True, the grid isn't ready for 300M EVs by 2030... but it will have to be.
Alas, consumers have a long history of ignoring exhortations to change their habits. They always do what they want, not what some authority tells them they ought to do. If they want giant-ass long-range electric trucks and SUVs, they will buy giant-ass long-range electric trucks/SUVs.
The only viable solution is a massive wave of investment to improve energy generation, storage, delivery, and efficiency worldwide.
A microgrid generally means having wind/solar/batteries near your neighborhood, with a natural gas or diesel generator that kicks in when the batteries die.
I guess I’m much more cynical about who changes consumers habits. Auto companies have spent enormous sums ensuring political behavior is such that cities aren’t as walkable as they could be and that people need cars in their life.
Auto companies didn't change consumer habits. They changed physical infrastructure to make vehicles a necessity. And they did so surreptitiously through back-room political influence, without ever telling consumers what they ought to do. That's... different.
Did they do it in every developed country? The US doesn't have massively higher number of cars than other countries, esp. considering its relatively rural character.
A lot of people pushing for all-EV laws would be even happier if ubiquitous car culture were brought to an end and commoner rural / suburban people were all forced to move into cities and rely on mass transit. So I'm not convinced such shortcomings in the all-EV plan are unintentional. The 2030 timetable seems deliberately too short to be realistic.
Meh, range of today's EVs is more than enough to support suburban and rural people. Remote rural areas with 100 mile drives to the store exist but are hardly the commoners.
Rural people with the space to put in solar panels and large batteries will actually be able to get cheaper electricity than urban. With the way prices are falling for batteries and solar by 2030 it will be cheaper for most to even replace farm machinery running diesel engines with electric motors let alone cars.
Range has nothing to do with it, I didn't say anything about EV range. It's a matter of economics, ICE bans by 2030 will require people to purchase new cars years before they otherwise would have (the economics of running a gas station business will be trashed, gas will become much more expensive.) It will require increased taxes to pay for new infrastructure, or otherwise increase the cost of electricity. All around it increases the cost of a rural lifestyle significantly, pricing commoners out. Which is probably half of the intention in the first place because rural living is frequently castigated by the anti-car crowd (who never seem to propose car bans for the rich, only policy changes that would price commoners out of owning cars.)
Response to sibling comment's "just buy a field of solar panels bro": Yeah that's great for the people with money to spare. These policies won't bother rich people, but will price out the poor from whom the rich will eagerly buy up property, creating massive country estates while commoners wallow in cities. Just like Roman times. Just the way the rich want it.
At some level a car is a luxury good which doesn't really scale. American car ownership is a historical aberration that continues to take its toll on the climate, both due to emissions from the cars themselves and with subsidized suburban and rural living.
It's all about turning a commodity into a luxury; an extremely regressive policy tantamount to throwing gasoline on the inequality fire. If use of cars is to be curtailed, they should be banned for everybody. The rich should not be allowed to buy their way out of these changes.
But that's pretty much the opposite of reality. The "commoners" are increasingly priced out from being able to "wallow in cities". The idea that city living is some kind of negative punishment is really distorting your perspective.
> The Stanford study points out that since charging electric vehicles takes time using conventional chargers, owners tend to leave their cars charging in the evenings and overnight, putting added pressure on the grid. Demand peaks between 5-9 pm as people return home from work and use electric appliances like televisions and kettles.
> If vehicle owners were to charge them during the day, this could cut costs and help the grid as the number of electric vehicles increase to meet sustainable goals, the authors say.
My EV (Tesla) already has a charging option for when rates are cheapest. I would assume that most EVs will have that feature if they don’t already?
Not sure I understand why this is considered a big problem.
There are chargers in parking lots at/near office buildings. People use them during the day. In residential areas without offstreet parking, there are few to no convenient chargers.
Interesting. My suspicion is that the amount of workplaces where this is an option is small compared to workplaces as a whole, but I've no idea! My (incorrect?) assumption is that the primary convenient option is for homeowners in suburbs to charge in their driveway or garage when home.
In the UK, my provider has a thing called Intelligent Octopus that allows them to control when my car charges.
They offer me discounted rates (41p KWH vs 7.5p KWH) if I charge between 2330 and 530, but I can plug it in when I get home, and they control that charging block. It allows them to turn on charging anytime they like if the load on the grid is low, and they charge me that lower rate even if it's outside the off-peak time.
With a connected car, the "charging block" can just be software running on the car.
More importantly, the direct payment plan with the utility company (which means waiting for 10,000 different utilities to switch pricing models!) can be replaced by an aggregation company (which only needs a handful of companies worldwide).
On the grid side, the aggregation company behaves just like any other company that owns a big battery, bidding on the wholesale electricity market like a power plant would. But in reality they actually command a "fleet" of smart car chargers and stationary batteries. By splitting some of the profit with these car/battery owners, an aggregation company can magically align the pricing model for everyone, without waiting for 10,000 utilities to get their act together.
If you follow JB Straubel's public talks[0] over the years, none of this should come as a surprise.
I don't want a connected car where the manufacturer or whoever compromises them can remotely disable charging on my car. I don't understand why that sort of access would need to be included in the car instead of the charger. It seems an unnecessary compromise of autonomy.
If you don't want any data connection, then—by definition—you must reject any sort of grid-interactive charging features of any kind. Baby, meet bathwater!
Fortunately the vast majority of regular users (eg bengale with their Intelligent Octopus device) aren't bothered by it. They'll happily save money on EV charging and improve grid stability at the same time.
> I don't understand why that sort of access would need to be included in the car instead of the charger
I didn't say it needs to be included. However if you already have a fleet of connected EVs (eg Tesla), you could instantly roll out this feature overnight without any additional hardware investment.... (hint hint...)
That's always possible! Can you clarify your position, so we might better understand each other?
For a minute I did considered the possibility that you were leaning hard on the word manufacturer. However, I thought it was quite absurd that you would be fine with a situation where "[a third party] or whoever compromises them can remotely disable charging on my car."
I intentionally avoided that less-than-charitable interpretation of your words, since IMO it would violate the HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Seems like charging at night is a problem if the grid is powered by solar, but a benefit if the grid is powered by nuclear. At least, if the chargers are timed to start later in the evening, when rates are cheaper.
The grid will never be ready for that, but smart charging may be the solution.
What do I mean by that: there is already a number of solar panel installations that are feeding the grid at daytime, sometime even more than what the grid can consume. There is no way currently to link the PV systems and the cars so that when the PV generates a lot of electricity all the cars in the area will start charging, maybe discharge at night to cover home consumption, practically using the cars as very large and intelligent batteries with the side effect of using all the excess PV energy to change cars for driving.
Otherwise we will be in the situation of cars charging at night will fail the grid and PVs overproducing at day will fail the grid, while most cars are used less than a couple of hours per day on average (ignoring commercial vehicles and taxi/Uber, cars carry people from home to work and back, eventually with a round trip to shop for groceries).
> if adaptations aren’t made before net-zero goals for EVs are met.
Of course. Why would we not make adaptations? The job of the grid is to adapt to consumer needs. They aren’t perfect, but it makes sense that they’ll adapt.
I wouldn’t count on consumers changing unless the grid does something simple like set prices to incentivize charging patterns.
I have a few electric companies near me. One just has flat rates. The other has nighttime rates that are much lower. I expect all power companies will end up like this. Or just grant low prices for “smart chargers” that auto charge based on when there’s excess capacity.
These types of articles seem funny to me as a form of “I haven’t eaten in the past 8 hours, if this trend continues I will starve to death in two days.”
Indeed. I have talked to multiple utility representatives from Florida all the way up to Illinois, and they are all aware of the upgrades that are going to be necessary to support full electrification. Not just vehicles, but everything (cooking, hvac, etc). ComEd in Illinois even mentions it on billboard advertising they have in their market (“Electrification is coming. We’ll be ready.”).
If you consider what is the cost of "adapting" I bet your discourse would change. EVs have massive consumption, way bigger than lights, computers and AC/heating combined. In my part of the world (Eastern Europe) the usual power consumed by a home is 0.5 to 2kW, with short time spikes to 3-4kW. An EV can easily go 12KW, that requires a very expensive upgrade in capacity and load balancing of the grid to accept locally (in a city block) hundreds of cars randomly connecting with huge surges. You need some kind of interface and protocol to coordinate car charging per micro-grid.
EVs can go to 12kw but don’t need to. At that rate a Tesla will add over 40 range-miles per hour, which means you’d recharge the entire battery range in about eight hours. Some people do drive 300 miles per day, but on average people drive less than 30 miles (in the US) and maybe 40km/day in Europe. When you work this out into a continuous power draw over the course of a day, it’s a few hundred watts per vehicle. Still requires grid upgrades and some planning to avoid spikes where everyone fast-charges at once, but it’s better to consider these smaller averages than assume everyone is doing 12kw charging continuously.
Exactly. It's always weird when current infrastructure gets brought up as an objection against new technology (EVs, clean energy transition etc.). As if it's some unchangeable law of nature. It makes me wonder if, during the industrial revolution, people pointed out that trains could never take off because there were no railroads for them.
I think it’s more complicated than it seems. For example,
- electricity payments are highly regulated. I’ve seen places where the electric company wants to raise rates to cover investments in infra only to see the gov not allow it.
- there are laws that impact how they can upgrade the infrastructure and limit the abilities of the electric companies
These are legislative issues that need to be dealt with by non-experts. Articles like this can help with those processes
> The other has nighttime rates that are much lower.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? As I understand, the goal is to get vehicle owners to charge during the day, since (domestic) consumption at night is already high, and since solar only helps then.
Currently in the UK energy prices are lowest at night when usage is lowest. Night being after most people are in bed and before they wake up. You're correct that when solar makes up a larger propotion of the energy created, it might change that, but that doesn't change the idea of encouaging people to charge when energy is most abundant/cheapest.
There are already companies doing this in the UK such as Octopus with their Agile tarrif[0]. the unit price you pay changes every 30 minutes based on the wholesale price at the time. It's capped at 100p/kwh, which is 3x the average flat rate people use in the UK, but on the flip side it can go below 0p and at those points you actually get paid for using electicity. In those cases you're acting as a load balancer when there's just too much energy in the network. You can see a graph of the past prices here[1].
Octopus also has a pretty good API and hooks in IFTTT so you can set up automations for yourself. You could set your car or home bettery when the price is under a certain price. This could also just be built into the charge in the future and there's no reason why it couldn't be a standard between energy providers too.
Usage is high during the way due to work and industry with a peak around 8pm.
Electricity usage midnight-5am is very low. And rates are lowered even further as many power plants produce at a uniform rate, regardless of time of day. Things like hydro, nuclear, tidal, and wind.
Seems to be sloppy research. Doesn't seem to understand the difference between world/US and US grid doesn't have to supply the worlds' EVs.
>> There were 16.5 million electric vehicles on the world’s roads in 2020
That's the world, not the US. The US has less than a million EVs, maybe 2 at most.[1][2]
>> this is expected to rise to 300 million by 2030. But with these rising numbers, the US grid could struggle without investment and changes in charging habits, a Stanford study finds.
Projections are 26 million[3] by 2030 in US, 300 million is worldwide, but what has US grid got to do with it?
But, even if it were true, it won't be as big as a challenge as its made out to be.
a) There is plenty of free renewable power. Renewables oversupply, which is currently being curtailed. Renewables are growing, this will mean plenty of oversupply coming online. If only there was a way to create demand.
b) Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times across the seven US grids in 2021
c) EVs can absorb all of this free energy or get paid to absorb
d) Right now, energy bill is split between gas, electricity and nat gas. Households switching to EVs will have solar, bringing their bills to zero as well as no new demand on the grid.
e) Quite possibly, there is no net new demand. A comment on HN: It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank of gas as to charge an EV. [5]
Sure, we can try to change people's behavior, which of course will only work with smart incentives. And/or we need a lot more grid-scale energy storage. Changing people's behavior is really hard. And before it's even possible to implement "surge pricing" in a way that's exposed to individuals, we need a ton of infrastructure changes. Those are good goals, but it might be simpler to incentivize behavior at a larger scale than consumers and cover the gap with storage. For example, add storage to car charging stations instead of telling consumers when to charge. The charge station would then charge up at low demand so it won't pull from the grid during peak demand. Maybe we need all of the above, we'll see.
It was common to carry containers of gas when traveling cross-country (USA) in the 1930s (source: my grandparents). I don’t know the size but would guess several 5-gallon containers would do it.
Spare gas cans can get you hundreds of miles. When I was growing up this was super common for long road trips just because gas stations usually closed at night and there weren’t credit card readers for 24 hour pumps.
I'm talking about 100 years ago when cars were invented. We didn't stop and wait for the infrastructure to be ready. We built it, got it out there. Everything else will come when and as we need it.
Early car adopters probably were range conscious as hydrogen car owners today like me are .
Built it and it will come doesn’t always work for the early adopters, early investment in a technology can be risky it might take longer than expected or some other tech might replace the current front runner.
Gasoline powered cars weren’t the only tech in early 1900s either, steam powered cars were being as late as 1930s.
The diesel and petrol engines were competing too, very different kinds of engines and fuels
How did the hardware stores store the fuel, how many time a day did they get delivery, what were the distribution networks? Those questions didn’t get answered overnight, yet the car industry didn’t wait until all of the components were in place. It will be the same with EVs
What are you talking about? The whole point is that you can buy a spare 10-20 gallons of gas and take it with you. And the technology (a metal can) existed long before cars.
It probably mirrored how some of the alternative fuels are setup today like hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles
California has around 45 hydrogen pumps I am always aware where my car can go and not , and the dynamics change every time a pump comes up or shuts down
The pattern of gas pumps probably looked similar to how hydrogen pumps are distributed today - Most clustered in urban areas of SF bat and LA with some in smaller centers like scaremento and rest scattered on high traffic key road ways between them like the one on I5 .
