Electric cars seem more about saving the car industry ecosystem, under the guise of saving the planet.
I recognize a valid counterpoint is that because we already have car infrastructure* BEVs are a drop-in replacement culturally and physically where transit, urban planning, and remote work all require more systemic change and have long timelines and NIMBYism. Electric vehicles also make sense in most fleet situations (delivery, school buses, trucking). The backwards-compatability argument makes sense in the short term, but misses the sort of step change needed to recalibrate western lifestyles to become both resilient and sustainable.
In the end, while BEVs are better than gasoline cars, and they may provide a stepping stone, the real investments must go well beyond the default individual car ownership model--to considering designing the best local mobility experience as a network and services rather than a thing parked in your drive.
This is where user experience and service design can make a profound climate impact, in creating better, more desirable mobility experiences as alternatives to car ownership.
Acronyms:
BEV = Battery Electric Vehicle = electric car
NIMBYism - Not In My Backyard-ism. The tendency of property owners to push against urban densification, rapid transit, and similar efforts in their neighborhoods.
> I suspect if you threw away all preconceived notions of local mobility and started with maximizing {effectiveness/efficiency/carbon/infrastructure costs/real estate/ healthcare/economic benefit/commute times/ opportunity costs} rather than an individual car you would end up with rapid on demand transit (think publicly funded ride-share minivans, light rail, bus rapid transit, autonomous golf carts, e-bikes and biking infrastructure) for moving people by default. Beyond that, you'd also see 15 minute neighborhoods where essentials are all walkable, and remote work for many commuters. Networked local mobility, denser mixed use planning, and hybrid work all do better at some of the same jobs that cars do today.
Yeah, sure, you'd see a lot of public transport in dense areas.
However I disagree that the population would all be housed in dense housing.
The only reason dense centers exist is because its walkable, bikable, etc. People who don't want to live in dense areas would still exist in significant enough numbers that the automobile as we know it would still exist.
Densification occurred prior to the automobile; it was not sufficient to prevent the invention of the automobile as we know it.
> The only reason dense centers exist is because its walkable, bikable, etc. People who don't want to live in dense areas would still exist in significant enough numbers that the automobile as we know it would still exist
That's not axiomatic. Commuter rail systems address this - there's a heavy rail line going through low density places, with infrastructure centered around that - be it bike lanes and racks, bus lines, or worst case scenario car parkings. The last mile problem can be solved in a variety of ways even in low density environments ( and FYI has been solved in many places around the world - e.g. in Paris the RER network continues to what are literally villages with houses, with population in the hundreds, with big parking lots and some other related infrastructure, and bus lines going there. So even if you live in a big house with a yard, you can bike, walk, take the bus, use your e-scooter or whatever to get to the train station which takes you to where you need to go).
Sure, but using public transport is a heavy trade-off in time. Where I am now, at peak hour a train (to my chosen destination) arrives every 15m. The bus/shuttle to the nearest station arrives as often as they can, which can be between 10m and 15m.
My last trip (from suburbs to a CBD +-20km away) during peak hour involved 30m total of waiting for the next shuttle/bus/train. That's 30m without the actual time in transit (on the train its quite fast - about 10m transit. On the bus, it is not, about 15m transit because it has many stops to make).
The next day I drove instead, and took a total of 30m to get to my destination.
Commuter transit systems work wonderfully for people who want to do things during transit but otherwise have no other use of their time.
For me, and a lot of people who opted to live in child-friend homes in child-friendly suburbs, an extra 60m-90m spent in transit is 60m-90m of time we lost with our family.
I don't care that I can read during that time; I can always simply read after my kid has gone to bed after all. I care that I get to spend those few extra hours per day with my kid.
This time trade-off is the main reason that pushes me to still have a car despite living right next to a bus stop and having good light rail nearby. Sure, when I need to go all the way downtown its nice having the light rail so I don't have to deal with parking, but on day to day kind of trips adding the time of riding the bus is quite a tradeoff compared to just driving there myself.
This is before pointing out that while there are daycares, there are grocery stores, there are restaurants available easily by the bus or by bike, there are far more options readily available by car and maybe its not fun carrying a week's worth of food for a family with me on the bus. And then there are people I like to visit who don't live near public transit, so choosing to go without a car means I wouldn't be able to visit them regularly.
Owning and operating a car is definitely expensive. I could technically live my life without a car, its entirely feasible from my location. However the time, ease, and freedom tradeoffs make car ownership still make sense for me. I still ultimately prioritized living in an area with decent mass transit and love to take it when it makes sense. I know people who do rely on the public transit for every day transportation, and I'm happy they're able to visit me easily and I'm perfectly fine with subsidizing it.
EDIT: I just looked up a normal trip I take on Google Maps to double check transit times in comparison to driving. 10 minute drive. 30 minute bike ride. 1 hour bus trip. Another common trip: 10 minute drive, 30 minute bike ride, 30 minute bus ride. Even for the shorter one, that's 40 minutes round-trip not counting on waiting for the bus for a trip I normally do weekly. That's about 33 hours a year of extra waiting for just that one route.
Electro Magnetic Pulses? The thing that requires us to detonate a nuclear weapon to create at any meaningful scale? No. I wouldn’t worry about that at all.
Besides, if we somehow managed to create an EMP above your city and not set off a full scale nuclear war, your gasoline car and gas pump wouldn’t work either. Those also have computers in them that are critical to their functioning.
Most cars will also stop working if an EMP fries their electronics. The only things that will work are older diesel engines (90s and older depending on the brand).
One thing I find annoying about the argument for heat pumps helping to reduce global warming is no one considers if the refrigerant leaks. R-410A, R-13A, etc. refrigerants have a pretty high global warming potential (GWP) and it seems like likelihood of a leak is decently high, especially if there is a car crash.
That problem appears mostly solved these days. Household refrigerators and freezers now use propane. Many (most?) new vehicles now use 2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene.
We /can/ do better than those refrigerants, though. R-1234yf has a tiny global warming potential compared to even some of the green choices out there like propane or isobutane. There's also the old solutions like CO2, or even ammonia (though that I wouldn't expect anywhere but industrial environments).
Even for those refrigerants, the GWP should be considered in context - an AC unit only holds a few pounds of refrigerant, which has a similar GWP to the tailpipe emissions of a typical gas-powered car over three months or so.
The article doesn't mention it, but another example of the "electric makes things better" mentality is trains. Trains are in some respects easier to electrify than even trucks, let alone ships, by virtue of them being on fixed tracks (no need for batteries on electrified tracks except as a backup in case of power outages) and by virtue of train cars being readily swappable (so even on not-yet-electrified networks, trains could swap their depleted battery cars for fresh ones at the station). Plus, freight trains support intermodal containers just like container ships do, so they can share the same sorts of battery-in-a-container idea.
I was thinking you could have a battery in a train, that is charged by pantographs at the station. Accelerating out of the station will use a lot of energy so for a mile or so there could be pantographs and then they won't be needed for a few miles whilst the train runs off the battery. The battery can be charged when slowing down for the station using regenerative braking and charged whilst idling at the station.
This might be more complex and expensive though than just having the pantographs the full length of the line, but I thought about it recently when my local line was closed as a tunnel on it was too small to fit the pantographs through and had to be rebuilt.
Some are doing this with buses on fixed routes. There are even experiments with trucks and pantographs, electrified rails and even wireless charging on limited sections of highways (in Sweden and Germany I believe).
Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the fuel to generate electricity, which is then utilized to drive electric motors
My only quibble is that electric lawn mowers today are rather better than "same, but electric". Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. And my Ego push mower will also fold up to store vertically, which is great with limited garage space. Plus it starts every time at the push of a button, no trips to the gas station, maintenance, tough starts, etc.
Also bought an Ego when we moved into our first home and I love it for all the reasons you mentioned and more. It's fantastic.
The only gas item I still have to keep around is the snow blower as we get a significant amount of snow. Fortunately I really don't run it that much at all over the course of the year. Maybe 5 gallons of gas a year. But when I need it, I really need it.
Oh yeah very interested! Unfortunately we do have about $1500 invested in our current machine, so it would be hard to justify. It works very well too. But if we ever have problems with it or it dies out we'll definitely make the switch.
You’re not missing out, paid like 1500 for the machine, another 900 for 2 10ah batteries then ran over a newspaper day one while helping the in-laws. This promptly broke the thing, main shaft wouldn’t turn anymore. Contacted ego who asked for some vids which I sent, they wanted me to bring it 1.5 hrs away which I wasn’t interested in so they they shipped me a new one.
Finally got it 3 days after the very last snow storm. So yea, I switched to electric this year for the snow and got lots of exercise this last year.
The issue I’ve got with them is it’s driven off a gearbox that honestly doesn’t seem too strong where’s a gas powered shaft is coupled to the engine via a couple of belts that can be serviced with basic tools at home in the mists of dealing with snow, the ego absolutely can not.
Yeah. I don't think I can explain how awesome it is to be liberated from a bucket of gas in the garage to make it through the yard. That it also stores nicely and I can use the same battery for a chainsaw and weed eater? Battery powered devices really did get usable while people were not paying attention.
I think this speaks to a similar problem with BEV adoption. Plenty of people tried them, or read a ton of press about them back in 2016-2018, when they really weren't all that great. People now hold onto those ideas, not realizing how much they've improved in the short years in between.
The first battery lawn mowers were terrible. Today's are excellent.
Yeah, this is what I meant by saying that they got good. I remember the first batch of battery screw drivers/drills. Could do basic work, but that was about it. Now, my blower, chainsaw, mower, and weed eater are all battery. And all work great.
Having an ecosystem of batteries + tools is great. The question is which of the endless ecosystem options (ryobi, dewalt, milwaukee, bosch, etc.) to pick
Nthing this. ProjectFarm is an impressive, objective, numbers based review of all sorts of tools and lubricants. The guy looks like your average farmer, but he covers pretty much every real world use case and is always impressively thorough, with the knowledge of someone who has actually used tools/products like that in the field. He also does some amusing things like lubricating a lawn mower with bananas.
Just a personal recommendation for domestic use. I use two Bosch 36V 4.0AH batteries for their mower, strimmer, and leaf blower. For long tasks, I put the first battery on charge as soon as depleted and switch to the second one. I haven't been without juice so far.
Be wary of, or careful when using, these dumb adapters. Lithium batteries require protection electronics, in particular ones to shut off the tool when the battery reaches too high a temperature or the cells reach too low a voltage. Most manufacturers put the electronics in the tool, using the connector's other conductors to sense the battery's condition. Since these cheap adapters don't also adapt the sensing electronics and conductors, the electronic safety is substantially or completely disabled. If the battery's user doesn't take as much care as the tool's electronics would have, there is a great increase in the probability of premature, and possibly incindiary, battery failure.