And if you got fuel stranded you are going to pay a lot for someone to bring fuel by traditional means to you - horse drawn then, towing now
Are people aware that there’s an entire industry with 100s of billions in capital already working on these problems? Every time I read one of these articles and the comments on them, it reads like a reason why we can’t or shouldn’t decarbonize, rather than a call to do the engineering work to fix the problem. Which plenty of people are doing already! This is Hacker News, right?
I doubt that the world was actively preventing consumer vehicles from driving on existing infrastructure. It seems like the same people who are forcing the change over to electric vehicles are also actively working to reduce the presence of vehicles on the roads.. I don’t believe they are operating in good faith.
Right? Imagine, having the full benefit of hindsight, and still responding to such a massive opportunity by grumping that there’s no way it could ever work!
Gas distribution is a very different problem from electricity distribution, though. Gas was initially sold at pharmacies and it worked just fine before specialized shops cropped up. You can't have that with electrical grid.
I am literally building an electric jerry can in my workshop right now so that you can carry around car recharges in your trunk. There are solutions to all of these problems and the technology is getting better all the time. All you have to do is stop looking for reasons why it can never work, and start looking for ways to make it work.
I'm not sure how that helps if the grid is already nearly overloaded and we need gas/coal to cover peak demand. The problem is not the charger and its small battery, the problem is generating clean power and transmitting it.
He’s solving the transmission problem. A portable battery does not need to be charged from the grid.
Edit to add: I have about 1.2kW of storage that can be charged by solar in a few hours that takes up about the space of a 5 gallon NATO jerry can. It can be charged thousands of time for the initial price paid. That’s with 2020 tech. Certainly density and efficiency will improve as market pressures increase.
I don’t know if you saw my edit, but in my case, it’s charged by either a portable solar panel or (optimally) home solar panels.
In the not so distant past there were plans for neighborhood scale nuclear reactors. That would go a long way towards distribution, redundancy, and scale issues.
Why does it have to be a grid? There are plenty of electronic devices that don’t get power from the grid, some at dwelling scale. What prevents power from being delivered by truck, just like fuel is today? (Density is definitely an issue, but technology evolves)
Haven't really considered that. I guess the problem is conversion loss. If we're making some sort of fuel at power generation points, why not use that fuel in cars instead of doing another conversion back to electricity? We could make hydrogen or even synthetic gas/diesel and just keep the cars we already have.
It wasn't a problem because if you went on a longer trip where there was no gas, you just took more gas with you. Lack of gas stations wasn't even an issue for gas cars. People didn't just jump in their cars and go on a totally unplanned drive like we can do now.
Why would everyone high speed charge? You can get 250 miles in Model 3 at 12 hours of 6.6kW (~22 mi/hour). Even only eight hours would get 170 miles. Eight hours of charging per night is doable for most people, I imagine.
This is what I am pointing out about the article, industry, and fear mongering on this subject.
the p50 for daily commute distance in America is ~41 miles; if cars only had a 200 mile range. they'd still last ~4+ days; and that's not accounting for the possibility of "topping" off at commercial electric properties (places or employment/entertainment, transportation hub, gas stations installing chargers)
Exactly. And modern thermostats and modern electric cars can work around each other, around grid usage dynamics while also extending the average driver's battery life because 8 hours of sleep doesn't require full speed charging.
> everybody can't high speed charge on their residential service 250 miles every day
Fortunately, most people drive substantially less than 91K miles per year, so everyone charging 250 miles every day is not anywhere close to the actual requirement.
The gasoline delivery pipeline is a risk to national security and the health of citizens; it has experienced a number of issues over the last 10 years.
95% of fear-mongers are concerned about the 5% use case, while ignoring that humans sleep, eat, or need to stretch legs in less miles.
No one pushed a deadline for transition from horses to ICE car though. It just happened over time at its own pace. People bought cars when they could afford it and there was infrastructure to support them.
Where? I haven't seen anyone upgrading all the powerlines and power stations around my home... I haven't even seen any plans to do so. The local power distribution monopoly says it can't be done unless they raise prices 5x - which nobody wants to pay.
Also, power generation - if everyone wants to charge at night, we need to completely change the concept and stop the move to solar energy in favor of nuclear.
Yes, exactly. Where I live it's a political thing so I'd know. The situation now is that they say they're not going to do it because people oppose the higher prices.
They even stopped allowing people to connect their solar arrays without large batteries because the grid is that overloaded.
(of course they're doing work on it - but definitely not the sort of work required to allow everyone to charge their 1-3 cars per household).
There’s none in the Brussel area of Belgium. In fact, we’re stuck for the foreseeable future to a grid at 3x220 (nearly the only one in the world) because it’s too costly to update the network, cabin and so on.
We’re speaking about industrial level of power delivery to charge all those EV. Things need to change at a huge scale and the operator are not ready for that.
Source ? I discussed that with my operator for high power need - their answer was to move elsewhere.
I was curious about the "grid at 3x220" mention so I did some research. Couldn't find what you meant by this, but did find a page from the electric utility in Brussels explicitly saying there are no problems or work required by the EV conversion plans by 2030.
In many, many places all over the world every day, just maybe not in your backyard just yet. Your local power distribution company is lying, and if you want to solve a fun problem you could get into the weeds and figure out how to work around them.
Diesel doesn't have to be fossil. Unfortunately, I can't make them switch to algae. But I'd be OK with paying more for it, if it was available. My regular long distance trips are impossible with current electric cars, so that's really not an option. Yes, I considered an online call.
I wonder if that could work on my 1200km-long trip. It'd have to be a truly pan-European company and network. So far we don't even have telecoms like that - I switch between 3 different national networks during the trip... But on the other hand, the Tesla Supercharger network spans the route, so why not I guess.
Upgrading the power lines isn't the full answer, certainly some upgrades will be required, but the wires are designed for peak demand. EVs have flexibility, and can mostly be charged in non-peak times, drastically reducing the powerline and power station upgrades required.
This flexibility has to be managed, and there are many companies working on this. For example: https://ev.energy/
I did a back of the envelope calculation some time back for both Canada and the UK (I imagine the US numbers are proportionally similar to Canada). If we replace all private passenger cars with EVs, using average mileage, it increases annual electricity demand by about 20%. The difference between daytime peak and nighttime off peak is more than 20%. In a lot of cases, there will be no need at all for new power plants or distribution networks. The reality, of course, is more complicated as we are electrifying much more than passenger cars.
You better believe, however, that the distribution networks are planning around this. I was in a meeting with someone from the National Grid (UK central grid authority) who is responsible for planning for the transition. Basically, all new housing developments are being provisioned assuming heat pumps and EV chargers. Existing areas are being monitored and upgraded as they near the grid limits. Plans go out years in advance. It is a lot of work, but I am confident that it is being well managed. I cannot say that everywhere is as well managed, but I think it is safe to assume that many of these people and organisations do, in fact, know what they are doing. It sounded like the biggest problem in the UK was NIMBYs fighting against the new distribution networks needed to land the power from the offshore wind farms which are rapidly replacing the old fossil fuel generators.
NIMBY is indeed the issue here as well. People don't want wind and solar arrays and they don't want to pay even 20% more for electric distribution or electricity itself.
The power distribution company is competent, I have full confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.
It's just not happening near your home (probably intentionally). Go down to the Mojave desert between Barstow and Vegas and there are massive solar farms built over the last decade. Same with the California mountain passes and wind energy - there are large wind farms on the Altamont, Pacheco, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio passes. Many of these are also getting large upgrades with more energy-efficient turbines, eg. the Pacheco Pass windfarm (18 MW, 162 turbines, built in the early 1980s) is getting upgraded in 2023 to 147.5 MW and 200 MWh of battery storage with fewer turbines.
Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
Well, that's US. I am in much more densely populated Central Europe - several orders of magnitude compared to California. For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
Oh, we most certainly do. Look at how much energy in the form of gas/diesel is used in Europe - it's definitely not insignificant. The average household has almost 2 cars, many have 3 - and they use them, just not to get to work.
IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.
People don't use the car to go to work, but they use it a lot after they come home. Families with children use their cars a lot. Even with good public transport, handling affairs of a family of 5 takes a lot of time on the bus - so people use the car to go shopping, drive the kids to their after-school sports/clubs, visit grandparents etc.
Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.
There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.
> Well, that's US. I am in much more densely populated Central Europe - several orders of magnitude compared to California.
The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.
> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.
I don't live in Germany. Germany is a large state with a lot of empty space. I live in a much smaller, much more densely populated state.
Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like Germany.
The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on just 50km2, and it's not even the most dense city around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.
People here live in very dense cities with agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.
> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and especially not during peak hours, not to mention the missing power generation capacity. The grid is already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
Except between 2021 and 2022 california lost 3GW of generation capacity. They're building new plants at the same time they're taking other ones offline and the totals aren't increasing.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
The trend was a net increase in capacity from 2011 to 2017. From 2017 until today the trend has been a net decrease in capacity. There were 206GW available in 2017, there were 194GW available in 2022. Which is a 6% loss overall.
Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
My question is “how much capacity is in the pipeline?” These projects happen on the scale of years. Looking at current and past trends doesn’t tell the whole story.
The answer is "not enough." The states dual mandates of "electrify all cars" and "green all the energy" are, again, reaching an ugly corner. This is not controversial at all.
it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date.
but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. EVs solve only one of several major issues with ICE vehicles. they still shed tire/brake particles, take up tons of space, encourage sprawling development, and are just as hazardous to pedestrians.
I can't help but think this massive investment of time and resources might be better spent on public transit that is actually pleasant to use. pax will typically optimize for travel time over all else. if the fastest option is public transit more often than not, personal vehicles will become a niche that doesn't matter much from an emissions perspective.
btw, I am an auto enthusiast. I love driving and I love cars. but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. imo we would all be better off if cars were enjoyed intentionally by a small minority of enthusiasts. why spend so much to fix something most people don't like to begin with?
The massive investment in time in resources is mostly private capital, on the assumption that that capital will see a return, which is unlikely to ever happen with public transit.
I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I’m resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also help those efforts.
> but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all.
While many people don't enjoy driving, many people do prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don't assume that people "don't like cars", whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars.
> if the fastest option is public transit more often than not
That's a very high bar to reach. And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
People do often prefer driving. However, people tend to not like the effects that other people driving has on their life. Public transport starts to look a lot better when you take that into account too.
If you don’t live in a mega city it doesn’t matter though. I live in a metro area of ~250k people. No traffic is so bad a 2 lane road doesn’t still move. So drive away my neighbors! Preferable in an EV powered by green energy.
Same in Manhattan! Now we only need to make most of the US as dense as London at least. I don't think it's realistic. (Also, have you tried to afford a place to live in London, to say nothing of Manhattan?)
People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric option.
In cities, of course, public transit should predominate, and should be developed and improved, while car presence should become lower and lower.
we don't need to make most of the US as dense as London. we need to make the parts of the US where most people live dense enough to support public transit for most trips.
it's fine if people use ICE vehicles now and then to visit family, go to a specialty store, etc. it's the daily and weekly trips that need to be fixed.
and the breakeven point does not need to be quite so dense as London. for example, the DC area has a lot of sprawly (at least by east coast standards) suburbs. the DC metro has some room for improvement, but it is still much better than a car for getting into and out of the city during peak hours. though I'll admit I sometimes splurge for an Uber. cars are much more competitive when you don't need to park them.
Last time I was in Manhattan was 6 years ago, but at the time an Uber was as-good-or-better than the train for a lot of within-Manhattan trips. I splurged on a bunch of Ubers since it let me see a lot more of the city at ground level, which was fun, and then quickly noticed that when you factored transfers and walking to/from stations, it was no inconvenience either.
Obviously it wouldn't scale that well for everybody but I wouldn't be surprised to see, if self driving cars master Manhattan, some more well-off people who aren't currently at "private driver" level of rich to move to self-driving cabs or such to avoid crowding and go point-to-point.
The big advantage of the trains was in leaving Manhattan and going to Long Island, though, compared to the car-bottleneck-hell of the bridges and tunnels.
Public transportation in London is awesome and everyone from the richest to poorest rides it together. The couple of times I rode in Manhattan really put me off of it. Dirty, overcrowded, pervasive smell of urine, and mostly just lower class people.
>whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars.
You're basically rejecting the premise as your counterargument. Yes, in the currently built world where public transit is generally worse, people would rather take a car. What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent? You don't really address this, you just state a bunch of gripes with transit-as-is not transit-as-conjectured.
>And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK. When trains run at 5 min frequencies or better, and the network is at least federated between hubs, you get effectively arbitrary point to point transport which is always there when you need it, you don't need to find or pay for parking, it will never be broken into or have unexpected maintenance costs, and you can focus on anything you want because you don't have to pay attention to the road. Factoring in the cost of a new car over how many years you will own it, as well as insurance and other expenses, you're paying more per day than you would on the train before you even left the driveway! The rationale of car ownership stops making sense in cities like these, and consequently, people aren't preferring cars.
The commonality of commuting by car in North America doesn't arise out of natural preferences, its a built preference. Built by a system that reinforces itself.
> Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK.
I've been to Paris and London and used their Metros and had no car. They're nice, but there's still a lot of walking between where you are and the metro station. If you're on the system late at night, there's a lot of waiting. If you're on the system during rush hour, there's a lot of people in a tiny space. If you can use it on the shoulders of peak, it's wonderful. Then again, roads are pretty good on the shoulders of peak too (parking in a busy area is almost never great, but there's an easy solution: avoid dense cities, which I'd prefer anyway, dense cities have a lot of people, and I don't like people in groups)
You may not have to pay money for unexpected maintenance, but you may be stuck somewhere when a train breaks down or has a collision; hopefully at a station and not on the particular train. Yeah, this happens with personal vehicles, but when my car won't start, it doesn't have a big impact on taxi capacity; when the train is stuck, everybody wants a taxi and it's hard to get one.
The big problem is there's no sense of agency. I can maintain my car, but I can't maintain the metro. I can fuel my car, but I can't prevent metro workers from striking. I can pretend I'll avoid collisions when driving, but I can't drive the train (and the train can't stop in time if anything unexpected is on the tracks).
Americans like a sense of agency, even if it means a worse result. Give me liberty or give me death and all that.
I rarely waited 5 minutes for a tube in London late at night, never more than 10. On Bart in San Francisco you frequently wait 20-30 minutes for a train on a weekend or late evening.
The weirdest thing about moving to car-centric Silicon Valley are the after work drinks. These are often in the office (since they are located at motorway junctions away from anything else) and then you stand there carefully nursing your one drink since you all have to drive home.
In London you'd just go to a pub for a few beers after work with your colleagues, or meet up with other friends after work because you all worked in the city centre anyway so it was easy.
> I rarely waited 5 minutes for a tube in London late at night, never more than 10.
It seemed impossible to get to my hotel from the Eurostar train in a reasonable time with the tube when I came in on an after work train. Ended up with an unlicensed cab with a driver who spoke with a very deep cockney accent and dropped us off on the wrong side of the street where there was a fence to prevent pedestrian crossings. It was an adventure. I never ended up on the tube, because it was simpler to just walk to the office.
>but you may be stuck somewhere when a train breaks down or has a collision;
A) This problem does exist in cars. Highways crawl to a standstill when there's an accident.
B) there's no such thing as "train collisions". Its not like cars. They don't get into "accidents". It would be unacceptable for public safety if they did. There are other error modes which cause delays, but its not the same thing as tacitly accepting the deadly consequences of the flow of vehicles being loosely regulated and fully decentralized.
C) I think you're severely undervaluing just how much of a "you problem" it is when your car breaks down vs just how fleeting a problem it is when a train is delayed. The inherent statistical risk of the universe is averaged over everyone. You won't ever be randomly on the hook for 3 digit sums of money at random intervals.
The agency argument really underplays the great freedom of not owning a car. Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off. I can chase any opportunity I want. I'd rather have two wings than 4 wheels. Hows that for personal agency!
> there's no such thing as "train collisions". Its not like cars. They don't get into "accidents". It would be unacceptable for public safety if they did. There are other error modes which cause delays, but its not the same thing as tacitly accepting the deadly consequences of the flow of vehicles being loosely regulated and fully decentralized
From experience with Caltrain, they do. Lack of grade crossings on an underground or elevated train won't prevent 'tresspasser incidents', although no grade crossings and good train control will prevent a lot of things. Sure, it's a me problem when my car breaks down, but it's also a me problem when the train breaks down. Either way, I can't get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time without an alternative, and when everbody else is looking isn't a great time to be looking myself.
> Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off.
Cars are pretty easy to sell. Or you can park it at the airport and never pick it up, if you've got nothing else to sell before moving. Of course, getting to the airport may not be easy on transit either (sometimes it is great, sometimes it's an easy transfer or two, sometimes the schedules are aligned in just the wrong way).
I think Shanghai’s metro is great…during rush hour (well, as long as I can fit onto the train, it can be rough sometimes). Otherwise I’ll just grab a cab and get where I need to go much faster. But ya, you don’t need to own a car.
Counterpoint - Singapore public transport is world-class and car ownership attracts punitively high taxes but for some bizarre reason many middle-class people still love driving. A lot to do with showing off, apparently.
I also can't understand why such a tiny country with limited real estate and an urban heat problem allocates so much space (relatively speaking) to roads and carparks.
Having lived in Singapore and having had a Singapore PR for awhile? (Albeit awhile ago)
The reason why people own cars is for flexibility and to have some more control over their lives. Which is also a status symbol. It’s also really, really helpful with kids.
Is it still doable with public transit? Yes. And Singapore is easily one of the more pleasant and doable on that front. But it’s also a lot of dealing with crowds, taking time walking (while carrying things) or just not going, having to fit within society, and often having unpleasantness shoved in your face (well, as much as Singapore has anyway, which isn’t a lot) from society as part of the normal routine.
Unlike Paris, SF, NYC, at least you won’t have too many buskers and scam artists messing with you, which is nice.
If you get in a car, due to all the costs and taxes, the experience is generally a more quiet and pleasant one, and you can go anywhere on the island with (less) worry about what loud/raucous/unpleasant mess you might be stuck being near. And if you do get stuck somewhere, as long as you have AC, you can roll up the windows and mostly ignore any shitshow going on. Which is nice.
Compared to NYC, Paris, SF, Seattle on my list of ‘ugh’ places with public transit), it’s not on the bad list at all.
When I lived there, it was about as good as Switzerland or Tokyo with how well it was run (you’re welcome PAP), but obviously a different cultural feel.
Unlike Switzerland, you do have the more Chinese influenced ‘everyone’s business is my business’, especially from the Ajimas.
And if you’re a Gwailo, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb everywhere - and everyone DOES notice - which has pros and cons.
Also, no worries about folks bringing Durian onboard in Zurich for instance.
I didn’t even try Indian public transit, but that’s my loss I guess. It was sketchy enough just using cabs.
Driving in India is an invitation to get scammed and/or ruined on its own, so
I can’t imagine wading through the crowds. That said, the scams tend to be less in your face than in the western societies, and the scammers more subtle and far less violent. Which is nice, I guess?
Germany, Spain, and UK have good public transit, and middle of the pack for pleasantness.
The Danes run decent public transit in the big cities, but the lack of density meant you could easily be stuck somewhere (and have a very long, very cold walk) if you didn’t know the local holiday schedule. And they didn’t do much signage to tell you.
If done well, Public Transit can be very effective and definitely reduces cost and load with having a vehicle.
But it’s not a place for quiet contemplation (except perhaps in Switzerland, but even then it depends on the day), and it means you’re always dependent on the society you’re in and have to know how it works (and when) to get anywhere.
Which can be limiting in a way Americans outside the cities are used to not being limited.
Also, there is a reason New Yorkers are known for being in your face assholes. You would too - or be crushed - if you had to deal with the people in their daily life that they do.
I said "arbitrary door to an arbitrary door", not "from a few blocks away from your starting point to a few blocks away from your destination".
> What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent?
I would love to have that world. My comment was making it clear that it's reasonable to not choose public transit while we don't have that world, and that it's reasonable to have high expectations on public transit rather than being willing to make do.
Yes, in a world in which we have public transit that is not any slower to use than cars are today, requires no additional walking, requires no additional hassle, and is clean and comfortable, many people will stop preferring cars.
> The drum brake offers even further attractions, the environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when compared to the traditional disc brake system technology, that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse effects on human health, depending on the size of the particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system, allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a controlled manner that protects the environment.
These things rust as hell in their enclosures. Volkswagen group EVs with rear drums are catastrophic development. Take press releases and advertisement with a grain of salt next time.
Yes. My cheap motorcycle had drum brakes and was fine for many many kilometers. The problem with electric vehicles is that they brake with motors and not with brakes. Brakes gather dust and silently corrode. Apparently latest vehicles periodically activate brakes without driver’s intervention to prevent corrosion and uneven wear.
> Until perhaps 10 years ago, drum brakes were standard as the rear brakes of almost every car.
You need to go back more than that. In the 80s nearly every car had rear drum brakes, that phased out in the early 90s or so. Only the very cheapest cars had drums past that timeframe.
> They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
Having owned a few drum braked cars (including all four wheel drums), not really. You still need to change them as they wear out, it's just a lot more work than disk brake pads which can be swapped out in a few minutes.
The rear brakes do a lot less work than the fronts, particularly on smaller lightweight cars (the kind that still had rear drums in the 90s) so in that sense yes, those rear drums lasted a good while (but certainly not the life of the car).
If you put front drum brakes on a fast & heavy car, you'll be wearing them out pretty quick.
Maybe that’s specific to big US cars? Drum brakes are still completely standard on entry level european and Asian models. Rear discs only come into play when you’re going above 100hp and/or 1300kg
Front disk brakes came into widespread use in 1960s and for a good reason.
They are more efficient (read: safety) and much easier to maintain.
Rear brakes are almost redundant on entry level cars except for the parking brake. You can just disconnect them and not notice any significant change in handling.
The Honda Civic Si went to four wheel disk brakes in 1992, over 30 years ago.
Last time I had to touch drum brakes was in 1991 and I'm very (very very) happy about that. Drum brakes are a maintenance nightmare I never again want to experience. I'd rather adjust carburator jets all night before working on drum brakes again.
And EVs with regen, brake usage is also vastly vastly reduced as well. Most folks aren't replacing their disc brakes in their EVs either until very high mileage unless they're hard on their cars.
How does the accumulated brake dust not affect braking performance? And can it tolerate getting wet inside, or is it somehow sealed well enough to go through puddles without getting wet?
I suppose one could build an all-wheel-drive EV that only uses mechanical brakes during emergency maneuvers.
Drum brakes have been around for a century, afaik they're more robust than discs but "lower performance". These look like a variation on a pretty standard design at first scan.
Yes, by not charging to 100%, so you have some room for additional charging by regenerative braking. Virtually all EVs come with a setting, usually enabled by default, that stops the charge at a preset percentage, like 80 or 90%. Chevy aptly calls theirs "hilltop reserve".
Drum brakes are one of the many things that contribute towards EVs becoming lighter than equivalent ICE cars over time, as they weigh less than disc brakes (about 25% lighter, 10lbs maybe, and unsprung weight too).
As the link states, they also increase efficiency, and that allows for smaller batteries, less weight. They're also looking into lighter weight aluminium disc brakes because EVs use them less, and it prevents issues with low usage disc brakes rusting.
I’ve never played with a drum brake, but I’ve assumed that dust is ejected somehow in normal operation. The Continental design is sealed to contain the dust.
Maybe dust in the drum isn’t a problem? Or maybe it’s designed so the dust accumulates somewhere other than on the friction surface inside the drum?
EV’s greatly reduce brake wear. We live on a mountain, and typically apply the brakes for 1-2 seconds to get down with the EV. We ride the brakes for 1 or 5 minutes with our manual or automatic transmission ICE car. Put another way, we’re pushing 50K miles on the EV’s original brakes and replacing / servicing them isn’t on our radar.
However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup truck with somewhere to be.
> However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup truck with somewhere to be.
Out of curiosity, why is that?
Edit: I Google’d:
“ Electric vehicles boast instant torque, meaning they accelerate the second you put the pedal to the metal. However, the high instant torque of electric vehicles can also increase wear and tear. In addition to good grip, the rubber compound used for EV tyres also needs low rolling resistance.”
And
“ Teslas are heavier than most other cars because of their battery packs, which can add hundreds of pounds to the vehicle's overall weight. This extra weight puts additional strain on the tires and leads to increased friction between the tires and the road surface, which causes them to wear out faster.”
No way, the grip on a normal road with those tires would be terrible. They would also be destroyed very quickly. They are designed for off-road low-speed applications. Low rolling resistance rubber tires are much more efficient energy wise as well. Rubber tires are very advanced anyway, many use chlorobutyl blends and steel and/or Kevlar reinforments.
That seems like a temporary issue. Right now we've still got lots of expensive/high class EVs where ludicrous mode is a thing people are excited about, but once there's real competition on the low end... "doesn't waste tyres" sounds like both a good selling point and simple to implement.
I think we are already there. The best selling Tesla right now is also a slowest Tesla ever made - Model Y SR at pretty limpy 0-60 of 7s (which is perfectly fine and fun to drive).
p.s. Seeing how many people already killed themselves with Plaid - I think gov should require advanced driving licence for super quick and super fast cars.
Advanced driving courses have a decidedly mixed record on improving safety, unfortunately. I believe the evidence suggests that they improve confidence more than they improve skill.
As for the Plaid, from what I’ve read the yoke and the high-speed handling are frankly dangerous. If somebody gave me one, I’d sell it and buy something where the drivetrain, the handling, and the aerodynamics are better matched.
I am under the (maybe wrong?) impression that the former issue is helped a lot by telling the car to accelerate in Chill mode instead of Standard, which causes it to purposefully carefully ramp a derivative or two of acceleration.
It helps less than you’d think. Part of the issue is that the tires are ultra low rolling resistance, and part is that the car weighs an extra ~500 lbs.
The car weighing a lot is the second issue, though, not the first. Is the ultra-low rolling resistance a third issue, or related to one of the other two?
> Electric vehicles boast instant torque, meaning they accelerate the second you put the pedal to the metal. However, the high instant torque of electric vehicles can also increase wear and tear.
It seems like this factor could be easily solved with torque output adjustments, but it won’t be unless it’s regulated.
The unwashed masses now expect every BEV to be performant without knowing the maintenance costs of actual ICE performance cars.
Manufacturers feed into this, as dealers love to have repeat customers for an otherwise low-maintenance car.
It’s just too hard to resist pulling out of an intersection with lots of acceleration. I’ve more than a few times heard my wheels squeal going from stop to 25 in a couple seconds.
> we’re pushing 50K miles on the EV’s original brakes and replacing / servicing them isn’t on our radar
50k is nothing, ICE cars often go longer than that without new brake pads. Had my ICE sedan for five years with no sign of brake squeaks yet. Never thought about brakes when I lived on a huge hill either.
I think most EV drivers will tell you that they use the brakes very infrequently - perhaps once or twice per hundred miles if one is driving long distances. Certainly if you're careful it'd be possible to never use the brakes. I think that's what EV owners think of as different to traditional cars. Yes, brakes can last a long time on traditional cars, but it seems intuitively obvious that if you're just not using them, they'll last longer for the same equipment.