> Having an ecosystem of batteries + tools is great. The question is which of the endless ecosystem options (ryobi, dewalt, milwaukee, bosch, etc.) to pick
Dead dinosaurs is basically the universal tool battery for larger tools.
my non-electric mower folds up and stores vertically, so this isn't that unique. strange that this is something called out in gas vs battery discussion
I don't know the exact model of my mower, but here's a similar model from Home Depot[0]. I don't really know what other meanings of vertical you can come up with, but the implication that I don't know what vertical means is quite insulting.
Unless he edited his comment, he didn't imply that you don't know what "vertical" means, but rather that you could have different ideas about what it means to store a lawn mower vertically.
One meaning, per my earlier comment, but that doesn't imply exactly one permutation for the folding and storage of a lawn mower. Anyway, this is not a very interesting topic, so I'll see myself out.
Yeah, exactly. Perhaps the handle just stacked 'vertically' above the mower body. Or maybe the body somehow folded in half with the motor perched above it or something. As it turns out it does indeed just store on its end with the engine sideways, but I didn't think the question was unreasonable.
No need to be insulted; I was just trying to get clarification, since as I mentioned, I wasn't aware of gas engines that could be stored on their side. Your link shows they do appear to exist though!
It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.
two stroke mower? Where do you live? In the US, the only major brand selling two stroke motors was lawn boy, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. They were always a bit odd.
Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.
two strokes are brush cutters, tend to be. They are no push mowers, though... and electric ones are absolutely no replacement due to sheer lack of power (or battery life).
@grand parent - Mowing ditch/stream slopes with anything but petrol brushcutter is just next to impossible. Saying that as owning - a battery strimmer, a 4-stroke petrol push mower, a battery robot mower and 2-smoke brush cutter. I have tried using even a battery powered hedge trimmer. In other words - not everything is a nice flat rectangle short grass cover.
I honestly assumed they were two stroke. The last lawn mower I used at my parents house was two stroke IIRC (smelled like it at least), and I never bought a gas mower once I bought a house. I went straight to electric.
I've used one of those for the last several years, it's terrible if you get behind even a little bit, the long grass doesn't make it into the knife. I'm gonna a buy a battery mower this year.
Depends on the size of your yard and how quickly it grows. My current yard is on the edge where power is a nice to have, my parents’ old yard would have taken hours to do with a non-powered motor.
My mowers getting on 10 years old now. It's probably gonna do another ten. I don't like waste. I'll probably try convert it to run off ethanol. I'd buy more battery gear if it wasn't designed to be so wasteful and the market wasn't full of so much lock in. Getting stuck in one brands battery goes against alot of my ethics re. Tech purchases. I hate vendor lock in.
My Ego mower is 8 years old now. (I got one as soon as they were available in Canada, as it was the first mower to operate at >40V.) Still works like new. Don't think they're inherently any more wasteful than gas. And of course, they don't waste gas. Yeah, you're locked into the battery, but at worst, if you don't use the battery for anything else, that's no worse than the gas mower. With a few tools though (leaf blower, string trimmer, maybe hedge trimmers...) you end up saving a bunch.
Funnily enough, lawns are not very eco friendly. The uniform green looks of them are water intensive and a food desert for local insects. Putting a mix of local flora might be even better if environment is what you are concerned for.
Alternatively get a robot mower - does the job better, takes even less space and effectively requires no work/maintenance, aside replacing the blades every few months.
Are there any that work like robot vacuums? I mean NO funny cables around a garden that show robot a no go zone? I want robot to build a map of garden just like Roborocks.
I have had ideas to build a GPS based prototype on my own as a hobby project (both the hardware and software)... other than that I don't know of commercially viable ones.
However, in practice the cables are no issue - you can have them installed and dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in). Once done - you'd never notice them ever again. No go zone can be organized with magnetic strips (also buried).
Roomba was developing a system without a boundary wire at some point, but it doesn’t look like they ended up shipping it.
Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight?
Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?
The boundary wire was not a matter of minutes for me - far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight.
I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.
I made the same mistake the first time as well, took forever to get it installed underground by hand. The second time I paid like 100 euros for the full-service package where they showed up with a cable-laying machine and it literally took the guy more time to unload the machine from the van than it took him to circle the property and lay the cable.
The bigger headache with boundary cables is finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork.
>finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork
this is also easy if you have decent electronics equipment... or it's built in the mower, itself, where you can select to follow the line till the break.
Yeah, might do that eventually. At the moment I kind of enjoy mowing the lawn. I listen to a podcast or audiobook, give my brain a break.. Also will pick weeds and such as I go, which the robot can't.
Robot mowers frighten me. It's one thing to have a vacuum cleaner blindly stumble around - there's only so much damage it can do. But whirling blades up the lethality stakes a lot. The navigational and object-avoidance prowess of Roombas do not convince me that arming them with samurai swords is wise.
it's discharged on the lawn, itself, obviously. No box. Since it's everydays jobs the cuts are really short. The lack of external discharge is better for the lawn.
You shouldn't have one. The grass breaks down if you have your grass mowed to a proper height. Your lawn won't look like a golf course though. which is a good thing, golf courses are an environmental disaster.
Unless, of course, you live in an HOA which requires you to not leave your clippings on the lawn. If only there was a place round here where there wasn't an HOA!
Ha ha, me too. I confess though that modern gas mowers I have owned have been much easier to start. Maybe it's because I'm not a kid anymore ... or they are making the engines better.
You know, that reminds me of the other fun part. Because it was gas the mower was stored in a shed in the back yard. A shed full of thousands of really large spiders.
Yes! I have an electric mower as well as an electric weed whacker that takes the same batteries. My favorite aspects are that they don't vibrate the hell out of my RSI-inflamed elbow and don't cover me in 2-stroke exhaust. Yes, my electric yard tools are superior in every aspect to a gas ones. I've even managed to convince some of my neighbors to switch to electric and the resulting reduction in neighborhood noise levels has been GREAT!
I don't have a leaf blower. Leaf blowers are stupid noisy and not any faster than a good rake.
My electric leaf blower is actually not very loud - I stopped bothering with ear protection even. The 2-stroke models the professional crews use are a bane.
Yeah, I'm a fan of my electric blower too. I don't generally use it in situations where I'd use a rake, but it's great for things like blowing debris out of the garage or cleaning off a patio. Also drying cars after washing, if you want to avoid water spots.
> Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained.
The problem with electric tools is that the battery life heavily depends what you're doing. I also have an Ego mower (the top model/largest battery as of 2020). The only way my battery might actually last the advertised hour (with a ~40 min charge time) is if I religiously mowed twice a week. I'm usually lucky to get 30 minutes of real world mowing, but sometimes it's less than half of that. I used to prefer mowing in the morning to avoid the heat, but any amount of moisture in the grass slaughters the battery life. Likewise if the grass is higher than normal, say goodbye to the battery life. All in all my electric mower is quite a bit inferior to a decent quality gas mower, but not inconvenient enough (so far) to push me to switch back.
Huh, certainly not my experience. Maybe it's because the mower is bigger? I've got one of their smaller ones, and two medium/small batteries (one 4Ah and one 2Ah iirc), and never have problems, even with damp grass. Only on the most overgrown day have I gone through both batteries, and thrn the first one was charged and ready.
> A cheap electric cooktop is a lot like a gas stove, except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive.
No. Well, yes, a "cheap" electric cooktop that simply produces heat (coil or IR) is worse than burners, and less responsive. But that's not what you want. You want an induction cooktop: safe, efficient, beautiful, and more importantly, more responsive than burners.
That’s still enough for a peak of 2kw for an average induction range. Granted you can’t probably run a heater and a vacuum on full power at the same time.
2kw per element is plenty of power, though you could definitely find more powerful ones. In my 3 years of owning an induction cooktop, I don't think I've ever had more than 1 element at full power at one time, it's really only useful for bringing water to boil, waaaaaaaay to much heat for anything else.
I'm not even sure if my entire house has a breaker for more than 32A.
Yeah, indeed, this is not esoteric physics. If you have a 10 kW electric induction stove (you can see the rating from the specs) and you want to operate purely on solar panels, you need at least 10 kW of solar panels and inverter etc.
Also maybe you want to use the oven and AC and charge the car at the same time etc. As far as I understand, it's a plus and minus calculation. It's not any kind of compatibility issue...
Naturally big electric power sinks need bigger voltages, otherwise the current and thus the cabling would get very thick.
If you want to run it just on solar, use one that can be legally fed with DC (almost all work fine, anyways), and hook a battery with suitable voltage between it and the solar panels.
If you are running the burners flat out. Which you only do when getting water to boil or preheating cookware. Once up to temp, induction requires far less energy to cook with since it is way more efficient - directly heating the pan.
So yeah, if you are in the habit of routinely maintaining four pots of water at a furiously rolling boil you probably will have problems. The rest of us are likely to be pretty safe.
Seen RV build-outs with an induction cook-stove (and solar). I think the issue has more to do with battery capacity/current-delivery than with your solar capacity.
Maybe a home however is lacking the battery intermediary.
Only if you use the higher settings, which you typically don't unless you are boiling water.
Source: I have induction and solar and my stove-top is 90% solar (with BESS). The oven is a different story.
Another thing to keep in mind: with gas about half the energy heats the air and flows around the pot or pan, so it ends up being about 50% efficient.
But with all said, the carbon monoxide buildup issue was what swayed me in the end.
If you can get the required parts in the single quantities you'd need, you may want to consider a battery voltage suitable for the induction stove to run directly off of, so you wouldn't need the dance with a bigger inverter and that.
Just need a grid-powered charger for the battery to replace the sun with if you worry about running out of electricity to cook.
Thanks, I will keep voltage in mind. I have ample wind so my long-term plan is solar plus small windmills on the roof. For bigger cooking sessions I will have an outdoor grill, might add some burners too. This is Spain so big LPG tanks for the home are totally common.
[Edit: it's off the grid, only gets water, and I want to keep it that way in principle.]
Yeah, if it's already off-the-grid, just combine batteries with a DC microgrid if you're aiming for cheap and efficient.
If you have the charging top voltage at/below the peak of 240V mains (which is sqrt(2) higher than the rms of 240V), you can get away with using the load's voltage-adaptive power supply to handle the varying battery voltage. This will work with resistive heaters (no simple thermostats, though; "electronic trailing edge phase cut dimmer" is the technology needed, but with adapted control to work like a normal PWM), but resistive light bulbs would burn out.
There are plug standards similar to the ones used on computer power supplies that are rated as DC variants.
Feel free to stay in contact; I am looking for making use of local solar power for electronic loads that make up most of my electricity usage once I can spend the appropriate money on it, and combining it with UPS functionality as that's rather cheap to add.
Wouldn't a battery bank/wall be the buffer that would solve this problem? The battery bank could be supplied by an electric vehicle, plugged in when at rest for such a purpose.
That may be true but gas cooking isn't available everywhere. So if electricity-based cooking is necessary, induction is likely more efficient than conventional resistance coils.