> Brakes don't last 50k if you have to ride them for 5 minutes every time you leave home.
You should never ride the brakes for minutes at a time! Even if didn't care about wear, the main problem is they will overheat and become less and less effective so if you suddenly need to brake harder during that downhill, you may have little to no braking power.
Always use engine braking if faced with a long steep downhill. Use the brakes occasionally to modulate speed but never ride them continuously for a prolonged time.
I was downvoted into oblivion for suggesting part of the EV solution will be to force people out of driving and into using a Waymo-like service.
Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it.
I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road.
I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance.
Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life.
I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days.
Let me get this straight. You're asking what's stopping people from walking everywhere?
And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.
Not everywhere. That is a very deliberate decision on my part. I have picked jobs which support it, moved where I rent based on it, and made it important. Not for the environment either, but for me.
If you want to work 15km from your home and can't bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been finding work from home positions since 2015 without issue.
The comment about the grocery store is different than what you think. The problem is that people complain about carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500 times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea of size.
These same people drive to the centralized park and convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP voters.
I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or compostable.
I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere, just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem they claim to care about.
Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.
> What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.
ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use case.
> not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.
It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere" because it requires you to assume that the person can make up any shortcomings in their location with mail order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere in most places.
I work full time. I make all my food from scratch(when tomatoes are off season I do use canned tomatoes and tomato paste but not something such as tomato sauce) I have one child, an elderly dependent, and a wife. My wife also works full time.
We do not order delivery.
I do not commute currently, but I have walked for 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week) for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike route.
We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that are hard to find close by.
There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.
Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.
That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.
> People are just lazy.
Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)
> Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles […]
Well… they were laid out according to the "sound" urban planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being taken into account.
There are areas that promote walking and other forms of transit and there are those that don't.
I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.
Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.
I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm weird. I'm also lazy.
>Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.
In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road. Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas where the weather and the city layout is amenable to walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to walk any significant distance at all.
Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.
So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.
But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.
As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.
And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.
This doesn't change the amount of generation you need to go N miles. Indeed, rideshare might increase distances overall.
Rideshare has some benefits in reducing some of the capital investment and some in allowing some charging infrastructure to be centralized (reducing distribution system). It might also be able to squeeze a little bit of mid-day charging in. But it doesn't really change most of the picture for the grid.
I think there is a clearly positive impact in having what I imagine would be 70% less vehicles on the road. Including the added benefit of the elimination of driveway requirements and huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.
It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Getting people to walk would be the biggest impact.
> I think there is a clearly positive impact in having what I imagine would be 70% less vehicles on the road.
Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture for the grid.
> huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.
Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually houses might become closer together. But that will be a much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy usage based on current building distances.
> It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Rideshare is also one of a portfolio of things that make it easier to have walkable, bike friendly cities while still being able to hire cars (of an appropriate size) when necessary.
So commute every workday by bike/bus/train but use a car share to get to somewhere out of town once a month.
What I'd like to see would be transit networks aggressively build out "virtual" and "semi-virtual" routes with capped waiting times. E.g. put a "call" button at bus stops, run anywhere from no to frequent scheduled full bus routes on a stretch, and (EDIT: automatically, on demand) charter ride-share services as needed to fulfill wait time guarantees. Increase the use of actual buses as usage increases.
A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where people buy cars because the transit options aren't good enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or it deters people who strongly prefers to use public transit from even moving there.
You need to treat it as a public good not just for those who use it, but for those who might want to use it and even those who don't but end up benefiting from less congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options, with or without self driving, could help drive down the cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full scale buses.
Yes, transport nerds talk about why you need public transport that runs at night and weekends so that people can rely on it, but increasingly technology opens up options like you suggest.
Rural areas have been early adopters of this kind of on demand public transport due to low density but it can be applied further.
They have a concept similar to what you described in South America. In Peru you can jump in private vehicles that run particular named (sometimes even numbered) routes.
The car and minibuses simply go when they are full or once they have waited a fixed amount of time and they have at least on passenger. It works pretty well and a company called CityMapper tried to do something similar in London. They looked at the transport data and found routes that people wanted to take, but we're underserved by public transport (eg. Shoreditch to Islington on a Friday night). They would then hire privately operated black taxis to run the route for a fixed fare with a fixed waiting time, and they took the risk on empty seats.
I live in London and use Citymapper all the time. I think the problem with their tests is that to do that well you need bigger scale and a very long term commitment, because e.g. Shoreditch to Islington would serve 1) an existing demand, 2) that are on Citymapper. In London that'll work in the centre, because people will know there will be some route, even if suboptimal (Shoreditch to Islington right now, granted it being a Sunday which makes it worse, is 30 minutes on public transport and 39 minutes walk, it's certainly a stupid gap).
But the real social benefit is when you find real dead spots, where people likely aren't searching on CityMapper that often because they are familiar with (live, work) in the area, and know they're in a bad spot for buses and have few alternatives, and so the potential demand goes un-spotted.
E.g. most of the buses near me goes in an approximately radial pattern out from 3-4 of the local train stations for quite a while before they start turning in various directions. That leaves some areas where you're better of taking a car or a long walk to the nearest station because you're halfway between two bus routes and almost equidistant from the station, and many routes requires going in to the nearest station and out along a different radial.
A handful of routes cutting across those radials, and ideally connecting two stations, but in an arc, would make opting for public transport far more viable for a lot of people living in the area. An experimental route like Citymappers would get some people to use it opportunistically But the real payoff comes when you offer a commitment to keep running that route for long enough that people start relying on it: Maybe they opt against buying that second car (or first), or move there on the basis of good transport links. That takes a willingness to commit to an elevated level of subsidy for something like a decade or more to really get the payoff.
And that's also why cutting the cost of introducing a new route could make such a huge difference.
In terms of finding areas, instead of just looking at "hot routes", if trying to do this with data from something like Citymapper, I'd also try to correlate a population density map with below average number of searches for that density, and then look at what those people are searching for when they still do (and here we also have the tragedy of siloed data: data from e.g. Uber would be far more likely to reveal underserved routes, because they capture a whole lot of searches from people who already know they're poorly served by public transport for specific routes; e.g. I could get to my sons school by bus, but I know it'd be very slow, so if I need to go to a parents evening etc. I'll take Uber; but getting data out of Uber for this would likely be hard, unless perhaps you'd manage to offer them an exclusive or preferential deal on being the provider of "backup cars" to fulfill waiting time guarantees)
Of course. I couldn't do what I do there and would never suggest anyone choosing that life should change. I value personal freedom immensely.
There are definitely things that could be done in that situation to limit the need for driving. I have no real way to know if the people living outside of cities do such.
Probably downvoted for many reasons:
1. Your idea of "forcing" people into rideshare is childish, really one of the dumbest ideas I've read in weeks. It would never work outside of countries whose government have that level of control over their citizens.
2. You are in the vast minority of how people live their life in western countries. If you're not even using public transportation, you're intentionally isolating yourself to a crazy small area of the world, try leaving sometime.
3. Your whole argument seems to be centered around your "feelings". Nobody cares, especially when you're the type that gets irrationally upset at vehicles while you're walking around and then complains about it on hacker news making blanket statements saying we should give governments the ability to force people into a lifestyle that you find convenient.
I think the long-term solution to transit problems is intermodal passenger pods that can shuffle between self-driving cars, trains, aircraft, watercraft, and elevators. Containerization for people, basically. You'd hop in your pod which is basically another room in your apartment when not in use, and then the building would shuffle you down the elevator to the subway. Once you're outside of city limits, it'd transfer you to a self-driving car to take you to a hike in the mountains. Or it could send you to the airport, security scan you on the way, and your pod would fit straight onto the aircraft without any need to get out, go through security, wait at the terminal, or interact with other passengers. Or it might transfer you to commute rail to get to the general vicinity of your workplace, and then a self-driving scooter for the last mile to work.
EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle miles, which makes EV charging easier.
Transit time, particularly in the transfer points between types of transportation. Imagine leaving for the airport 30 minutes before take-off time rather than 2 hours, and not needing to spend half an hour de-planing and collecting your baggage. Many short-haul commuter flights (eg. ~1H from SFO to Reno or LAX to Vegas) become viable, and HSR is much more practical if you don't need to worry about connections or last-mile transportation.
You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy -> SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing - you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area extended out to the Central Valley.
Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail transportation is that you lose much of the travel time to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that your trains can go much faster.
There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk transport like trains or planes for the majority of the trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy use and makes recharging simpler.
OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system that adds a ton of mechanical failure points—so buddy can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here? If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
Who's going to pay for this system? If they pass the costs onto the consumer, the average schmoe isn't going to be able to afford to travel with what maintaining a system of this complexity would cost.
What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time. The solutions are travelling less, not increasing the complexity of the transport infrastructure and consuming more juice just because someone doesn't want to stop what they're doing for a minute or two.
People say WFH is apparently bad for productivity—so what's coding from a train? Productivity is measured in value generated and quality of that output, not time invested.
As for cars and trains matching speeds to facilitate transfer of a pod, what's that going to do to the price of real estate so transport can do that all over the place?
> OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system that adds a ton of mechanical failure points—so buddy can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here?
Yes, that's precisely the point - to get back the hours spent commuting so you don't have to think about them and can do other more productive or enjoyable things with that time. If you spend 8 hours working at $50/hour and then 2 hours commuting, that's $100/day or roughly $2000/month in saved time. Most people would consider that worthwhile.
> If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
No shit, but cutting time wasted in commuting is generally an easier sell than cutting time spend actually working or engaged in leisure activities.
> What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
The same way we've made air travel so safe that you don't need to think about it, despite the tens of thousands of parts in a modern jetliner. Engineer the hell out of it, and build in multiple redundancies and failsafes.
> Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time.
If remote work actually worked, we should do that instead.
Not everyone is a software engineer or knowledge worker, and it's likely that the fraction of people who are is going to go down in the future.
Having to be at the airport 2 hours in advance is solely due to the security theater we all participate in. Back in the 90s you could indeed show up 15-30mins before takeoff. Magic pods aren't going to solve it: you'll just sit for two hours in your pod instead.
Trains in Britain used to detach some cars while driving at high speed, so-called "slip coaches". Turns out it is needlessly complicated while providing negligible real benefit. High-speed rail already operated in a hub-and-spoke structure, and one 5-minute stop every hour 100 miles or so is barely noticeable.
Public transit only works when the stops are all in high density areas. Most the the US is not suitable for it. We might improve it in areas where it makes sense though.
I used to think this, but you'd be amazed how many small towns in Europe have train stations. The eastern third of the US is high enough density for this, we've just chosen to put our money into interstates and the like instead.
Trains take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be. They are not a substitute for privately-owned transportation, except perhaps in dystopian fiction.
They work wonderfully in extremely dense places like London and Tokyo, but they're awful absolutely everywhere else. Definitely nothing in America that compares to foreign trains yet, it would take us 50 years to come close to catching up.
Trains connecting town centers obviously can’t solve everyone’s transportation needs, but they can help to enable a car-free or reduced-car lifestyle for those who want that and are willing to design their lives around it.
Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.
And that's why you are supposed to design your environment. One railway station is in the suburbs, the other is in a high-density office park. Problem solved!
Plenty of stations I travelled between as a child (in Norway) were pretty much a bit of pavement next to the track, and no station building. Sometimes minutes from the nearest house.
Public transit can relieve / reduce the need for car traffic a whole lot of places too low density to completely remove the need for cars.
Now check the population distribution of US states and even the lowest density US states have most of their population in areas with far higher population density than places in Norway served by trains.
Yes, it's not a solution for everywhere. It's not a solution for everywhere in Norway either. But the point was not that. The point was that contrary to the comment I replied to, it is perfectly viable to serve areas that are quite low density. When you consider the low density areas in Norway that are served by trains, the proportion of the US population that lives in lower density regions is tiny.
It is viable if those areas are close enough to a place with enough population to service them.
A lot of the United States is that low density area with a drive of an hour or two to the next municipality with a population of 5000 or more.
It isn't going to be practical to run a rail out to most of those places with anything resembling a regular schedule.
The difference is that in Norway the distance between an area with sparse population and a city with a few thousand people is much smaller. It can make sense to run trains to all the cities in Norway that have a population of more than 5000 people - that gets you 100 cities (looking at it, a lot of them are impractical in terms of "you will need to take a ferry or fly"), but we've still got 100 cities there.
The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
The population portion may be accurate... and that can be solved by fixing New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Once you go beyond those metro areas trying to provide regular public transportation of any sort becomes impractical. If one sticks to the eastern seaboard, ok - it might be doable. Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
You're still arguing against a strawman. At no point have I argued for trying to meet the demand for everything with rail.
The point was exclusively that you don't need high density to be able to serve an area with rail. You need a route that sufficient number of people will take, sure. But you'll often find stations nearly in the middle of nowhere, because adding a minimal stop on a regional route even when the density is really low is a means of making even marginal routes between small towns viable.
And that is the only argument I've made: That stations in low density areas can also be viable (incidentally proven by the fact that Montana has train stations, ironically along a route that is ridiculously low density mainly serving places outside the state). Not that every little rural place has a viable route.
> The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
So don't even consider covering anywhere but the 2-5 most viable bits of Montana (e.g. Billings to Missoula via Bozeman and Helena or Butte, following the existing roads; EDIT: Incidentally there are already rail lines used for freight on this route and connecting to Spokane, WA, and to both Wyoming and North Dakota), or just ignore all of Montana.
(EDIT2: Project to bring Amtrak back to Southern Montana [1])
You can ignore all of Montana entirely and still vastly improve US public transport, because covering every rural place is not something I've ever (here or in any thread anywhere) argued for.