In our kitchen we have both. Items heat faster with less heating of nonessential surrounding areas vs. standard burners.
My guess is cooking aside solar generation is probably not going to be by itself a sufficient source of household power for the foreseeable future. In any case optimizing use of electric energy requires taking advantage of the best available technologies.
Induction cooktops are wildly popular on solar powered sailboats, do you have any sort of information to back this claim up? There are tens if not hundreds of sailing vlogs on youtube who are exclusively using induction cooktops because they don't want to carry propane onboard.
This doesn't sound right (correct me if wrong)... but we've ran a small one plate cooker off of a camping solar system + battery kit & off of a petrol generator and it all seemed fine and working as normal. Usually when putting heavy load on the generator you can hear it work harder, but with this plate it barely makes a difference.
I have to note that it is rated at 2000w at max setting (6), but due to it being so potent, we've never had it set to more than 3 out of 6, anything above that is way too aggressive. So make it 1000w typical draw.
We have solar panels on medium sized house in the UK (15 panels - half east, half west roughly) and an induction hob and use it without needing power from the grid!
That's a very categorical statement for a comparison of two quantities, both of which vary (cooktop power and solar power). And ultimately if you're using a lower-power cooktop it .. won't cook properly.
The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.
I would like to know what is your point here? You can't consume locally produced gas either, can you? Or are you comparing with non-induction electrical stove?
I find that quite surprising. I don't have an induction hob, but I do have an electric fan oven, and I find my batteries, charged from solar cope with that just fine, or a 3kW electric kettle.
Induction stoves are anywhere from 1200W to 3800W for the larger ones at full power. Looks like the size just needs to be considered when building it out.
They are particularly suitable to be run directly off of a battery with no inverter, because they are essentially a switched mode power supply with the pan as the secondary winding. They already have a rectifier front end.
I have one, and I love it with one exception: woks.
The induction stove only heats the bottom plate. Whereas with a gas stove around a large wok, there is a lot of convection heating the thin walls of the wok as well.
not going to have the power for true wok cooking. Burners from Turkey friers are perfect. Also do it outside. True high heat cooking will expel all kinds of smoke and other stuff into the air. Unless you have a high flow hood with a make up air system (similar to what restaurants have - and yes, there are systems made for home/non-commercial use), you do NOT have adequate indoor ventilation to do that kind of cooking indoors.
I found an unexpected downside of induction cooktops. They make an ultrasonic squeal that only my kids can hear and it drives them crazy. I read a while ago that some shop owners were using devices that purposely made the noise to keep kids away. I don’t know if it was specific to that particular model or if there are some that don’t make the noise.
It's an annoying feature in some power electronics, they design the switching frequency to be outside of most peoples' hearing, but not high enough to be completely outside.
I suspect the switching frequency is completely outside of any humans hearing range. But there are probably components that have resonant frequencies that are both within human hearing range, and happen to be closely divisible to the switching frequency, and thus will couple to the switching signal and vibrate.
Likely an issue with the hob you have. The squeal will be caused by the high frequency components running the induction ring. Cheap capacitors and inductors will vibrate as the oscillating signal passes through them because the alternating electromagnetic field will cause the windings to gently push and pull on each other.
Problem is solved by either using better components, or better matching the control frequency to the components used so there a no frequency modes that happen to match up with the resonant frequency of components used. Thus eliminating the transfer of electrical energy into mechanical energy.
Neither of these are solutions available to an actual user of these products though. I worked with these things constantly for years and even the high end commercial line ones make the squeal after a few months of heavy use.
Used to be able to hear it but can't anymore so either they all got better the last few years or I aged out of being able to hear it.
To expand on the source of noise and possible solutions ...
Regardless of price, multilayer ceramic capacitors are piezoelectric - meaning they physically vibrate. Inductors and transformers are electromagnets powerful enough to noticeably vibrate and move themselves. In fact, if you test them during assembly before taping them, the two halves of the ferrite core will snap together like magnets. Most noise comes instead from the windings, but that gives you an idea of their physical power. The biggest winding in an induction cooktop is the induction coil itself.
The reason you hear them is because they're being used at audio frequencies. Considerate designers choose higher switching frequencies above what humans and household pets can hear. Induction cooktops are kind of a special case where it's tempting to dip into the audible frequencies. Frequency choice alone doesn't eliminate all noise, so there are other mitigations like materials selection and assembly, to name a couple.
Overall, it's largely due to being cheap about the design and manufacturing processes.
Free idea to anyone out there: a self-heating electric wok. It shouldn't be too hard to put heating elements spread across the under surface of a wok and make it fully electric.
The winning strategy for serious wok cooking is an outdoor propane burner. Basically no indoor range has the heat output you actually want for the restaurant-style wok cooking.
Also if you are performing true restaurant style wok cooking you doubly want to be outdoors for the offgassing/smoke. Restaurants have hoods that are paired with make-up air systems. That 600CFM (being generous!) "hood" built into your over the range microwave is NOT going to be able to keep up with normal cooking, let alone real wok cooking!
The lack of adequate kitchen ventilation is pretty underrated by most people. Picked up a WYND Halo indoor air quality monitor out of general curiosity and was astonished at just how quickly indoor air can sour when cooking if you don't have adequate ventilation.
Downsides of induction burners: bottom of pan heats up very quickly, but heat propagates through the pan slowly, so food is prone to burn when you are adjusting for a certain level of simmer.
Limited heat settings left me often wishing for more nuance, especially in lower temperatures.
Hysteresis. You can see this by putting your saucepan with water to 350, then lowering it to 212 when it reaches a boil. It will rapidly cycle between boiling and not boiling, making simmering very difficult. My particular induction burner has one setting for 140F (way too low) and the next setting is 212F. Where's simmer?
It does heat water up faster than a conventional burner, so I use it for cooking the pasta while I make the sauce on a conventional gas stovetop. I also use it when temperature control isn't important, but that's not very often in cooking.
Induction heat transfer is basically generating a magnetic field in the bottom coil, which is then picked up by the vessel, currents induced in it causing the heat.
Cheap induction stoves emulate lower power levels by turning the heat on and off, averaging the heat.
One solution is to use a thick bottom vessel that retains enough heat between the cycles to allow simmering.
Or buy a smooth controlled stove. But I dont think there are any such ones in the market.
Would cast iron pots and pans count as thick-bottomed in this case?
I usually use these with electric stoves since they retain heat pretty well. They take a while to warm up though, so there's both time and energy lost in that warming process.
I primarily use cast iron for cooking, and it does help with the hysteresis, but I still have a problem with the bottom of the pan being way too hot and tending to burn food.
The best vessel is a flat bottomed one with at-least quarter inch thick bottom.
Cast Iron ones will do too.
If you have to cook something to simmer and hold heat for long, best use thick bottomed ones.
What could be done to mitigate the slow heating issue is to use a small amount of water initially, on high settings, allowing it to boil. Then you can add your contents, reduce the power setting and allow it to simmer.
What many dont know is that you can keep a cast iron or steel plate between the vessel and the stove, of a suitable thickness, that converts the induction stove to a "heater" stove (the plate gets heated through induction, but the vessel only sees the heat). However, a word of caution. If the plate is of a very large size, it will have un-even heating and may warp. Best size is one that is slightly smaller than the circular marker on the stove.
Then this means induction cooktops are not a good solution yet because most Americans will keep their mid range gas stoves that work well instead of getting an expensive induction one to do the same.
I have a gas stove but will be moving to induction soon given it meets our needs better. You already see induction in high end new builds (with gas in mid-end and older builds).
Having both, I miss the infinite adjustability and almost instant change when using gas, compared to the preset steps of temperature offered by the induction burner.
Again, it is just to our needs. The most important being cleanability, and then kettle speed. We mostly do Chinese cooking, so precise temperature control isn't so important for stir fry.
How is induction any less responsive than gas? My gas stoves had big metal grates that themselves heated up - and took forever to cool down. There is way less mass on my induction stove cooktop for any residual/carry over heat than on the gas cooktop. You kill the power to the HOB and heat stops - immediately. And induction ramps WAY faster than gas could ever hope to, especially if you have decent cookware (i.e. solid metal/no discs welded on the bottom).
I do agree that there are far too many induction cooktops with gawd awful controls that are not responsive; that's more a matter of picking a well designed unit rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology itself. Same with granular control - higher end models offer not just finer control, but different control modes. It boggles my mind there aren't more temperature probe options for automatic temperature control. My GE cooktop had an optional bluetooth probe - but it only worked for low temps. If they had a high temp probe it would be a candy makers dream!
I only use gas when I want to cook with super high heat - like with a wok.
And for that I use a left over turkey fryer burner - outside! Double bonus for all the gunk thrown off during cooking not being trapped in my house either. I don't have a restaurant style hood and make up air system; it's far cheeper and easier to just go outside for that kind of cooking.
Mine has very accurate temperature control, but if I'm not using cast iron (which changes temperature more slowly), then it's prone to hysteresis. Also, just because it has accurate temperature control doesn't mean that the preset temps are actually useful. I found one burner that uses an infrared thermometer and is adjustable to +/- 1F, but it costs over $1,000 for a single burner.
I have an easy time using cast iron but I do have a futuristic induction cooktop that measures temp either with a probe or a conductive thermometer.
I both agree with and disagree with your post- I agree that induction has not met its potential yet. If every induction range used the Control Freak's control systems, people would be abandoning gas in droves because it's better in every way: https://www.amazon.com/PolyScience-Temperature-Controlled-Co...
I disagree that it's specifically worse for cast iron, especially when you have a good device. The problem there is the quality of the cookware, cast iron works, and an aluminum or aluminum cored stainless steel work perfectly if they're well designed.
> ”Downsides of induction burners: bottom of pan heats up very quickly, but heat propagates through the pan slowly, so food is prone to burn”
Have you tried a thicker, heavier pan? A good quality induction cooker should heat reasonably slowly and maintain a constant temperature if you set it to, say, 1/3 or 1/2 power.
I’ve been using a friend’s one recently and found it to be much easier to maintain a steady temperature than with my old electric cooktop.
I'm specifically referring to my experience of using a cast iron pan. The bottom heats up quickly because it's being directly affected by the induction process, but propagates through the sides of the pan very slowly, which is normal behavior for a cast iron pan. That's part of its usefulness: even heat. The problem with induction is that it hyperheats the bottom, but the slow propagation of the eat means that the normal benefits of cast iron are eliminated (at least in the first part of the cooking process, until the whole pan heats up).
Ok, so how about either a) starting at a lower power level to let the cast iron heat more gradually, or b) waiting until the pan heats up to the desired temperature before adding food?
I have used solution A, and once it heats up, you still lose fine control of heat (because my induction burner is cheap and only has 10 preset temps that are spaced too far apart).
I was excited by the prospects of induction cooking, and if I'm boiling water, or even making a slow-cook stew, it works great. But for sauces and meat (where fine temperature control is critical), I'll stick to gas or (if I have to) electric.