Again, the only thing I've argued for is that stations in low density areas can be viable. None of you're arguments have addressed that.
> Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
So don't do that. Not argued for it at any point.
[1] https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2022/11/rural-cor...
"He said restoring an old Amtrak route would also link the state’s major urban centers – Billings, Bozeman, Helena and Missoula – while giving more options to rural communities." ... "BNSF, the freight railroad that owns the tracks over which the new service would pass, is on the rail authority’s board. "
There are 10 states with a population greater than 10M people.
And by that measure, we're mostly there. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia - we're good.
The next step would be to get reliable public transportation to the small towns in the Sierras of California.
My choice of Montana was for the size and the population density.
The issue sit hat the distance from {small town} in Montana to nearby city is much greater than in Norway.
If we're only going to do the eastern seaboard, ok. If rural areas are going to be ignored... ok... but there is a lot of rural area in the United States.
The idea of a train station (paved area next to the track) next to every small town in Montana with regular service to the nearby city (like Japan and Norway have) is impractical in Montana.
It is sometimes challenging to understand the sparseness of the Great Plains of the United States without having traveled through there.
Public transport outside of the large cities... the 10th largest city in Montana is Anaconda with a population of 9,000. There are 60 cities in Norway with more population than that. The 100th largest city in Norway has a population of 5000... if it was in Montana, it would be the 20th largest city.
Yes, let's start solving this in the largest cities and that will get most of the population... better public transportation and better electrical infrastructure. However, the approach of "just need more train stations" (yes, a simplified straw man) isn't going to work in most of the US when looking at it by area.
Low population areas generate less traffic and less pollution. Let them be, for now.
Focus on the 80%.
Also, in-settlement transport is the US problem. It's probably fine if a lot of inter-settlement transport remains by car, except for connections between cities of say, more than 200k that are closer than 300km from each other.
As I found while replying to another comment, most of the largest towns even in Montana are already connected by rail, they just haven't had Amtrak service since the 70s after cuts. Just reinstating that would be a significant improvement, and most of the counties covered by the rail network in Southern Montana have banded together to try to bring passenger rail back again on that route.
Exactly, and you don't need to invest tons of $$ on EVs to solve that. ICE vehicles should be acceptable in rural areas. In fact, you'll probably have hard time convincing rural folks to switch to EVs.
> In fact, you'll probably have hard time convincing rural folks to switch to EVs.
I don't think it'd be as hard as you suggest. Even grid power (let alone off-grid power) is far more accessible to even the ruralest of ruralites than a gas station. Another decades' worth of improvements on vehicle range/horsepower/affordability and off-grid power generation/storage/affordability would be more than enough to convince folks that EVs are a sufficiently-practical choice.
> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date.
Isn’t that what it means to set a goal to complete some task? Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the dependencies by that date.
> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…":
Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than practical.
> but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with.
I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-centric and more human-centric developments, but until there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system:
I think using a rare moment of broad public alignment to change our transit paradigm is a lot more aspirational than issuing patches to a fundamentally broken system.
I suspect that broad public alignment would be far less broad and far less aligned the moment one suggests actually changing said transit paradigm to any significant degree.
That’s hogwash, swapping 100% of new cars to EV’s represents roughly a 1% increase in electricity demand per year. We can quibble about how flexible the grid is, but historically demand has increased much faster than that in several periods.
As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100% new EV’s represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use a lot of power when their on but most people aren’t driving that long per day.
Actual use depends on various factors like charging efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000 kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity demand. (Edit: fixed units.)
Do people actually replace the battery in cars once it dies and continue to use the car? Former Coworkers old Prius had the battery stolen out of it and insurance totaled the car. Wondering if the lifetime between ice and ev is valid.
Why would the battery die? This is not a smartphone. For LFP batteries I expect multiple decades of use, even the other Tesla batteries are holding up with only around 5-15% of capacity loss after a decade.
Yes, but its a "its cheaper than a new car" ... but if you're dealing with insurance it is "its more expensive than totaling it."
I had a Honda Civic hybrid that had its battery pack die back in 2009. It was going to be a $3000 repair with a 2 week "its in the shop" while waiting for the battery (it wasn't something they stocked).
I bought a new car (an Insight) because I needed a car (it was on a road trip). The value of the Civic as a trade in would be near zero - the value of the trade in was similar to the cost of the repair.
This can be seen even today with my Insight if I was to try to trade it in or repair it - my 2010 Insight has a trade in value of $2620 - $3707 (and it is in fine working condition).
If this was about a car that had a value of $3000 when working that needed a repair of $3000 to get it back into that range of working - that's the insurance definition of totaled.
If the battery fails on my Insight, I'll be getting that repair rather than getting a new car because it's still cheaper than a new car. But if it was a "dealing with insurance" then it is by definition totaled.
I currently have a ~30 min commute by car and ~40 mins by train.
I still pick the train because I can read stuff for 20 mins uninterrupted. I don't have to get worked up about traffic, someone merging without indicating, etc.
But the same connection is scheduled every 10 minutes, so I don't need to plan around it.
On my last job with a 15 minute car commute vs 30-50 minutes by bus (the bus was often not on schedule), I always picked the car. Especially because I can't read in the bus anyway from the way it moves.
I might have picked the bus if it didn't only come every 15 minutes and sometimes be delayed by 20. Especially because connections then become less time intensive.
Public transit works well when you don't need to check the schedule and can just go at any time, certain that your train will come in the next 3-5 minutes, and any connection does the same.
It’s not a technology problem. I expect to see grid failures in some areas for a while because of general NIMBY opposition and bureaucratic inertia preventing expansion from occurring until it’s an acute problem.
> Are people aware that there’s an entire industry with 100s of billions in capital already working on these problems?
I'm confused, what problem do you think they are fixing ? Because they cannot fix an inherently practical problem.
In most countries on this planet, you have three "problems" when it comes to EV demand, and none of them can be fixed by "100s of billions in capital" by private industry.
Thee are :
1) There is (usually) only one national grid
2) There are only a finite number of power stations
3) Most people live in cities and in apartments / dense-housing
This leads to two (because there's nothing you can do about point 3) super-hard, super-expensive "problems" that need fixing for all these EVs:
1) Expanding the grid is effectively a non-starter, the cost would be measured in trillions, not billions.
2) Building new power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not enough of them.
3) As I said, there's nothing you can do about point (3), i.e. it's simply not remotely viable that everybody can magically have solar panels and battery storage at home. Most people don't have the space. And expecting everyone to retro-fit is, realistically, a non-starter.
Now, on the subject of power stations, you will probably come back and say "but, but .... renewables".
Well, yes, renewables are cool and quick(er) to build than power stations, but they are not the panacea.
Grid-level bulk solar is cool, but all those panels take vast amounts of space that most countries don't have to spare. Solar is also cool, until it gets dark at night.
Grid-level wind is cool, but then on hot summer days there's not much wind. So you end up relying back on the old-school power generation (nuclear, coal, gas etc.).
Hydro is cool, but for obvious reasons not available everywhere. And nobody's going to be rushing out building large numbers of new dams any time soon.
Bulk-storage in batteries at grid level is not feasible to deal with all millions of EVs coming on stream. You would need millions of batteries, which as we know, batteries don't last forever....
So ultimately whether you love em or hate em, you still need old-school power generation.
Which brings us neatly back to my point (2) ... Building new power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not enough of them.
You don’t necessarily need “most people” to have a big and growing business, though. Getting electric cars into the garages of people in suburban and rural areas is still a pretty big market, and in these places there is often room to install solar panels. That will reduce load on the grid, which can be used for other purposes, including electric car charging in cities.
Also, maybe we shouldn’t expect one kind of transportation to dominate like happened for cars? There can be different solutions for different use cases. Driverless taxis, electric bikes, and public transportation all work sometimes, and they can be usefully combined.
Grid companies are some of the most competent corporations I've interacted with. The power is mostly on, I don't need to play stupid telephone customer support games with them, and they keep things running.
Maybe PG&E, or whatever they have in Texas sucks, but as a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't assume that grid operators are stupid.
Not only that, but it’s obviously a huge market opportunity from bottom up. Kids looking to enter the workforce should be able to expect all sorts of work related to electrification-electricians, engineers, etc. It’s likely to actually create niches and market segments.
Exactly. I work for a larger company that builds and maintains the electrical grid in many European countries. I won’t say there are no challenges, but I can assure you that we are confident that we can build the solution(s) to sustain no only EVs but everything else that’s gonna rely on the grid. One of the biggest show stoppers is actually current regulation. And even here, at least my employer is building and investing in solutions as if the required market regulation changes were already in place.
>I work for a larger company that builds and maintains the electrical grid in many European countries.
Also European here. The problem for EV charging is gonna be the last mile, not the grid. Upgrading the grid is the easiest part. The charging points are the painful part to fix that nobody seems to have an answer to or want to talk about in the first place.
In my city, most of the residential streets where people live (in flats) are full of parked cars on both sides of the street. How will all those cars charge once they switch to EV? Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will this work?
Currently all EV owners here are well off people who own their houses in the suburbs or in rural areas, and can install their own chargers at home for their EVs, but how will the people living in flats who have to park on the street charge their cars? Effectively those who aren't well off to own their own houses are penalized by the lack of EV charging infrastructure where they live.
Ideally, we'd get rid of private cars in the city completely and replace them with better public transport and cycling infrastructure, but looking at the real life facts, there's no political will to push car owners out of car ownership, and car owners are by far a majority of the voting population, even among the low earners. And upgrading the public transport and making it run frequent enough to make people give up cars ownership voluntarily would most likely make tickets too expensive for car owners to justify. And public transports is already subsidized.
Edit 1: Also, regarding the last mile charging infrastructure stations, another one of their weaknesses compared to filling up with gas at a gas station, is that they suck, the billing & payment systems sucks, the UX sucks and they often have faults or are broken, making them unusable or seeing people struggle to get them to work. MKBHD did a video on this proving this point and is definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA2qJKU8t2k
Edit 2: Another issue with EV adoption is the EV range and charging durations. Many Europeans hop into their cars in the summer and drive their family to the south of Europe hundreds or thousands of km. The range of a cheap EV still is subpar compared to a cheap ICE and so is the charging duration VS the refueling duration, making long holiday trips by EV a nightmare compared to a ICE car. We'd need a lot more charging points around these routes to cover summer or winter holiday trafic, and by a lot more, I mean a lot a lot more. Even some gas stations can have 15-20 minute queues for a 3 minute tank refuel at peak holiday season in summer or winter near popular routes like Austria, Italy or Croatia, so imagine what EV charging queues would look like when a charge easily needs 30 minutes instead of 3.
There are 3 places where people can charge their car: at home, at work, and at the store. If you can't charge at home because you park on the street, that still leaves two opportunities to charge.
Another way to think about it is where does your car spend its time, 24 hours a day? Is there any time where you car is somewhere for an hour or more, sitting idle? That's where chargers should be.
The variance in pricing needs to be tackled though. At home, on an EV-optimised electricity tariff, you can pay £0.10/kWh whereas at my local supermarket it’s about £0.45/kWh. You’re penalised for not having access to a charger in your flat. Compared to petrol, where it costs what it costs (ish).
Indeed the pricing is another big one. In public spots you'll have much higher prices than what you could get with domestic charging, meaning the ones who aren't home owners or can't have domestic charging get shafted further.
> Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will this work?
In my neighbourhood (London) there are now some charging ports coming out of lamp posts, and some coming out of the floor. There is a short cable required to connect the car to the charging port, but it's not too bad a trip hazard as it's only between the car and pavement.
Lamp posts don't really exist in my city. All city street lights are hung from overhead cables wired between the residential buildings on the sides of the street/sidewalk.
My city has no lamp posts since sidewalks are too narrow. Lights are hung from overhead cabels between buildings.
>- at work (need parking anyway)
I don't drive my car to work anymore (thank god) but good luck forcing employers to spend money on installing enough charging stations for everyone. Some employers don't even have enough parking spaces for all employees so it's a game of music chairs already.
>- charge station with fast charge (not that different than gas stations, but slower)
Fast chargers are not ubiquitous yet, nor are EVs with it, especially affordable ones. And even EV fast charging is still much slower than filling a tank of gas in a cheap car.
My point is there are solutions, as the number of EV grow so will the solutions.
It’s way easier and safer to charge an EV than to fill a gas car (electricity is everywhere), so you can expect the solutions to come progressively (with some bumps along the way of course)
It’s a good thing, EV will become a big part of the battery we need for a renewable grid, absorbing the excess electricity in period of overproduction.
Ideally, we'd get rid of private cars in the city completely and replace them with better public transport and cycling infrastructure, but looking at the real life facts, there's no political will to push car owners out of car ownership, and car owners are by far a majority of the voting population, even among the low earners.
In Tokyo it’s illegal to own a car unless you have a deviated car space near your apartment. Within 1km (if I’m not mistaken).
You must prove you have a space to rent (they will come an inspect it) before you can register.
Maybe a model like that should be introduced ?
No one owns a car in Tokyo and taxis and bikes are happy, it’s an incredible city to visit.
I lived in Switzerland (Lausanne) and it was similar. There was basically no free street parking, so you couldn’t really own a car without a place to park it.
Tokyo is dense, but it's not relevant because it's absolutely huge, and you still need to get around. The subway system is amazing.
In my opinion, if people care about the environment, it needs to be bikes, and delivery / utility vehicles only. Everyone else should be on public transit.
Tokyo can afford a Subway system because it's super dense. In my 300k city the public transportation system sucks because it can't justify further expansion because the city is not dense enough.
California, a state with many EVs, can’t keep its power grid going during high winds, heat waves, etc. PG&E and other power companies are a long way from fixing this issue.