Lack of fine control isn't a fault of induction, but of a cheaply made cooktop. I too made that mistake on my last house. My mom's induction range has half steps and they make all the difference. Getting a new house next month and I won't even be considering an induction cooktop with fewer than 18 steps.
Indeed I love to cook so much and one of the downsides of induction I didn't see talked about too much in this thread - matching pan size to hob size - bugged me so much on my old cooktop I'm tempted to get something ridiculous like the Gaggenau 400 Series that doesn't have defined areas for pans, but a grid of smaller hobs that will autodetect and adjust to the size/location of a pan. There are at least three versions of that cooktop from various manufacturers and one of the non-Gaggenau ones was something like 30% cheaper. And I just realized I didn't save it like I thought I had. D'oh!
I'm replying to my own comment here, but I wanted to clarify something with hysteresis. Heating water (or food, or a pan) up to a certain temperature takes more energy than maintaining that temperature. It appears that the temperature setting on my induction burner uses the same amount of energy regardless. So it will bring the water to a boil when I use the 212F setting, but once it's there, it requires less energy to maintain that temp, but the induction burner doesn't adjust accordingly. So, instead of turning the amount of energy down to maintain 212F, it just cycles on and off hysteritically. With a gas or electric stove, I can turn the heat up, and once it reaches boiling, I can turn the heat down slightly, maintaining the current level of boiling (because there's "simmer", "boil" or "rolling boil", for example).
I fail to see why you can't do that with induction - indeed I do that all the time with induction. The cycle is just a lot shorter with induction.
Waiting for integrated temperature control to become more of a thing with induction - higher end cooktops have it; just needs to percolate down. My GE cooktop had a bluetooth probe that worked great at lower temperatures - but usually you want automatic temp control more on the high end - frying and candymaking is what I was missing. I guess if you made lots of delicate sauces the bluetooth probe would have been a godsend and maybe that's what they were going for. Probably cheaper, easier and more reliable to only have a lower temp probe too. Just not nearly as useful for what I would have liked!
I've never once had hysteresis be a problem with induction - especially any more or less than with gas or traditional radiant electric.
If you like to cook invest in good cookware. The biggest problem with induction is cheap cookware with "disks" on the bottom. Having as much ferrous magnetic metal as possible is the real key to success with induction - and why your cast iron performs so well!
I love All Clad - triple ply stainless steel sandwich of either aluminum or (if you are feeling really extravagant) copper. Far easier to maintain than cast iron (although I love my cast iron too - can't get fried chicken just right in anything else). Cookware and More is the official All Clad factory seconds (usual some dent or other cosmetic flaw) outlet with great prices and if you get on their mailing list they have an annual sale where they take even more off. I've gotten All Clad skillets for well under $200 and they will be something I can pass on. Good cookware never dies. Took several years to get the pieces I wanted but I did it without breaking the bank.
If All Clad, even factory seconds, are still too pricy - I'm not paying $500 for a stockpot no matter how wonderful it may be - then Made In has very nice pieces competitively priced. Got my stock pot from them for under $200.
Finally Tramontina has great induction ready clad cookware pieces and can be found at regular big box stores like Costco or even Walmart. Not quite as heavy/well constructed as All Clad or Made In, but still leaps and bounds better than anything with a disk.
Good, better, best - just reject anything with a damn disk welded onto the bottom of it and you will find induction a LOT more enjoyable. As good as your cast iron :)
Fine control comes with higher end units that have more settings. Didn't pay attention to that at my last house and got a cooktop with only 11 choices. My mothers induction range has double that and it's amazing what a difference makes, especially at the lower end - as you note. Getting a new house next month and won't be making that mistake again! Something with a at least 18-20 steps from low to high will be mandatory for me. 11 just isn't enough.
I had a chance to cook on a friend's induction stove. It beeped angrily any time I lifted the pan to shake it around. And I had trouble finding the touch buttons on the flat surface due to lack of contrast and the food bits on the surface.
I get the principle but the UX leaves a lot to be desired. Other than boiling water it's a step down for me.
Not all beep crazily like that - and not as many as I like have physical controls. I loathe the obsession with capacitive touch dominating design these days :p
And, Induction is much easier to clean and keep clean. Food does not burn onto the cooktop, the cooktop is solid surface, and temps stay lower. Boil something over? Move the pot, wipe it with a towel or sponge, put the pot back. Or put a paper towel or regular towel down between the pan an the cooktop, you can boil water without burning the towel.
Also, it throws off way less heat than a gas burner. Almost all of it goes into the pan, where gas tends to throw a lot up around the pan.
I've never run into the problem mentioned by another in this thread about cycling when simmering or burning. My range is a $3500 Samsung range, more than a cheap electric, less than many gas, but not exactly cheap. Well worth it for me.
However, one downside I didn't expect is: My inductive range is more disposable.
Where a regular range, if it breaks, you can probably have a repair guy come by and do some simple troubleshooting and identify a burner element or knob that has failed... The inductive cooktop the repair guys tend to just want to replace the whole thing, to the tune of $750 parts, plus labor. At which point they start recommending you just replace the range, because most people don't want to spend more than a cheap range on a repair.
A year ago my range had two of the burners stop working. Thankfully, it was a well known problem, a blown solder joint on one of the boards deep in the cooktop. I was able to repair it for $0 in 3 hours (my son was helping, probably could have done it in half the time if I wasn't also teaching him), and we were back in business.
But no repairman would have wanted to spend 90 minutes on a "maybe" repair with no warranty and another 90 minute service call or potentially $300 board replacement or $750 cooktop replacement, and an angry customer because their fix didn't work.
A great counter-example: the 2022 BMW i4 M50 uses a lot of parts from the gasoline version, including the "transmission tunnel" aka the thing that protrudes up from the floor in the backseat and prevents the person sitting in the middle from resting their feet comfortably at the same height as the other two passengers
I like how everybody talks about how to make everything electric using only solar and wind energy (hydro and nuclear energy are not deemed as "green").
But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so, no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future. No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
It seems many are replacing critical thinking and science with passion and ideology.
Hydro is great. Most of our hydro resources have already been tapped.
Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.)
Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too.
I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study
That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.
I don't know who you're reading that you say "no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so". I feel like people think about these costs all the time - it is the comparison to costs of continuing GHG trends and climate change impacts that is really staggering.
There are in fact a lot of people thinking about this and they generally agree that a) it's possible, b) it's not more expensive than what we currently do, especially if you take into account environmental damage, and c) it's better for the environment. The only real debate left is whether we want some nuclear in the mix or not, and that largely depends on how quickly we can bring cheap reactor designs to market. The reactors we currently have are not cost competitive with renewables.
>But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so,
According to the current economic system the future is being discounted and considered unimportant. Anyone who tries to extend the lifetime of humanity or the planet is a lunatic because longevity counts for nothing.
If you were to account for the next 500 years, then the costs that we have to pay today would definitively be worth it. If you only account for the next 30 years, then sure collective suicide (hyperbole) is more efficient.
>no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future.
Germany is doing everything on hard mode and yet its electric grid is already 50% renewable. The government did almost everything in its power to slow things down. It's certainly possible if you stop the analysis paralysis of pondering whether it is possible.
>No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
Is this supposed to be an attempt at the nirvana fallacy? Taking the next step will reduce damage to the environment by x% where x is smaller than 100. After that we will have even more stringent environmental standards and then figure out how to implement those.
> If you were to account for the next 500 years, then the costs that we have to pay today would definitively be worth it.
As a society—maybe, as human kind—maybe, as individuals—I highly doubt it.
The former two depend on how do we handle everything else on this planet. Looking at what happens in Ukraine, I’m sceptical. The latter: none of us is going to be here in 500 years. Maybe sone will, assuming we, the kind, don’t get wiped by other external factors.
I’m not saying it isn’t worth trying to make a change. I’m only discussing that single point.
I'm skeptical that onloading and offloading containers of batteries is something that can be done quickly and easily on average. Suppose you're using batteries (probably lithium iron phosphate if it's based on current tech) that can charge at 1C. That means you can fill all the batteries completely in an hour just by charging them from external power (assuming enough current is available). I don't know how long loading an unloading take, but I assume most ports would have lines of ships waiting to use the cranes, and if you can't get everything done in under an hour you're better off just charging them on the ship.
Suppose you're a coastal city that wants to setup a charging facility for passing local ships. You can either build a full seaport (which might not be practical depending on geography) with a crane and battery storage and charging facilities, which can handle ships one at a time, or maybe two or three if you have the dock space. Or you can run a high voltage line out to a buoy, and ships can hold position out in the water and connect to the power receptacle at the buoy for an hour and charge. If you want to have ten ships be able to charge at once, you run ten high voltage lines out to ten different buoys. I would suggest that the latter option is probably cheaper and easier.
It's also not out of the question to have HVDC lines that connect continents to each other for power sharing (i.e. buying and selling solar power based on where the sun is shining), and if such cables exist across oceans it's not much of a stretch to imagine a string of charging stations at regular intervals for passing ships to use, even across the Pacific.
Even better would be some system where you can have a continuous connection to power, like the pantographs connecting to overhead lines in electric street car systems, but I have no idea how you would do that at sea.
Because in the time it takes to physically swap some batteries and charge others, you could have just charged them all and that would be simpler and easier.
One of the things that's counterintuitive about batteries is that if a battery is twice as big it still takes the same time to charge, not twice as long. (That's assuming you can supply enough power to charge at the fastest rate the batteries can handle.)
What if this assumption isn't true: dispatchable energy and opportunistic energy are two very different things.
If you want to build out battery storage to get a stable grid from intermittent sources, chances are you'd end up with cargo-container sized standard modules anyways, instead of every port having its own bespoke facilities reinvented in some folksy local style
Power delivery could be an issue. I guess it depends on how many ships a day you're serving. If there's just one or two a day, your infrastructure needs to handle short bursts at high capacity but then sits idle 90+ % of the time. If you're serving a hundred ships a day, it sort of just averages out and you can be at close to maximum capacity most of the time. I'd imagine most power utilities would love to have customers that consistent.
Delivering power to the ships would be interesting. I suppose it would have to come in at high voltage (either AC or DC) and be stepped down to a suitable pack voltage. That means each ship would have the equivalent of an electrical substation on board.
If you containerize batteries (which is a thing with some electric ships already), swapping the containers is a few minutes work. Most container harbors routinely process container ships with thousands of containers using automated cranes, autonomous ground transport, etc. I don't think that's a process that takes a lot of time. They probably measure that in numbers of containers per minute. So, I think that we can establish that swapping a few batteries should not be that big of a deal technically.
Recharging those containerized batteries would require some infrastructure. Conveniently, off shore wind parks are currently pretty popular, can generate lots of GW of power, and can be close to shipping routes. There are all sorts of solutions that you could imagine here. You could even shuttle batteries to and from ships that need them so those ships don't even have to make an expensive detour.
That work also would include high current high voltage connections. Which are suitable for use at sea... Which makes me thing that it is not exactly as fast process.
Plus you likely want to stack these to one part of ship and then risk having them relatively close each other which in case of fire could be risky.
Does anyone the difference of the environmental impact a between fuel powered thing like a car or lawnmower versus an electric car or lawnmower powered by a coal fired power plant? (assuming typical manufacturing methods for the battery as of 2022)
There are several different ways to slice this. "Pollution" should be characterized by effect - CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes global warming. We need local and global strategies to reduce it and replace systems that create it.
Other pollutants have a direct effect on human health. Some pollution has a very fast effect, some pollution has a delayed or chronic effect. We need to replace systems that create this pollution immediately.
For small tools like a two stroke gas engined lawn mower, weed eater or chainsaw, you have an immense immediate benefit from not having the particulate, unburned gas and oil, NOx, and carbon monoxide in your lungs. This immediate benefit to human health makes the transition worth it at almost any cost.
For larger things like vehicles or heat pump based home heating, you need to consider the pay off time. The pay off time is shorter (better) when replacing less fuel efficient vehicles (as low as 20,000 miles). If you have an existing vehicle that gets decent mileage (35+ mpg) and your local electricity is coal powered it can take much longer (50,000 miles or longer). But there is always a finite payoff time for any realistic scenario.
1. At least for now, the power still goes out. Maybe I'm still smarting from a week-long power outage this past winter, but in the US, our electric grid is fragile in many places, and we are probably decades away from it being more resilient, so more dependence on electricity is more reliance on large utility providers. Dirty fossil fuels are still better at being able to be moved around in bulk - gasoline has 50-100x the power density of batteries. Electricity has more potential for being decentralized, but we are far away from that.
2. Electricity tends to mean miniaturization and computerization. That tends to mean more difficult to repair; someone related to me a story about a small village somewhere in Africa that was reliant on a gas-powered pump for the well. They had to get gas for it of course, but if it broke down it was simple enough that nearly any person in the village knew how to repair it. A solar-powered pump would eliminate the need for gas, but no one had the tools or knowledge to repair it if it broke. Additionally, with manufacturers desiring ever more control through embedded DRM, it leads to a future where even if the electric power is available, we might not be able to use it because we didn't pay the licensing fees.
These are perhaps very dystopian concerns, but recent world events somehow make these sorts of concerns more realistic.
The US grid is indeed a bit of a mess. Not exactly world leading but still better than some third world countries. IMHO that situation will actually accelerate changes in the US. Because it is so bad, people are taking control of the situation and there are lots of solutions to reduce your dependency on the fragile grid that are getting popular. Burning gas/oil is the stupidly expensive solution (especially recently). Saving on that cost is what any entrepreneur worthy of the name would gladly spend on. And the US is famously very entrepreneurial.
Solar, wind, and batteries are not that complicated. If you are handy, you can buy some cheap stuff on ebay and wire it together yourself or you can pay some people in your area to do it for you. Different set of skills than maintaining an ICE engine but not fundamentally a lot harder than that. There are plenty of people handy with that sort of stuff that are busy electrifying everything they can get their hands on. There's no basis for your paranoia here.
If you want to put in a oil/gas pipeline, you need one permission from the state, then you're a go.
BUT. If you want to install new power lines it's a whole different ball game.
First you need state level permission, then you need one from the cities you're passing through, then the counties, then the individual property owners and everyone who can see the high-voltage lines. The amount of NIMBYing in the permit process is staggering.
Is there somewhere to read more about electric container ships? I'm really curious about the battery infrastructure they have in mind. If a battery is the size of a container, is it really worth even swapping them out mid-journey? I mean, if you're carrying a thousand containers, what's a few more containers of batteries? (And considering all that fuel storage space now available...)
> Conventional wisdom has long held that battery power is infeasible for ocean shipping.
There was an article on HN a while back about using lifting gas (specifically blimps) as a way to reduce shipping costs. I naively wonder how feasible it is to at least lighten the load of ships using hydrogen gas?
I always wondered whether Giant ships could have floating solar that they haul as well as solar panels covering 1.5 the ship area. Sounds impractical from perspective of current port design but I am sure some clever engineering can solve these issues. Combining this solar + kite/ sails based power + some batteries I am sure one can provide at least 50% of the energy needed for shipping. The bottleneck initially is just the cost of non standard designs being brought into an industry that makes its money off economies of scale and standardization.
I think many people underestimate just how harsh ocean is. Salt doesn't do great with electronics such as connections. Plus you would probably use pretty low barges which suffer from waves and rough seas. Also keeping the right angle will be massive pain for optimal energy gathering. Ships tend to travel in ways that the angle of sun isn't constant.
Not to forget drag and what it means to actually drag something at even speed current cargo ships travel. Traditionally my understanding is that barges are used at much lower speeds.
Right, when it comes to the ocean you also have to remember that hundreds of full containers a year are just swept off of a ship and lost. Floating panels would be outright annihilated in rough seas, and a system to stow them would add a fair amount of complexity.
And again, all of this is overshadowed by the fact that there's enough open unused space on land to power the entire planet with solar by multiple orders of magnitude. You could power 100 earths with ground-based solar and still have room left over.
BMW tried with the i3 but failed miserably. Not surprising in hindsight.
When we look back in time we see that new technologies very often tried to emulate the old technology that they were about to replace. Cars used to look like horse carriages, computers used the desktop metaphor and smart phones skeuomorphic design.
The time isn't ripe for better than “same, but electric”.
I remember when "everyone" pinned the success of the Prius on it looking different from normal cars. Many articles said that if the Prius had looked like a normal car it wouldn't have had sales from people who wanted to show that they were forward-thinking and ecological.
Then Tesla came along and now everyone says that their success is because of the cars looking like normal cars. shrug. I think the look takes second place to the technology and how well its implemented.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] thread>Apparently, most shipping routes tend to hug the coast and make cargo or maintenance stops anyway, and so this won’t really be a big change from current practice.
This is not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_transport#/media/File...
Hope that's clear enough.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/253988/estimated-contain...
Transatlantic + transpacific routes account for ~60% of cargo shipped.
The Great Circle between Los Angeles and Beijing cuts through Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=PEK-LAX
There are certainly remaining routes that might not be well-served by the "electric short hop" strategy, but I think most of the world's shipping routes could be amenable to Fleetzero's electrification plan.
And a bigger version of that same map:
https://www.shipmap.org/
China is building a number of new nuclear ships starting with icebreakers but container ships are in the plans: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3155860/ch...
We know how to secure a reactor on land, but the sea is a big, dangerous place - and it's only a matter of time before some cost cutting idiot blows up a ship because they wanted a bigger bonus.
On the bright side: if a nuclear reactor melts down in the middle of the ocean, there’s basically nothing around to be inconvenienced by that event.
The more pertinent risk would be piracy and the like; if thorium ever catches on, it'd probably help make that less of an issue.
Regardless of cost, which itself makes this whole idea impossible, nuclear-powered container ships are simply not a possibility for this reason (and in fact the link you shared doesn't even mention them).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker
Do you think any Chinese or Russian-built nuclear container ship is going to be able to dock in the port of Los Angeles or New York (the two busiest in the country)?
(Edited to remove an incorrect statement - sorry!)
Yes, such ships will likely have to stay away from the US territorial waters, but there's plenty of routes where this won't be a problem.
As for tight margins: fuel costs represent 50%-60% of overall costs ([1]) and if these expenses are replaced with CapEx (hopefully, benefiting from economy of scale), then the tight operational margins suddenly become amazing, and there's a room for quality.
1. https://www.morethanshipping.com/fuel-costs-ocean-shipping/
if it turns out that such shipping via nuclear reactors is much more cost efficient (including all currently externalized costs such as emissions), then the US will have no choice but to accept it - or be uncompetitive in the global markets.
Maybe I’m too jaded these days.
How about hundreds of cargo drones capable of lifting containers to transfer them from one ship to another? Something like this: https://www.cognitiveseeds.com/395-2/
Don't forget - a nuclear-powered ship that's not moving has a lot of free electricity: enough to charge all the drones (likely, bearing supercapacitors, as their flight from one ship to another will be very short)
Building drones that can lift containers from cargoships requires electricity/energy storage densities that are so far beyond anything realistic. A container can weigh up to 28 tonnes, there was exactly one helicopter that could carry this kind of load the Mil Mi-12 and that looked really more like a plane. Moreover if we would have those kind of densities why would we even use nuclear ships?
Nuclear drones!!1one! Problem SOLVED. Gee I'm smart. ;)
Let's see. There are two variables here in regards to power subsystem: power and energy capacity. Let's start with the power:
>A container can weigh up to 28 tonnes, there was exactly one helicopter that could carry this kind of load the Mil Mi-12 and that looked really more like a plane.
According to ([1]), we need around 0.28 kW/kg of thrust. Assuming that the drone weights twice more than a container, we need to have a lift of around 84 tonnes-force minimum, and ~100 tonnes-force in reality. That translates to 0.28 * 10^5 kW = 28 MW. This is close to what Mi-12 had (19.2 MW).
LTO batteries from Toshiba ([2]) advertise 3.5 kW/kg of energy density, which gives us 28 MW/3.5 kW/kg = 800 kg of batteries. Reasonable, given that our budget for drone dry weight is 56 tonnes.
Let's consider the energy capacity. To transfer a container from one ship to another standing 200 meters apart moving at 10 km/h, we would need 144 seconds for roundtrip. Let's make it 300 seconds for redundancy.
28 MW * 300 seconds = 2333 kWh. At 84 Wh/kg ([2]), we get 27.8 tonnes of batteries. Not great, but within out weight budget of 56 tonnes.
The gotcha here that I see is the longevity of these batteries (they are rated for 8000 cycles). Do you see any other issues? I mean, basic physics seems to allow for such drones (not saying it's trivial to make).
1. https://store.tmotor.com/goods.php?id=974
2. https://www.electrive.com/2022/01/12/toshiba-presents-new-20...
If one container move generates $10, and the drone moves 12 containers per hour, 12 hours a day, it will only take 6 months to earn the quarter of million mentioned.
Also, it might actually sound like a very cheap option compared to the ship-to-shore container cranes, which cost $20M-$40M each: https://www.freightcourse.com/port-cranes/
As for recharging: if our power train is 28 MW, why not charging it at the same speed as we discharge it? Why settle on 500 kW, which is really low? For comparison, Tesla supercharger is up to 300 kW, and a car is a much smaller EV.
As for charging at 28 MW: might work, given that the battery is physically larger, so there's more space to dissipate heat. I agree that it's not proven by the napkin math that it's doable.