As someone who works in the industry, the projects to increase grid capacity are dependent on investment mostly from the government or from large customers of which there are few. It's not like executives at every public utility are excited to sink themselves further into debt, assuming they can get access to all the capital, and betting it all on a completely unrelated industry and an unsure customer base.
I can only speak for my own observations but I think it comes down to the fact that fewer people are trusting “the market” to competently predict, deliver and maintain critical fundamental infrastructure for human life.
“The market will take care of that problem” seems to only benefit a small group of people and we’re not seeing the requisite proof that any future development will do any better
So get it ready. It’s the richest country in the world with profits so large it’s spiking inflation. There are billionaires out the ass. Maybe we can find the money there.
The post title misses the important "without investment and changes in charging habits". Most EVs can already be controlled to set charging preferences to match lower cost, off-peak charging overnight. However, this isn't the full solution as it can create secondary demand peaks. For example, if everyone in one region has an off-peak rate starting at midnight, you will get a step-change in demand at that time. Midnight onwards may also not be the lowest carbon time to charge as this will change every day as renewables are not predictable. In California right now, charging during the day would have lower emissions Source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
Many people are already thinking about this problem, including https://ev.energy. We go one step further and actively control EVs and EV Chargers to match their charging to when the grid is most clean. This may be overnight, but it could also be during the daytime when solar generation is highest. It is better for the grid not to use simple peak/off-peak pricing, but instead create tariffs that reward flexibility and move the exact charging times to best suit the grid.
A more critical issue with just electrifying cars without also reducing the number of them, is that it's completely inadequate to meet CO2 targets. A new study in Nature Communications modelled this for London and found that:
"[T]he current system cannot reach stringent carbon budgets without adopting highly aggressive and disruptive policies. Electrification, including moving the phase out date forward, results in cumulative emissions 7 times greater than the Tyndall carbon budget for the “well below 2 °C and pursuing 1.5 °C” global temperature target. Rather, a combination of aggressive policies is necessary so that future emissions reach levels comparable to the carbon budget. Of these policies, the most important is reducing car travel activity. Policies that decrease car distance driven and car ownership by over 80% as compared to current levels are highly effective in edging close to the designated carbon budget."
Can we also talk about the fact that the fastest growing EV market isn't for cars, its for e-bikes[1], and e-bikes are crazy efficient, and 20x-30x cheaper, compared to electric cars. Example, an e-bike with 400wh ~5 charges of a laptop battery, can get 30 miles of range, compared to ~250wh/mi of a car[2].
Cities are slowly waking up to the fact that more people are biking, and more biking infrastructure leads to even more people biking.
I'm not trying to say that the problem highlighted here isn't valid, I'm merely trying to highlight that the scale of the problem might be lower than we expect.
This is the way. Building out dedicated bike infrastructure in cities will come at a fraction of the cost of any other investments and provide for a transit mode that suffers from none of these problems.
Lol, you like riding bike in the rain? What about in the snow? What about when its excessively hot out? The US doesn't want and will not use 300m bikes. Or do we expect the US to come to a stop when its anything but pleasant outside?
Bikes and ebikes are great, but the ceiling on adoption is too low to make a dent in CO2 emissions on the scale of EVs. No large metro in the US has more than about 5% commuting share on bikes.
I've had a Chevy Bolt EUV for 3 weeks. We are moving to a new house that has a 240V outlet in the garage. This house does not, so I'm using the stock Chevy portable charging cable with the 110V adapter, not the 240V one.
Setting a known location (like home) means that you can charge at 12A because you can tell the car there's nothing else on the circuit. Otherwise, it will charge at 8A to avoid overloading the circuit.
The Bolt charges about 3.5 miles per hour on 110V, which is 35 miles of range or more overnight, which is fine for this situation.
Somebody in the neighborhood has a PHEV Subaru. They park on the wrong side of the street (can be ticketed for this in Portland) so they can run their charging cable out a window and plug it into the car. It is almost certainly another 110V.
The local utility offers $25 off if you let them control your smart thermostat during the winter and summer (not spring or fall) seasons. You have to participate in at least half of the events to qualify.
The typical recommendation for EV batteries is to charge them to 80% unless you need more. There are times where energy prices have gone negative because utilities have too much electricity from solar or wind power.
It doesn't seem impossible to do some combination of "let us fill you to 100% if we have too much energy" or "please go plug in your EV" along with time-of-day rates. 240V can draw up to 32A for the Bolts, other cars up to 50A (on a dedicated 60A circuit) and is easily multiples of 110V, which might not be worth really worrying about it.
There are solar panels on this house and there'll be ones on the next one, too.
The company I work for manages those demand response programs. Many of them now also support smart L2 chargers that can also be controlled similar to the thermostat you mention.
We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last decade has seen.
During WW2 the US built e.g over 300 destroyers in 6 years. Now they struggle to complete 2 per year. It might not be impossible but something has fundamentally changed.
War time procurement subverts entire industries and reserves everything anybody produces first for the military.
Sure the country produced 300 destroyers, tens of thousands of aircraft and tanks, and that production is what ultimately won the war , but you have to keep in mind the country produced little else any other normal economic activity was severely curtailed and even basic life needs were rationed.
It not only ramping up but also ramping down are problematic, for example even though military doesn’t really want congress keeps budgeting for M1 tanks so it can keep those jobs.
Suddenly producing 20 destroyers in one year and nothing for next 15 is going to impact labor market massively and also you are going to loose all the skills acquired
In peacetime you want a low constant throughput for your military.
And every other form of manufacturing shutdown or rationed for the war effort. Even how jeans were stitched together was regulated (to save on resources):
EV's use about the same amount of energy as an air conditioner, they both average about 10kWh per day. Is it a challenge? Yes. But it's a challenge we met before when we went from 10% of homes being air conditioned to 90% in under 2 decades.
Is 300M EV's the best use of manufacturing resources over the next 7 years to minimize climate change? Wouldn't it make more sense to upgrade old factories in Asia with advanced equipment to minimize their carbon footprint?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadAlas, consumers have a long history of ignoring exhortations to change their habits. They always do what they want, not what some authority tells them they ought to do. If they want giant-ass long-range electric trucks and SUVs, they will buy giant-ass long-range electric trucks/SUVs.
The only viable solution is a massive wave of investment to improve energy generation, storage, delivery, and efficiency worldwide.
I believe we can do it :-)
I'd rather have a revised Spark EV with rear wheel drive and 200mi range myself.
Response to sibling comment's "just buy a field of solar panels bro": Yeah that's great for the people with money to spare. These policies won't bother rich people, but will price out the poor from whom the rich will eagerly buy up property, creating massive country estates while commoners wallow in cities. Just like Roman times. Just the way the rich want it.
> If vehicle owners were to charge them during the day, this could cut costs and help the grid as the number of electric vehicles increase to meet sustainable goals, the authors say.
My EV (Tesla) already has a charging option for when rates are cheapest. I would assume that most EVs will have that feature if they don’t already?
Not sure I understand why this is considered a big problem.
They offer me discounted rates (41p KWH vs 7.5p KWH) if I charge between 2330 and 530, but I can plug it in when I get home, and they control that charging block. It allows them to turn on charging anytime they like if the load on the grid is low, and they charge me that lower rate even if it's outside the off-peak time.
More importantly, the direct payment plan with the utility company (which means waiting for 10,000 different utilities to switch pricing models!) can be replaced by an aggregation company (which only needs a handful of companies worldwide).
On the grid side, the aggregation company behaves just like any other company that owns a big battery, bidding on the wholesale electricity market like a power plant would. But in reality they actually command a "fleet" of smart car chargers and stationary batteries. By splitting some of the profit with these car/battery owners, an aggregation company can magically align the pricing model for everyone, without waiting for 10,000 utilities to get their act together.
If you follow JB Straubel's public talks[0] over the years, none of this should come as a surprise.
[0] https://youtu.be/4hNdbGjZfFU?t=2401
Fortunately the vast majority of regular users (eg bengale with their Intelligent Octopus device) aren't bothered by it. They'll happily save money on EV charging and improve grid stability at the same time.
> I don't understand why that sort of access would need to be included in the car instead of the charger
I didn't say it needs to be included. However if you already have a fleet of connected EVs (eg Tesla), you could instantly roll out this feature overnight without any additional hardware investment.... (hint hint...)
Thats not what I said.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
For a minute I did considered the possibility that you were leaning hard on the word manufacturer. However, I thought it was quite absurd that you would be fine with a situation where "[a third party] or whoever compromises them can remotely disable charging on my car."
I intentionally avoided that less-than-charitable interpretation of your words, since IMO it would violate the HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
What do I mean by that: there is already a number of solar panel installations that are feeding the grid at daytime, sometime even more than what the grid can consume. There is no way currently to link the PV systems and the cars so that when the PV generates a lot of electricity all the cars in the area will start charging, maybe discharge at night to cover home consumption, practically using the cars as very large and intelligent batteries with the side effect of using all the excess PV energy to change cars for driving.
Otherwise we will be in the situation of cars charging at night will fail the grid and PVs overproducing at day will fail the grid, while most cars are used less than a couple of hours per day on average (ignoring commercial vehicles and taxi/Uber, cars carry people from home to work and back, eventually with a round trip to shop for groceries).
Of course. Why would we not make adaptations? The job of the grid is to adapt to consumer needs. They aren’t perfect, but it makes sense that they’ll adapt.
I wouldn’t count on consumers changing unless the grid does something simple like set prices to incentivize charging patterns.
I have a few electric companies near me. One just has flat rates. The other has nighttime rates that are much lower. I expect all power companies will end up like this. Or just grant low prices for “smart chargers” that auto charge based on when there’s excess capacity.
These types of articles seem funny to me as a form of “I haven’t eaten in the past 8 hours, if this trend continues I will starve to death in two days.”
https://www.icc.illinois.gov/docket/P2022-0432/documents/325...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-comed-seeks-m...
I charge at ~2.7KW and drive 3000 km per month. Could probably get away with 500W charge rate, but would need to plug all the time.
It’s similar to the “what’s the point of oil exploration on today’s prices since it takes 10 years to yield.”
- electricity payments are highly regulated. I’ve seen places where the electric company wants to raise rates to cover investments in infra only to see the gov not allow it.
- there are laws that impact how they can upgrade the infrastructure and limit the abilities of the electric companies
These are legislative issues that need to be dealt with by non-experts. Articles like this can help with those processes
Shouldn't it be the other way around? As I understand, the goal is to get vehicle owners to charge during the day, since (domestic) consumption at night is already high, and since solar only helps then.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
There are already companies doing this in the UK such as Octopus with their Agile tarrif[0]. the unit price you pay changes every 30 minutes based on the wholesale price at the time. It's capped at 100p/kwh, which is 3x the average flat rate people use in the UK, but on the flip side it can go below 0p and at those points you actually get paid for using electicity. In those cases you're acting as a load balancer when there's just too much energy in the network. You can see a graph of the past prices here[1].
Octopus also has a pretty good API and hooks in IFTTT so you can set up automations for yourself. You could set your car or home bettery when the price is under a certain price. This could also just be built into the charge in the future and there's no reason why it couldn't be a standard between energy providers too.
[0] https://octopus.energy/agile/ [1] https://dashboards.energy-stats.uk/d/5cZqqmf4z/user-dashboar...
Electricity usage midnight-5am is very low. And rates are lowered even further as many power plants produce at a uniform rate, regardless of time of day. Things like hydro, nuclear, tidal, and wind.
>> There were 16.5 million electric vehicles on the world’s roads in 2020
That's the world, not the US. The US has less than a million EVs, maybe 2 at most.[1][2]
>> this is expected to rise to 300 million by 2030. But with these rising numbers, the US grid could struggle without investment and changes in charging habits, a Stanford study finds.
Projections are 26 million[3] by 2030 in US, 300 million is worldwide, but what has US grid got to do with it?
But, even if it were true, it won't be as big as a challenge as its made out to be.
a) There is plenty of free renewable power. Renewables oversupply, which is currently being curtailed. Renewables are growing, this will mean plenty of oversupply coming online. If only there was a way to create demand.
b) Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times across the seven US grids in 2021
c) EVs can absorb all of this free energy or get paid to absorb
d) Right now, energy bill is split between gas, electricity and nat gas. Households switching to EVs will have solar, bringing their bills to zero as well as no new demand on the grid.
e) Quite possibly, there is no net new demand. A comment on HN: It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank of gas as to charge an EV. [5]
[1]https://environmentamerica.org/articles/youre-not-imagining-...
[2]https://electrek.co/2021/11/09/the-number-of-us-electric-veh...
[3]https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-el...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35653034
https://twitter.com/MegaWattXinfo/status/1650913384206942414
Built it and it will come doesn’t always work for the early adopters, early investment in a technology can be risky it might take longer than expected or some other tech might replace the current front runner.
Gasoline powered cars weren’t the only tech in early 1900s either, steam powered cars were being as late as 1930s.
The diesel and petrol engines were competing too, very different kinds of engines and fuels
California has around 45 hydrogen pumps I am always aware where my car can go and not , and the dynamics change every time a pump comes up or shuts down
The pattern of gas pumps probably looked similar to how hydrogen pumps are distributed today - Most clustered in urban areas of SF bat and LA with some in smaller centers like scaremento and rest scattered on high traffic key road ways between them like the one on I5 .
And if you got fuel stranded you are going to pay a lot for someone to bring fuel by traditional means to you - horse drawn then, towing now
Edit to add: I have about 1.2kW of storage that can be charged by solar in a few hours that takes up about the space of a 5 gallon NATO jerry can. It can be charged thousands of time for the initial price paid. That’s with 2020 tech. Certainly density and efficiency will improve as market pressures increase.