What I really suspect is that if Los Angeles refuses to accept nuclear container ships, Mexico would let them in, and then the regular railway will be used to move them to the US. A much simpler solution. :)
But the biggest issue is is recharge, you can't recharge every 5 min. I mean how many of those drones are you going to employ? I mean a panamax class ship has 5000 containers. So either you need 5000 of those drones (good luck with them managing the off-onloading in 5 min) or some small subfraction, which then need to be recharged. Even if we assume we need to only move 500 containers (and use 500 drones), That means we either need to recharge 500 2333kWh batteries in 300s, how are you going to do that out on the ocean, or more likely you have 5 drones operating which need to work for 100 times as long, which increases you weight by 100. It just doesn't add up.
As for drones to handle cases of ports which don't allow nuclear ships to dock: this is just a potential workaround. I kind of guess, that they will just focus on other ports first, and then eventually (like, in 5-10 years timeframe) everyone calms down and just allows such ships to dock in LA / NY / other US ports.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with port cranes.
As for can be offered: we're talking about moving a container from ship to ship which stand just hundreds meters away. The physics / math works, see my other comment.
I guess if you get the design to where it acts like a giant battery that is nearly impossible to tamper with it could work fine. Of course the political will to even try to do that doesn't exist.
If you have the access and ability to safely operate a nuclear reactor you also have the access and ability to operate it very unsafely if you choose to. There is no way around this that doesn't also remove your ability to operate it safely.
Not only they exist for decades, but as recently as January 2022, you could have bought tickets for a nuclear ship cruise: https://poseidonexpeditions.com/northpole/north-pole-icebrea...
Also, the nuclear container ship (the old one, but still in service): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
The link I shared is about a Chinese nuclear icebreaker that is supposed to lead container ships behind. Then there's no difference in terms of security if there's just one nuclear ship in a caravan or all of them.
As for Chinese specifically planning for nuclear powered container ships, I can offer this speculation: https://www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionpropelling-decarb...
That's while we have cheap oil. Once it is gone, having nuclear powered container super-carrier will be strategic interest of countries.
You can, of course, use nuclear energy to run your ships, and even trucks and planes.
Use the nuclear energy (both the electricity and heat) to produce fuel from CO₂ and H₂O. Use this fuel in your jet engines and colossal diesel motors. Burning it is carbon-neutral.
Oil should become much more expensive though, and building of nuclear facilities, much more cost-efficient, for this to become economically viable.
Nuclear container ship Sevmorput: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
Civilian nuclear icebreakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker
Floating nuclear power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
That is essentially a state operator as far as I can tell.
I don't see a problem having nuclear container ships to be operated by civilian governmental agencies / state-owned enterprises. This might not work for the US, but we often have very unique ways of doing things.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
The more interesting example is NS Savannah [1], which indeed crossed oceans unattended, and was accepted at European ports.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
https://www.theoceanbird.com/
Yes, there are also cargo ship kites, but those only work as a small adjunct to a big diesel engine.
There induction stove improves compared to the gas stove, but touch buttons go too far.
Ebikes and scooters are definitely capable of reimagining transportation, if we can get the scary cars reduced on the same infrastructure.
"tail-runk" -> trunk
"front-runk" -> frunk
The center console storage would be center-runk -> crunk
Electric is the future. Everything can be electric AND good.
Bought a house a year ago. The house (oddly enough) had a huge propane tank out back wired exclusively for the two stoves.. in addition to oil heat. So, when I moved in, my house had oil, propane, and electric service. No gas line. (Eastern Massachusetts, so, winter low temps around 0F but rarely below 5F).
My propane tank emptied after a month and the company said the tank itself was at end of life. A new tank would not be cheap. So I decided to cut the cord and replace my two stoves with electric ones.. and they’re awesome! I don’t think they’re quite as good as gas, but I can boil water in minutes, and I won’t blow my house up. The safety trade off is worth the reduced responsiveness.
Heat- installed a heat pump and it’s WAY better than the oil heat radiators. So much quieter and I can control each room independently. I like my office at 72, my wife at 68, that’s completely doable. Oh, and I’m saving a fortune on oil, plus I get air conditioning.
The biggest difference is that you can nor just cut the power like gas. You need to (horror of horrors!) move the pan off the heating element to dramatically cut the heat.
Modern induction stoves really are a massive leap from things you could get a decade ago. You can even get ones that work with woks. A trip through a few newer airbnbs on an island with very few gas lines was a serious revelation for me. From the article:
> except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive
Which basically ignores modern induction stoves which also don't heat up and are more responsive for thick-bottom pans! Which is the essence of the article - going further than "we'll make the job hot but with electricity".
The stove I bought has great dynamic range, which is helped by a safety feature that monitors conductivity through the plasma between the igniter and the frame, and re-lights the gas if it blows out.
Now I've a fancy glass top with one burner that takes forever to warm and then blasts through the desired temperature and incinerates the food, and three anemic burners that do very little.
I miss cheap coils.
I was not planning to spend that much, but I'm glad I did. I was replacing an obsolete 32 inch cooktop, which had a roughly 31.5 inch cutout in the counter. I found out that this 30 inch cooktop actually covers about 31 inches of counter, more than any of the others that I saw. I epoxied a stainless steel shim to narrow the opening on the far side of the cooktop. It looks good and works well.
I chose this model in particular since it has a high power center burner. With a lightweight steel wok you can make great stir fry with good temperature control.
https://www.thermador.com/us/products-list/cooktops-rangetop...
What did you think the premise was?
> Electric is the future. Everything can be electric AND good.
The premise was that electric can be better than gas-powered, as it doesn't have as many compromises.
If you threw away all preconceived notions of how a car should look and feel and spent an unlimited amount of time and money to design a new perfect one based around electric power, it would...still look very similar to any other car on the market today. The reason is that the design of a passenger car (and all of the infrastructure around it) has evolved over many centuries independent of its power source – from a horse drawn carriage to a Ford Model T to a Tesla.
I like the distinction between the sources that shaped a development.
[0]: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Cars on the market looks wildly different compare a Smart (the brand) car with the new GMC humongous pickup truck.
To your point, they're not even that different from stagecoaches--two people across, similar size.
Personally I think a 30-40kph speed cap within the city would save thousands of lives, make cars cheaper and smaller, make everyone less stressed out, allow more people to be comfortable using alternate modes of transportation (bikes, scooters, etc) and would probably add well under 5min to most journeys (traffic being the limiting factor 90% of the time)
Trains are generally not really designed to collide with anything at all (except maybe the occasional suicidal deer or human, but I doubt that this requires any particular design considerations), certainly not "train A is only designed to deal with stray passenger cars whereas train B should be able to deal with heavy freight".
What might be a design issue, more for the network and operation procedures than for the rolling stock is confidence about not meeting anything like a stray car. Different approaches exist, including train-side boxes on the last car or axle counters in the network.
American trains seem to suffer this more than others. Given that freight trains have priority on most of America's rail lines (which the freight companies own), that might have something to do with it.
Electric cars seem more about saving the car industry ecosystem, under the guise of saving the planet.
I recognize a valid counterpoint is that because we already have car infrastructure* BEVs are a drop-in replacement culturally and physically where transit, urban planning, and remote work all require more systemic change and have long timelines and NIMBYism. Electric vehicles also make sense in most fleet situations (delivery, school buses, trucking). The backwards-compatability argument makes sense in the short term, but misses the sort of step change needed to recalibrate western lifestyles to become both resilient and sustainable.
In the end, while BEVs are better than gasoline cars, and they may provide a stepping stone, the real investments must go well beyond the default individual car ownership model--to considering designing the best local mobility experience as a network and services rather than a thing parked in your drive.
This is where user experience and service design can make a profound climate impact, in creating better, more desirable mobility experiences as alternatives to car ownership.
Acronyms: BEV = Battery Electric Vehicle = electric car NIMBYism - Not In My Backyard-ism. The tendency of property owners to push against urban densification, rapid transit, and similar efforts in their neighborhoods.
Yeah, sure, you'd see a lot of public transport in dense areas.
However I disagree that the population would all be housed in dense housing.
The only reason dense centers exist is because its walkable, bikable, etc. People who don't want to live in dense areas would still exist in significant enough numbers that the automobile as we know it would still exist.
Densification occurred prior to the automobile; it was not sufficient to prevent the invention of the automobile as we know it.
That's not axiomatic. Commuter rail systems address this - there's a heavy rail line going through low density places, with infrastructure centered around that - be it bike lanes and racks, bus lines, or worst case scenario car parkings. The last mile problem can be solved in a variety of ways even in low density environments ( and FYI has been solved in many places around the world - e.g. in Paris the RER network continues to what are literally villages with houses, with population in the hundreds, with big parking lots and some other related infrastructure, and bus lines going there. So even if you live in a big house with a yard, you can bike, walk, take the bus, use your e-scooter or whatever to get to the train station which takes you to where you need to go).
Sure, but using public transport is a heavy trade-off in time. Where I am now, at peak hour a train (to my chosen destination) arrives every 15m. The bus/shuttle to the nearest station arrives as often as they can, which can be between 10m and 15m.
My last trip (from suburbs to a CBD +-20km away) during peak hour involved 30m total of waiting for the next shuttle/bus/train. That's 30m without the actual time in transit (on the train its quite fast - about 10m transit. On the bus, it is not, about 15m transit because it has many stops to make).
The next day I drove instead, and took a total of 30m to get to my destination.
Commuter transit systems work wonderfully for people who want to do things during transit but otherwise have no other use of their time.
For me, and a lot of people who opted to live in child-friend homes in child-friendly suburbs, an extra 60m-90m spent in transit is 60m-90m of time we lost with our family.
I don't care that I can read during that time; I can always simply read after my kid has gone to bed after all. I care that I get to spend those few extra hours per day with my kid.
This is before pointing out that while there are daycares, there are grocery stores, there are restaurants available easily by the bus or by bike, there are far more options readily available by car and maybe its not fun carrying a week's worth of food for a family with me on the bus. And then there are people I like to visit who don't live near public transit, so choosing to go without a car means I wouldn't be able to visit them regularly.
Owning and operating a car is definitely expensive. I could technically live my life without a car, its entirely feasible from my location. However the time, ease, and freedom tradeoffs make car ownership still make sense for me. I still ultimately prioritized living in an area with decent mass transit and love to take it when it makes sense. I know people who do rely on the public transit for every day transportation, and I'm happy they're able to visit me easily and I'm perfectly fine with subsidizing it.
EDIT: I just looked up a normal trip I take on Google Maps to double check transit times in comparison to driving. 10 minute drive. 30 minute bike ride. 1 hour bus trip. Another common trip: 10 minute drive, 30 minute bike ride, 30 minute bus ride. Even for the shorter one, that's 40 minutes round-trip not counting on waiting for the bus for a trip I normally do weekly. That's about 33 hours a year of extra waiting for just that one route.
Besides, if we somehow managed to create an EMP above your city and not set off a full scale nuclear war, your gasoline car and gas pump wouldn’t work either. Those also have computers in them that are critical to their functioning.
This is not something your average person has to worry about, no matter what kind of car they drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Refrigerants_with_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
This might be more complex and expensive though than just having the pantographs the full length of the line, but I thought about it recently when my local line was closed as a tunnel on it was too small to fit the pantographs through and had to be rebuilt.
So should be feasible with trains too
The only gas item I still have to keep around is the snow blower as we get a significant amount of snow. Fortunately I really don't run it that much at all over the course of the year. Maybe 5 gallons of gas a year. But when I need it, I really need it.
(I’m guessing everyone who has one Ego device is interested in more tools to defend the investment in batteries. Like myself.) ;-)
The first battery lawn mowers were terrible. Today's are excellent.
Tons of reviews of battery powered tools. My priorities led me to Milwaukee for power tools (not hand tools), YMMV. Great channel though.
Dead dinosaurs is basically the universal tool battery for larger tools.
[0]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-XP-21-in-149-cc-Vertic...
Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.
@grand parent - Mowing ditch/stream slopes with anything but petrol brushcutter is just next to impossible. Saying that as owning - a battery strimmer, a 4-stroke petrol push mower, a battery robot mower and 2-smoke brush cutter. I have tried using even a battery powered hedge trimmer. In other words - not everything is a nice flat rectangle short grass cover.
However, in practice the cables are no issue - you can have them installed and dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in). Once done - you'd never notice them ever again. No go zone can be organized with magnetic strips (also buried).
Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight?
Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?
I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.
The bigger headache with boundary cables is finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork.
this is also easy if you have decent electronics equipment... or it's built in the mower, itself, where you can select to follow the line till the break.
>>dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in)
From my previous comment. Look for "Cable Laying Machine" rent; it's around 60euro/day here.
Yeah, unless you have a dog that wants to dig stuff up.
https://www.wired.com/story/robot-lawnmowers-are-killing-hed...
At night, dusk? Hedgehogs are nocturnal.
The robomover cuts the lawn so often so there is just a fine mulch that disappears below the lawn (and fertilizes it).
I have heard stories about your rabid HOA, but they can't have a problem with that?
My next mower will be electric though.
I don't have a leaf blower. Leaf blowers are stupid noisy and not any faster than a good rake.
The problem with electric tools is that the battery life heavily depends what you're doing. I also have an Ego mower (the top model/largest battery as of 2020). The only way my battery might actually last the advertised hour (with a ~40 min charge time) is if I religiously mowed twice a week. I'm usually lucky to get 30 minutes of real world mowing, but sometimes it's less than half of that. I used to prefer mowing in the morning to avoid the heat, but any amount of moisture in the grass slaughters the battery life. Likewise if the grass is higher than normal, say goodbye to the battery life. All in all my electric mower is quite a bit inferior to a decent quality gas mower, but not inconvenient enough (so far) to push me to switch back.
No. Well, yes, a "cheap" electric cooktop that simply produces heat (coil or IR) is worse than burners, and less responsive. But that's not what you want. You want an induction cooktop: safe, efficient, beautiful, and more importantly, more responsive than burners.
The required draw is too high.
If I remember correctly, my comment was based on an average household with about 4 to 5 KW installed in western Europe.
This represents about 12 panels which is roughly the maximum amount of panels a regular house has space for.
The first one I looked the specs up on at my home center has a 4.8kW largest element and 8.6kW total. https://images.thdstatic.com/catalog/pdfImages/d9/d92c8678-a...
I'm not even sure if my entire house has a breaker for more than 32A.
Also maybe you want to use the oven and AC and charge the car at the same time etc. As far as I understand, it's a plus and minus calculation. It's not any kind of compatibility issue...
Naturally big electric power sinks need bigger voltages, otherwise the current and thus the cabling would get very thick.
Cooktop with induction cooking zones:
Right front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.
Left front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.
Left rear: 7” – 1800W, booster 2600W.
Right rear: 7" - 1800W, booster 2600W.
Center: 10” – 2500W, booster 3800W.
Voltage: 240/208V.
Connection rating: 15400W.
Current: 40A.
So yeah, if you are in the habit of routinely maintaining four pots of water at a furiously rolling boil you probably will have problems. The rest of us are likely to be pretty safe.
Maybe a home however is lacking the battery intermediary.
You don't always have to start out with every burner on high!
Another thing to keep in mind: with gas about half the energy heats the air and flows around the pot or pan, so it ends up being about 50% efficient.
But with all said, the carbon monoxide buildup issue was what swayed me in the end.
I was rather talking about the required instantaneous draw which is usually too high for an average household's Solar setup.
I’m planning to install solar and was thinking around 3KW with battery backup. I definitely want induction cooking.
Should I get more capacity? Bigger batteries? Fewer burners?
[Edit: bigger batteries seems to be the answer, also because of cooking at night.]
Just need a grid-powered charger for the battery to replace the sun with if you worry about running out of electricity to cook.
[Edit: it's off the grid, only gets water, and I want to keep it that way in principle.]
If you have the charging top voltage at/below the peak of 240V mains (which is sqrt(2) higher than the rms of 240V), you can get away with using the load's voltage-adaptive power supply to handle the varying battery voltage. This will work with resistive heaters (no simple thermostats, though; "electronic trailing edge phase cut dimmer" is the technology needed, but with adapted control to work like a normal PWM), but resistive light bulbs would burn out.
There are plug standards similar to the ones used on computer power supplies that are rated as DC variants.
Feel free to stay in contact; I am looking for making use of local solar power for electronic loads that make up most of my electricity usage once I can spend the appropriate money on it, and combining it with UPS functionality as that's rather cheap to add.
Lithium batteries like you find in electric cars probably can support this but it does require a certain additional upfront investment.
In our kitchen we have both. Items heat faster with less heating of nonessential surrounding areas vs. standard burners.
My guess is cooking aside solar generation is probably not going to be by itself a sufficient source of household power for the foreseeable future. In any case optimizing use of electric energy requires taking advantage of the best available technologies.
I have to note that it is rated at 2000w at max setting (6), but due to it being so potent, we've never had it set to more than 3 out of 6, anything above that is way too aggressive. So make it 1000w typical draw.
The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.
https://www.inductioncooked.com/how-much-electricity-does-in...
The induction stove only heats the bottom plate. Whereas with a gas stove around a large wok, there is a lot of convection heating the thin walls of the wok as well.
[1]: http://www.kenjilopezalt.com/books
https://youtube.com/shorts/JOoaKt4u-gk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGBP3sG3a9Y
I pity the dogs and cats especially!
Problem is solved by either using better components, or better matching the control frequency to the components used so there a no frequency modes that happen to match up with the resonant frequency of components used. Thus eliminating the transfer of electrical energy into mechanical energy.
Used to be able to hear it but can't anymore so either they all got better the last few years or I aged out of being able to hear it.
Regardless of price, multilayer ceramic capacitors are piezoelectric - meaning they physically vibrate. Inductors and transformers are electromagnets powerful enough to noticeably vibrate and move themselves. In fact, if you test them during assembly before taping them, the two halves of the ferrite core will snap together like magnets. Most noise comes instead from the windings, but that gives you an idea of their physical power. The biggest winding in an induction cooktop is the induction coil itself.
The reason you hear them is because they're being used at audio frequencies. Considerate designers choose higher switching frequencies above what humans and household pets can hear. Induction cooktops are kind of a special case where it's tempting to dip into the audible frequencies. Frequency choice alone doesn't eliminate all noise, so there are other mitigations like materials selection and assembly, to name a couple.
Overall, it's largely due to being cheap about the design and manufacturing processes.
https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-electric-woks-to-buy-4138...
The lack of adequate kitchen ventilation is pretty underrated by most people. Picked up a WYND Halo indoor air quality monitor out of general curiosity and was astonished at just how quickly indoor air can sour when cooking if you don't have adequate ventilation.
I cook a lot more outdoors than I used to now!
Ordinary domestic kitchens did not have the ventilation to do it properly.
Limited heat settings left me often wishing for more nuance, especially in lower temperatures.
Hysteresis. You can see this by putting your saucepan with water to 350, then lowering it to 212 when it reaches a boil. It will rapidly cycle between boiling and not boiling, making simmering very difficult. My particular induction burner has one setting for 140F (way too low) and the next setting is 212F. Where's simmer?
It does heat water up faster than a conventional burner, so I use it for cooking the pasta while I make the sauce on a conventional gas stovetop. I also use it when temperature control isn't important, but that's not very often in cooking.
Induction heat transfer is basically generating a magnetic field in the bottom coil, which is then picked up by the vessel, currents induced in it causing the heat.
Cheap induction stoves emulate lower power levels by turning the heat on and off, averaging the heat.
One solution is to use a thick bottom vessel that retains enough heat between the cycles to allow simmering.
Or buy a smooth controlled stove. But I dont think there are any such ones in the market.
I usually use these with electric stoves since they retain heat pretty well. They take a while to warm up though, so there's both time and energy lost in that warming process.
Cast Iron ones will do too.
If you have to cook something to simmer and hold heat for long, best use thick bottomed ones.
What could be done to mitigate the slow heating issue is to use a small amount of water initially, on high settings, allowing it to boil. Then you can add your contents, reduce the power setting and allow it to simmer.
What many dont know is that you can keep a cast iron or steel plate between the vessel and the stove, of a suitable thickness, that converts the induction stove to a "heater" stove (the plate gets heated through induction, but the vessel only sees the heat). However, a word of caution. If the plate is of a very large size, it will have un-even heating and may warp. Best size is one that is slightly smaller than the circular marker on the stove.
I do agree that there are far too many induction cooktops with gawd awful controls that are not responsive; that's more a matter of picking a well designed unit rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology itself. Same with granular control - higher end models offer not just finer control, but different control modes. It boggles my mind there aren't more temperature probe options for automatic temperature control. My GE cooktop had an optional bluetooth probe - but it only worked for low temps. If they had a high temp probe it would be a candy makers dream!
I only use gas when I want to cook with super high heat - like with a wok. And for that I use a left over turkey fryer burner - outside! Double bonus for all the gunk thrown off during cooking not being trapped in my house either. I don't have a restaurant style hood and make up air system; it's far cheeper and easier to just go outside for that kind of cooking.
I both agree with and disagree with your post- I agree that induction has not met its potential yet. If every induction range used the Control Freak's control systems, people would be abandoning gas in droves because it's better in every way: https://www.amazon.com/PolyScience-Temperature-Controlled-Co...
I disagree that it's specifically worse for cast iron, especially when you have a good device. The problem there is the quality of the cookware, cast iron works, and an aluminum or aluminum cored stainless steel work perfectly if they're well designed.
Have you tried a thicker, heavier pan? A good quality induction cooker should heat reasonably slowly and maintain a constant temperature if you set it to, say, 1/3 or 1/2 power.
I’ve been using a friend’s one recently and found it to be much easier to maintain a steady temperature than with my old electric cooktop.