In the not so distant past there were plans for neighborhood scale nuclear reactors. That would go a long way towards distribution, redundancy, and scale issues.
But every individual household can't high speed charge on their residential service 250 miles every day while their air conditioning is running. (/s)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware...
https://newrepublic.com/article/161498/huntersville-north-ca...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Colonial_Pipeline_leak
the p50 for daily commute distance in America is ~41 miles; if cars only had a 200 mile range. they'd still last ~4+ days; and that's not accounting for the possibility of "topping" off at commercial electric properties (places or employment/entertainment, transportation hub, gas stations installing chargers)
Frankly they are complimentary. If you have the service to run AC, you already have the service for an EV.
Fortunately, most people drive substantially less than 91K miles per year, so everyone charging 250 miles every day is not anywhere close to the actual requirement.
The gasoline delivery pipeline is a risk to national security and the health of citizens; it has experienced a number of issues over the last 10 years.
95% of fear-mongers are concerned about the 5% use case, while ignoring that humans sleep, eat, or need to stretch legs in less miles.
Also, power generation - if everyone wants to charge at night, we need to completely change the concept and stop the move to solar energy in favor of nuclear.
They even stopped allowing people to connect their solar arrays without large batteries because the grid is that overloaded.
(of course they're doing work on it - but definitely not the sort of work required to allow everyone to charge their 1-3 cars per household).
https://www.sibelga.be/en/about-sibelga/projects-challenges/...
The rest of Europe has 230V, 3 phases + neutral, with 400V between phases.
This flexibility has to be managed, and there are many companies working on this. For example: https://ev.energy/
You better believe, however, that the distribution networks are planning around this. I was in a meeting with someone from the National Grid (UK central grid authority) who is responsible for planning for the transition. Basically, all new housing developments are being provisioned assuming heat pumps and EV chargers. Existing areas are being monitored and upgraded as they near the grid limits. Plans go out years in advance. It is a lot of work, but I am confident that it is being well managed. I cannot say that everywhere is as well managed, but I think it is safe to assume that many of these people and organisations do, in fact, know what they are doing. It sounded like the biggest problem in the UK was NIMBYs fighting against the new distribution networks needed to land the power from the offshore wind farms which are rapidly replacing the old fossil fuel generators.
The power distribution company is competent, I have full confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.
At least this country is very pro-nuclear.
The most likely solution is house battery backups attached to a virtual grid.
https://youtu.be/_UJiglrYgJY
if we think that's somehow relevant here.
Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.
Curiously, how many cars need charging(at night even) in this area? Maybe I missed the intent behind your comment.
But it doesn't sound like there is much daily driving.
Perhaps "...hands wet on the wheel..." like in the Golden Earring song often? )))
Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.
There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.
The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.
> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.
Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like Germany.
The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on just 50km2, and it's not even the most dense city around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.
People here live in very dense cities with agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.
> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and especially not during peak hours, not to mention the missing power generation capacity. The grid is already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-electr...
but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. EVs solve only one of several major issues with ICE vehicles. they still shed tire/brake particles, take up tons of space, encourage sprawling development, and are just as hazardous to pedestrians.
I can't help but think this massive investment of time and resources might be better spent on public transit that is actually pleasant to use. pax will typically optimize for travel time over all else. if the fastest option is public transit more often than not, personal vehicles will become a niche that doesn't matter much from an emissions perspective.
btw, I am an auto enthusiast. I love driving and I love cars. but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. imo we would all be better off if cars were enjoyed intentionally by a small minority of enthusiasts. why spend so much to fix something most people don't like to begin with?
I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I’m resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also help those efforts.
While many people don't enjoy driving, many people do prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don't assume that people "don't like cars", whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars.
> if the fastest option is public transit more often than not
That's a very high bar to reach. And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric option.
In cities, of course, public transit should predominate, and should be developed and improved, while car presence should become lower and lower.
it's fine if people use ICE vehicles now and then to visit family, go to a specialty store, etc. it's the daily and weekly trips that need to be fixed.
and the breakeven point does not need to be quite so dense as London. for example, the DC area has a lot of sprawly (at least by east coast standards) suburbs. the DC metro has some room for improvement, but it is still much better than a car for getting into and out of the city during peak hours. though I'll admit I sometimes splurge for an Uber. cars are much more competitive when you don't need to park them.
Obviously it wouldn't scale that well for everybody but I wouldn't be surprised to see, if self driving cars master Manhattan, some more well-off people who aren't currently at "private driver" level of rich to move to self-driving cabs or such to avoid crowding and go point-to-point.
The big advantage of the trains was in leaving Manhattan and going to Long Island, though, compared to the car-bottleneck-hell of the bridges and tunnels.
You're basically rejecting the premise as your counterargument. Yes, in the currently built world where public transit is generally worse, people would rather take a car. What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent? You don't really address this, you just state a bunch of gripes with transit-as-is not transit-as-conjectured.
>And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK. When trains run at 5 min frequencies or better, and the network is at least federated between hubs, you get effectively arbitrary point to point transport which is always there when you need it, you don't need to find or pay for parking, it will never be broken into or have unexpected maintenance costs, and you can focus on anything you want because you don't have to pay attention to the road. Factoring in the cost of a new car over how many years you will own it, as well as insurance and other expenses, you're paying more per day than you would on the train before you even left the driveway! The rationale of car ownership stops making sense in cities like these, and consequently, people aren't preferring cars.
The commonality of commuting by car in North America doesn't arise out of natural preferences, its a built preference. Built by a system that reinforces itself.
I've been to Paris and London and used their Metros and had no car. They're nice, but there's still a lot of walking between where you are and the metro station. If you're on the system late at night, there's a lot of waiting. If you're on the system during rush hour, there's a lot of people in a tiny space. If you can use it on the shoulders of peak, it's wonderful. Then again, roads are pretty good on the shoulders of peak too (parking in a busy area is almost never great, but there's an easy solution: avoid dense cities, which I'd prefer anyway, dense cities have a lot of people, and I don't like people in groups)
You may not have to pay money for unexpected maintenance, but you may be stuck somewhere when a train breaks down or has a collision; hopefully at a station and not on the particular train. Yeah, this happens with personal vehicles, but when my car won't start, it doesn't have a big impact on taxi capacity; when the train is stuck, everybody wants a taxi and it's hard to get one.
The big problem is there's no sense of agency. I can maintain my car, but I can't maintain the metro. I can fuel my car, but I can't prevent metro workers from striking. I can pretend I'll avoid collisions when driving, but I can't drive the train (and the train can't stop in time if anything unexpected is on the tracks).
Americans like a sense of agency, even if it means a worse result. Give me liberty or give me death and all that.
The weirdest thing about moving to car-centric Silicon Valley are the after work drinks. These are often in the office (since they are located at motorway junctions away from anything else) and then you stand there carefully nursing your one drink since you all have to drive home.
In London you'd just go to a pub for a few beers after work with your colleagues, or meet up with other friends after work because you all worked in the city centre anyway so it was easy.
It seemed impossible to get to my hotel from the Eurostar train in a reasonable time with the tube when I came in on an after work train. Ended up with an unlicensed cab with a driver who spoke with a very deep cockney accent and dropped us off on the wrong side of the street where there was a fence to prevent pedestrian crossings. It was an adventure. I never ended up on the tube, because it was simpler to just walk to the office.
It does require local knowledge to expect this, I'll grant.
A) This problem does exist in cars. Highways crawl to a standstill when there's an accident.
B) there's no such thing as "train collisions". Its not like cars. They don't get into "accidents". It would be unacceptable for public safety if they did. There are other error modes which cause delays, but its not the same thing as tacitly accepting the deadly consequences of the flow of vehicles being loosely regulated and fully decentralized.
C) I think you're severely undervaluing just how much of a "you problem" it is when your car breaks down vs just how fleeting a problem it is when a train is delayed. The inherent statistical risk of the universe is averaged over everyone. You won't ever be randomly on the hook for 3 digit sums of money at random intervals.
The agency argument really underplays the great freedom of not owning a car. Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off. I can chase any opportunity I want. I'd rather have two wings than 4 wheels. Hows that for personal agency!
From experience with Caltrain, they do. Lack of grade crossings on an underground or elevated train won't prevent 'tresspasser incidents', although no grade crossings and good train control will prevent a lot of things. Sure, it's a me problem when my car breaks down, but it's also a me problem when the train breaks down. Either way, I can't get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time without an alternative, and when everbody else is looking isn't a great time to be looking myself.
> Not owning a car means not being tied to where you are. I can get on a plane and move anywhere on a whim. There's nothing to sell off.
Cars are pretty easy to sell. Or you can park it at the airport and never pick it up, if you've got nothing else to sell before moving. Of course, getting to the airport may not be easy on transit either (sometimes it is great, sometimes it's an easy transfer or two, sometimes the schedules are aligned in just the wrong way).
I also can't understand why such a tiny country with limited real estate and an urban heat problem allocates so much space (relatively speaking) to roads and carparks.
The reason why people own cars is for flexibility and to have some more control over their lives. Which is also a status symbol. It’s also really, really helpful with kids.
Is it still doable with public transit? Yes. And Singapore is easily one of the more pleasant and doable on that front. But it’s also a lot of dealing with crowds, taking time walking (while carrying things) or just not going, having to fit within society, and often having unpleasantness shoved in your face (well, as much as Singapore has anyway, which isn’t a lot) from society as part of the normal routine.
Unlike Paris, SF, NYC, at least you won’t have too many buskers and scam artists messing with you, which is nice.
If you get in a car, due to all the costs and taxes, the experience is generally a more quiet and pleasant one, and you can go anywhere on the island with (less) worry about what loud/raucous/unpleasant mess you might be stuck being near. And if you do get stuck somewhere, as long as you have AC, you can roll up the windows and mostly ignore any shitshow going on. Which is nice.
Compared to NYC, Paris, SF, Seattle on my list of ‘ugh’ places with public transit), it’s not on the bad list at all.
When I lived there, it was about as good as Switzerland or Tokyo with how well it was run (you’re welcome PAP), but obviously a different cultural feel.
Unlike Switzerland, you do have the more Chinese influenced ‘everyone’s business is my business’, especially from the Ajimas.
And if you’re a Gwailo, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb everywhere - and everyone DOES notice - which has pros and cons.
Also, no worries about folks bringing Durian onboard in Zurich for instance.
I didn’t even try Indian public transit, but that’s my loss I guess. It was sketchy enough just using cabs.
Driving in India is an invitation to get scammed and/or ruined on its own, so
I can’t imagine wading through the crowds. That said, the scams tend to be less in your face than in the western societies, and the scammers more subtle and far less violent. Which is nice, I guess?
Germany, Spain, and UK have good public transit, and middle of the pack for pleasantness.
The Danes run decent public transit in the big cities, but the lack of density meant you could easily be stuck somewhere (and have a very long, very cold walk) if you didn’t know the local holiday schedule. And they didn’t do much signage to tell you.
If done well, Public Transit can be very effective and definitely reduces cost and load with having a vehicle.
But it’s not a place for quiet contemplation (except perhaps in Switzerland, but even then it depends on the day), and it means you’re always dependent on the society you’re in and have to know how it works (and when) to get anywhere.
Which can be limiting in a way Americans outside the cities are used to not being limited.
Also, there is a reason New Yorkers are known for being in your face assholes. You would too - or be crushed - if you had to deal with the people in their daily life that they do.
> What about the scenario where public transit is actually decent?
I would love to have that world. My comment was making it clear that it's reasonable to not choose public transit while we don't have that world, and that it's reasonable to have high expectations on public transit rather than being willing to make do.
Yes, in a world in which we have public transit that is not any slower to use than cars are today, requires no additional walking, requires no additional hassle, and is clean and comfortable, many people will stop preferring cars.
https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/te...
> The drum brake offers even further attractions, the environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when compared to the traditional disc brake system technology, that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse effects on human health, depending on the size of the particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system, allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a controlled manner that protects the environment.
You need to go back more than that. In the 80s nearly every car had rear drum brakes, that phased out in the early 90s or so. Only the very cheapest cars had drums past that timeframe.
> They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
Having owned a few drum braked cars (including all four wheel drums), not really. You still need to change them as they wear out, it's just a lot more work than disk brake pads which can be swapped out in a few minutes.
The rear brakes do a lot less work than the fronts, particularly on smaller lightweight cars (the kind that still had rear drums in the 90s) so in that sense yes, those rear drums lasted a good while (but certainly not the life of the car).
If you put front drum brakes on a fast & heavy car, you'll be wearing them out pretty quick.
They are more efficient (read: safety) and much easier to maintain.
Rear brakes are almost redundant on entry level cars except for the parking brake. You can just disconnect them and not notice any significant change in handling.
Last time I had to touch drum brakes was in 1991 and I'm very (very very) happy about that. Drum brakes are a maintenance nightmare I never again want to experience. I'd rather adjust carburator jets all night before working on drum brakes again.
How does the accumulated brake dust not affect braking performance? And can it tolerate getting wet inside, or is it somehow sealed well enough to go through puddles without getting wet?
I suppose one could build an all-wheel-drive EV that only uses mechanical brakes during emergency maneuvers.
As the link states, they also increase efficiency, and that allows for smaller batteries, less weight. They're also looking into lighter weight aluminium disc brakes because EVs use them less, and it prevents issues with low usage disc brakes rusting.
This is because of regenerative braking not using the brake pads, using the motor instead.
Maybe dust in the drum isn’t a problem? Or maybe it’s designed so the dust accumulates somewhere other than on the friction surface inside the drum?
However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup truck with somewhere to be.
Out of curiosity, why is that?