I was excited by the prospects of induction cooking, and if I'm boiling water, or even making a slow-cook stew, it works great. But for sauces and meat (where fine temperature control is critical), I'll stick to gas or (if I have to) electric.
Indeed I love to cook so much and one of the downsides of induction I didn't see talked about too much in this thread - matching pan size to hob size - bugged me so much on my old cooktop I'm tempted to get something ridiculous like the Gaggenau 400 Series that doesn't have defined areas for pans, but a grid of smaller hobs that will autodetect and adjust to the size/location of a pan. There are at least three versions of that cooktop from various manufacturers and one of the non-Gaggenau ones was something like 30% cheaper. And I just realized I didn't save it like I thought I had. D'oh!
Waiting for integrated temperature control to become more of a thing with induction - higher end cooktops have it; just needs to percolate down. My GE cooktop had a bluetooth probe that worked great at lower temperatures - but usually you want automatic temp control more on the high end - frying and candymaking is what I was missing. I guess if you made lots of delicate sauces the bluetooth probe would have been a godsend and maybe that's what they were going for. Probably cheaper, easier and more reliable to only have a lower temp probe too. Just not nearly as useful for what I would have liked!
If you like to cook invest in good cookware. The biggest problem with induction is cheap cookware with "disks" on the bottom. Having as much ferrous magnetic metal as possible is the real key to success with induction - and why your cast iron performs so well!
I love All Clad - triple ply stainless steel sandwich of either aluminum or (if you are feeling really extravagant) copper. Far easier to maintain than cast iron (although I love my cast iron too - can't get fried chicken just right in anything else). Cookware and More is the official All Clad factory seconds (usual some dent or other cosmetic flaw) outlet with great prices and if you get on their mailing list they have an annual sale where they take even more off. I've gotten All Clad skillets for well under $200 and they will be something I can pass on. Good cookware never dies. Took several years to get the pieces I wanted but I did it without breaking the bank.
If All Clad, even factory seconds, are still too pricy - I'm not paying $500 for a stockpot no matter how wonderful it may be - then Made In has very nice pieces competitively priced. Got my stock pot from them for under $200.
Finally Tramontina has great induction ready clad cookware pieces and can be found at regular big box stores like Costco or even Walmart. Not quite as heavy/well constructed as All Clad or Made In, but still leaps and bounds better than anything with a disk.
Good, better, best - just reject anything with a damn disk welded onto the bottom of it and you will find induction a LOT more enjoyable. As good as your cast iron :)
Fine control comes with higher end units that have more settings. Didn't pay attention to that at my last house and got a cooktop with only 11 choices. My mothers induction range has double that and it's amazing what a difference makes, especially at the lower end - as you note. Getting a new house next month and won't be making that mistake again! Something with a at least 18-20 steps from low to high will be mandatory for me. 11 just isn't enough.
and loud
I prefer non-induction electric.
I get the principle but the UX leaves a lot to be desired. Other than boiling water it's a step down for me.
Also, it throws off way less heat than a gas burner. Almost all of it goes into the pan, where gas tends to throw a lot up around the pan.
I've never run into the problem mentioned by another in this thread about cycling when simmering or burning. My range is a $3500 Samsung range, more than a cheap electric, less than many gas, but not exactly cheap. Well worth it for me.
However, one downside I didn't expect is: My inductive range is more disposable.
Where a regular range, if it breaks, you can probably have a repair guy come by and do some simple troubleshooting and identify a burner element or knob that has failed... The inductive cooktop the repair guys tend to just want to replace the whole thing, to the tune of $750 parts, plus labor. At which point they start recommending you just replace the range, because most people don't want to spend more than a cheap range on a repair.
A year ago my range had two of the burners stop working. Thankfully, it was a well known problem, a blown solder joint on one of the boards deep in the cooktop. I was able to repair it for $0 in 3 hours (my son was helping, probably could have done it in half the time if I wasn't also teaching him), and we were back in business.
But no repairman would have wanted to spend 90 minutes on a "maybe" repair with no warranty and another 90 minute service call or potentially $300 board replacement or $750 cooktop replacement, and an angry customer because their fix didn't work.
No problem for a DIYer.
But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so, no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future. No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
It seems many are replacing critical thinking and science with passion and ideology.
Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.)
Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too.
I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study
That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.
According to the current economic system the future is being discounted and considered unimportant. Anyone who tries to extend the lifetime of humanity or the planet is a lunatic because longevity counts for nothing.
If you were to account for the next 500 years, then the costs that we have to pay today would definitively be worth it. If you only account for the next 30 years, then sure collective suicide (hyperbole) is more efficient.
>no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future.
Germany is doing everything on hard mode and yet its electric grid is already 50% renewable. The government did almost everything in its power to slow things down. It's certainly possible if you stop the analysis paralysis of pondering whether it is possible.
>No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
Is this supposed to be an attempt at the nirvana fallacy? Taking the next step will reduce damage to the environment by x% where x is smaller than 100. After that we will have even more stringent environmental standards and then figure out how to implement those.
As a society—maybe, as human kind—maybe, as individuals—I highly doubt it.
The former two depend on how do we handle everything else on this planet. Looking at what happens in Ukraine, I’m sceptical. The latter: none of us is going to be here in 500 years. Maybe sone will, assuming we, the kind, don’t get wiped by other external factors.
I’m not saying it isn’t worth trying to make a change. I’m only discussing that single point.
Suppose you're a coastal city that wants to setup a charging facility for passing local ships. You can either build a full seaport (which might not be practical depending on geography) with a crane and battery storage and charging facilities, which can handle ships one at a time, or maybe two or three if you have the dock space. Or you can run a high voltage line out to a buoy, and ships can hold position out in the water and connect to the power receptacle at the buoy for an hour and charge. If you want to have ten ships be able to charge at once, you run ten high voltage lines out to ten different buoys. I would suggest that the latter option is probably cheaper and easier.
It's also not out of the question to have HVDC lines that connect continents to each other for power sharing (i.e. buying and selling solar power based on where the sun is shining), and if such cables exist across oceans it's not much of a stretch to imagine a string of charging stations at regular intervals for passing ships to use, even across the Pacific.
Even better would be some system where you can have a continuous connection to power, like the pantographs connecting to overhead lines in electric street car systems, but I have no idea how you would do that at sea.
Why not both? charge on-ship batteries while swapping off-ship batteries.
One of the things that's counterintuitive about batteries is that if a battery is twice as big it still takes the same time to charge, not twice as long. (That's assuming you can supply enough power to charge at the fastest rate the batteries can handle.)
What if this assumption isn't true: dispatchable energy and opportunistic energy are two very different things.
If you want to build out battery storage to get a stable grid from intermittent sources, chances are you'd end up with cargo-container sized standard modules anyways, instead of every port having its own bespoke facilities reinvented in some folksy local style
Delivering power to the ships would be interesting. I suppose it would have to come in at high voltage (either AC or DC) and be stepped down to a suitable pack voltage. That means each ship would have the equivalent of an electrical substation on board.
Recharging those containerized batteries would require some infrastructure. Conveniently, off shore wind parks are currently pretty popular, can generate lots of GW of power, and can be close to shipping routes. There are all sorts of solutions that you could imagine here. You could even shuttle batteries to and from ships that need them so those ships don't even have to make an expensive detour.
Plus you likely want to stack these to one part of ship and then risk having them relatively close each other which in case of fire could be risky.
The bottom line is, they're already better everywhere today, and the grid is only going to get cleaner.
Other pollutants have a direct effect on human health. Some pollution has a very fast effect, some pollution has a delayed or chronic effect. We need to replace systems that create this pollution immediately.
For small tools like a two stroke gas engined lawn mower, weed eater or chainsaw, you have an immense immediate benefit from not having the particulate, unburned gas and oil, NOx, and carbon monoxide in your lungs. This immediate benefit to human health makes the transition worth it at almost any cost.
For larger things like vehicles or heat pump based home heating, you need to consider the pay off time. The pay off time is shorter (better) when replacing less fuel efficient vehicles (as low as 20,000 miles). If you have an existing vehicle that gets decent mileage (35+ mpg) and your local electricity is coal powered it can take much longer (50,000 miles or longer). But there is always a finite payoff time for any realistic scenario.
1. At least for now, the power still goes out. Maybe I'm still smarting from a week-long power outage this past winter, but in the US, our electric grid is fragile in many places, and we are probably decades away from it being more resilient, so more dependence on electricity is more reliance on large utility providers. Dirty fossil fuels are still better at being able to be moved around in bulk - gasoline has 50-100x the power density of batteries. Electricity has more potential for being decentralized, but we are far away from that.
2. Electricity tends to mean miniaturization and computerization. That tends to mean more difficult to repair; someone related to me a story about a small village somewhere in Africa that was reliant on a gas-powered pump for the well. They had to get gas for it of course, but if it broke down it was simple enough that nearly any person in the village knew how to repair it. A solar-powered pump would eliminate the need for gas, but no one had the tools or knowledge to repair it if it broke. Additionally, with manufacturers desiring ever more control through embedded DRM, it leads to a future where even if the electric power is available, we might not be able to use it because we didn't pay the licensing fees.
These are perhaps very dystopian concerns, but recent world events somehow make these sorts of concerns more realistic.
Solar, wind, and batteries are not that complicated. If you are handy, you can buy some cheap stuff on ebay and wire it together yourself or you can pay some people in your area to do it for you. Different set of skills than maintaining an ICE engine but not fundamentally a lot harder than that. There are plenty of people handy with that sort of stuff that are busy electrifying everything they can get their hands on. There's no basis for your paranoia here.
If you want to put in a oil/gas pipeline, you need one permission from the state, then you're a go.
BUT. If you want to install new power lines it's a whole different ball game.
First you need state level permission, then you need one from the cities you're passing through, then the counties, then the individual property owners and everyone who can see the high-voltage lines. The amount of NIMBYing in the permit process is staggering.
There was an article on HN a while back about using lifting gas (specifically blimps) as a way to reduce shipping costs. I naively wonder how feasible it is to at least lighten the load of ships using hydrogen gas?
https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting...
this is a similar flaw with things like “solar roads” or “solar sidewalks” it’s just unnecessary complexity
Not to forget drag and what it means to actually drag something at even speed current cargo ships travel. Traditionally my understanding is that barges are used at much lower speeds.
And again, all of this is overshadowed by the fact that there's enough open unused space on land to power the entire planet with solar by multiple orders of magnitude. You could power 100 earths with ground-based solar and still have room left over.
I was going to say, isn't this thesis already exemplified by Tesla?
When we look back in time we see that new technologies very often tried to emulate the old technology that they were about to replace. Cars used to look like horse carriages, computers used the desktop metaphor and smart phones skeuomorphic design.
The time isn't ripe for better than “same, but electric”.
Did it? I see plenty of them around. Over 227k sold world wide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3#Global_sales
Then Tesla came along and now everyone says that their success is because of the cars looking like normal cars. shrug. I think the look takes second place to the technology and how well its implemented.