Edit: I Google’d:
“ Electric vehicles boast instant torque, meaning they accelerate the second you put the pedal to the metal. However, the high instant torque of electric vehicles can also increase wear and tear. In addition to good grip, the rubber compound used for EV tyres also needs low rolling resistance.”
And
“ Teslas are heavier than most other cars because of their battery packs, which can add hundreds of pounds to the vehicle's overall weight. This extra weight puts additional strain on the tires and leads to increased friction between the tires and the road surface, which causes them to wear out faster.”
It maybe a false memory effect but I vague remember this notion about trolleybuses.
https://youtu.be/vSNtifE0Z2Q
p.s. Seeing how many people already killed themselves with Plaid - I think gov should require advanced driving licence for super quick and super fast cars.
As for the Plaid, from what I’ve read the yoke and the high-speed handling are frankly dangerous. If somebody gave me one, I’d sell it and buy something where the drivetrain, the handling, and the aerodynamics are better matched.
It seems like this factor could be easily solved with torque output adjustments, but it won’t be unless it’s regulated.
The unwashed masses now expect every BEV to be performant without knowing the maintenance costs of actual ICE performance cars.
Manufacturers feed into this, as dealers love to have repeat customers for an otherwise low-maintenance car.
50k is nothing, ICE cars often go longer than that without new brake pads. Had my ICE sedan for five years with no sign of brake squeaks yet. Never thought about brakes when I lived on a huge hill either.
You should never ride the brakes for minutes at a time! Even if didn't care about wear, the main problem is they will overheat and become less and less effective so if you suddenly need to brake harder during that downhill, you may have little to no braking power.
Always use engine braking if faced with a long steep downhill. Use the brakes occasionally to modulate speed but never ride them continuously for a prolonged time.
We can excuse the brake riding in the automatic, but why not just downshift the manual?
This. Drum brakes are an inordinate pain to maintain and adjust.
I can change pads in disk brakes on all four wheels in less time that it took me merely to remove the drum from a single wheel in older cars.
Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it.
I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road.
I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance.
Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive luxury. Especially without any public transportation? Sounds really nice.
It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any time soon.
I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life.
I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days.
People are just lazy.
And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.
OK.
If you want to work 15km from your home and can't bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been finding work from home positions since 2015 without issue.
The comment about the grocery store is different than what you think. The problem is that people complain about carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500 times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea of size.
These same people drive to the centralized park and convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP voters.
I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or compostable.
I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere, just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem they claim to care about.
Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.
not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.
ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use case.
It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere" because it requires you to assume that the person can make up any shortcomings in their location with mail order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere in most places.
We do not order delivery.
I do not commute currently, but I have walked for 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week) for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike route.
We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that are hard to find close by.
There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.
Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.
That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.
> People are just lazy.
Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)
Well… they were laid out according to the "sound" urban planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being taken into account.
There are areas that promote walking and other forms of transit and there are those that don't.
I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.
Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.
I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm weird. I'm also lazy.
In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road. Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas where the weather and the city layout is amenable to walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to walk any significant distance at all.
Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.
So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.
But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.
As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.
And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.
Rideshare has some benefits in reducing some of the capital investment and some in allowing some charging infrastructure to be centralized (reducing distribution system). It might also be able to squeeze a little bit of mid-day charging in. But it doesn't really change most of the picture for the grid.
It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Getting people to walk would be the biggest impact.
Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture for the grid.
> huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.
Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually houses might become closer together. But that will be a much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy usage based on current building distances.
> It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Already mentioned.
So commute every workday by bike/bus/train but use a car share to get to somewhere out of town once a month.
A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where people buy cars because the transit options aren't good enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or it deters people who strongly prefers to use public transit from even moving there.
You need to treat it as a public good not just for those who use it, but for those who might want to use it and even those who don't but end up benefiting from less congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options, with or without self driving, could help drive down the cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full scale buses.
Rural areas have been early adopters of this kind of on demand public transport due to low density but it can be applied further.
The car and minibuses simply go when they are full or once they have waited a fixed amount of time and they have at least on passenger. It works pretty well and a company called CityMapper tried to do something similar in London. They looked at the transport data and found routes that people wanted to take, but we're underserved by public transport (eg. Shoreditch to Islington on a Friday night). They would then hire privately operated black taxis to run the route for a fixed fare with a fixed waiting time, and they took the risk on empty seats.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/citymapper-ties-with-gett-...
But the real social benefit is when you find real dead spots, where people likely aren't searching on CityMapper that often because they are familiar with (live, work) in the area, and know they're in a bad spot for buses and have few alternatives, and so the potential demand goes un-spotted.
E.g. most of the buses near me goes in an approximately radial pattern out from 3-4 of the local train stations for quite a while before they start turning in various directions. That leaves some areas where you're better of taking a car or a long walk to the nearest station because you're halfway between two bus routes and almost equidistant from the station, and many routes requires going in to the nearest station and out along a different radial.
A handful of routes cutting across those radials, and ideally connecting two stations, but in an arc, would make opting for public transport far more viable for a lot of people living in the area. An experimental route like Citymappers would get some people to use it opportunistically But the real payoff comes when you offer a commitment to keep running that route for long enough that people start relying on it: Maybe they opt against buying that second car (or first), or move there on the basis of good transport links. That takes a willingness to commit to an elevated level of subsidy for something like a decade or more to really get the payoff.
And that's also why cutting the cost of introducing a new route could make such a huge difference.
In terms of finding areas, instead of just looking at "hot routes", if trying to do this with data from something like Citymapper, I'd also try to correlate a population density map with below average number of searches for that density, and then look at what those people are searching for when they still do (and here we also have the tragedy of siloed data: data from e.g. Uber would be far more likely to reveal underserved routes, because they capture a whole lot of searches from people who already know they're poorly served by public transport for specific routes; e.g. I could get to my sons school by bus, but I know it'd be very slow, so if I need to go to a parents evening etc. I'll take Uber; but getting data out of Uber for this would likely be hard, unless perhaps you'd manage to offer them an exclusive or preferential deal on being the provider of "backup cars" to fulfill waiting time guarantees)
There are definitely things that could be done in that situation to limit the need for driving. I have no real way to know if the people living outside of cities do such.
EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle miles, which makes EV charging easier.
You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy -> SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing - you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area extended out to the Central Valley.
Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail transportation is that you lose much of the travel time to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that your trains can go much faster.
There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk transport like trains or planes for the majority of the trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy use and makes recharging simpler.
OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system that adds a ton of mechanical failure points—so buddy can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here? If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
Who's going to pay for this system? If they pass the costs onto the consumer, the average schmoe isn't going to be able to afford to travel with what maintaining a system of this complexity would cost.
What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time. The solutions are travelling less, not increasing the complexity of the transport infrastructure and consuming more juice just because someone doesn't want to stop what they're doing for a minute or two.
People say WFH is apparently bad for productivity—so what's coding from a train? Productivity is measured in value generated and quality of that output, not time invested.
As for cars and trains matching speeds to facilitate transfer of a pod, what's that going to do to the price of real estate so transport can do that all over the place?
The office is dead. Long live the office.
Yes, that's precisely the point - to get back the hours spent commuting so you don't have to think about them and can do other more productive or enjoyable things with that time. If you spend 8 hours working at $50/hour and then 2 hours commuting, that's $100/day or roughly $2000/month in saved time. Most people would consider that worthwhile.
> If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their work-life balance is problematic.
No shit, but cutting time wasted in commuting is generally an easier sell than cutting time spend actually working or engaged in leisure activities.
> What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the car running alongside the train?
The same way we've made air travel so safe that you don't need to think about it, despite the tens of thousands of parts in a modern jetliner. Engineer the hell out of it, and build in multiple redundancies and failsafes.
> Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to be in the office, let alone all the time.
If remote work actually worked, we should do that instead.
Not everyone is a software engineer or knowledge worker, and it's likely that the fraction of people who are is going to go down in the future.
Having to be at the airport 2 hours in advance is solely due to the security theater we all participate in. Back in the 90s you could indeed show up 15-30mins before takeoff. Magic pods aren't going to solve it: you'll just sit for two hours in your pod instead.
Trains in Britain used to detach some cars while driving at high speed, so-called "slip coaches". Turns out it is needlessly complicated while providing negligible real benefit. High-speed rail already operated in a hub-and-spoke structure, and one 5-minute stop every hour 100 miles or so is barely noticeable.
They shed a whole lot less brake particles due to regenerative braking.
Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.
You can take public transport pretty much anywhere you want to go. It’s clean, safe, and generally reasonably priced.
The downside is that houses are smaller and more closely packed. By American standards, the kitchens and bedrooms are cramped.
But dystopia? Hardly.
Public transit can relieve / reduce the need for car traffic a whole lot of places too low density to completely remove the need for cars.
Norway has an overall population density of 38/mi^2 (15/km^2) and a map with that distribution - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_population_de...
Montana has a population density of 6.86/mi^2 (2.65/km^2) - and an interactive map of it: https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Montana/Population
Japan has a population density of 900/mi^2 or 326/km^2
There are large portions of the US that are larger than European countries and have very low population densities in comparison.
Yes, it's not a solution for everywhere. It's not a solution for everywhere in Norway either. But the point was not that. The point was that contrary to the comment I replied to, it is perfectly viable to serve areas that are quite low density. When you consider the low density areas in Norway that are served by trains, the proportion of the US population that lives in lower density regions is tiny.
A lot of the United States is that low density area with a drive of an hour or two to the next municipality with a population of 5000 or more.
It isn't going to be practical to run a rail out to most of those places with anything resembling a regular schedule.
The difference is that in Norway the distance between an area with sparse population and a city with a few thousand people is much smaller. It can make sense to run trains to all the cities in Norway that have a population of more than 5000 people - that gets you 100 cities (looking at it, a lot of them are impractical in terms of "you will need to take a ferry or fly"), but we've still got 100 cities there.
The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
The population portion may be accurate... and that can be solved by fixing New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Once you go beyond those metro areas trying to provide regular public transportation of any sort becomes impractical. If one sticks to the eastern seaboard, ok - it might be doable. Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
The point was exclusively that you don't need high density to be able to serve an area with rail. You need a route that sufficient number of people will take, sure. But you'll often find stations nearly in the middle of nowhere, because adding a minimal stop on a regional route even when the density is really low is a means of making even marginal routes between small towns viable.
And that is the only argument I've made: That stations in low density areas can also be viable (incidentally proven by the fact that Montana has train stations, ironically along a route that is ridiculously low density mainly serving places outside the state). Not that every little rural place has a viable route.
> The 100th largest municipality in Norway with a population of 5000 would be the 20th largest city in Montana. The 100th largest municipality in Montana has a population of 237.
So don't even consider covering anywhere but the 2-5 most viable bits of Montana (e.g. Billings to Missoula via Bozeman and Helena or Butte, following the existing roads; EDIT: Incidentally there are already rail lines used for freight on this route and connecting to Spokane, WA, and to both Wyoming and North Dakota), or just ignore all of Montana.
(EDIT2: Project to bring Amtrak back to Southern Montana [1])
You can ignore all of Montana entirely and still vastly improve US public transport, because covering every rural place is not something I've ever (here or in any thread anywhere) argued for.
Again, the only thing I've argued for is that stations in low density areas can be viable. None of you're arguments have addressed that.
> Trying to do regular and reliable public transportation to the small towns comparable to the sizes served in Norway becomes difficult west of the Appalachian mountains.
So don't do that. Not argued for it at any point.
[1] https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2022/11/rural-cor... "He said restoring an old Amtrak route would also link the state’s major urban centers – Billings, Bozeman, Helena and Missoula – while giving more options to rural communities." ... "BNSF, the freight railroad that owns the tracks over which the new service would pass, is on the rail authority’s board. "
Start solving this for the places with 10+ million people and change rural areas last, if needed (most likely you won't need to change anything).
And by that measure, we're mostly there. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia - we're good.
The next step would be to get reliable public transportation to the small towns in the Sierras of California.
My choice of Montana was for the size and the population density.
The issue sit hat the distance from {small town} in Montana to nearby city is much greater than in Norway.
If we're only going to do the eastern seaboard, ok. If rural areas are going to be ignored... ok... but there is a lot of rural area in the United States.
The idea of a train station (paved area next to the track) next to every small town in Montana with regular service to the nearby city (like Japan and Norway have) is impractical in Montana.
It is sometimes challenging to understand the sparseness of the Great Plains of the United States without having traveled through there.
Public transport outside of the large cities... the 10th largest city in Montana is Anaconda with a population of 9,000. There are 60 cities in Norway with more population than that. The 100th largest city in Norway has a population of 5000... if it was in Montana, it would be the 20th largest city.
Yes, let's start solving this in the largest cities and that will get most of the population... better public transportation and better electrical infrastructure. However, the approach of "just need more train stations" (yes, a simplified straw man) isn't going to work in most of the US when looking at it by area.
Focus on the 80%.
Also, in-settlement transport is the US problem. It's probably fine if a lot of inter-settlement transport remains by car, except for connections between cities of say, more than 200k that are closer than 300km from each other.
For example you see a great number of people living along major rivers even through low density states.
I don't think it'd be as hard as you suggest. Even grid power (let alone off-grid power) is far more accessible to even the ruralest of ruralites than a gas station. Another decades' worth of improvements on vehicle range/horsepower/affordability and off-grid power generation/storage/affordability would be more than enough to convince folks that EVs are a sufficiently-practical choice.
Isn’t that what it means to set a goal to complete some task? Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the dependencies by that date.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than practical.
> but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with.
I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-centric and more human-centric developments, but until there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100% new EV’s represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use a lot of power when their on but most people aren’t driving that long per day.
Actual use depends on various factors like charging efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000 kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity demand. (Edit: fixed units.)
By comparison demand increased by roughly 100TWh/year from 1985 to 1990. Demand only really leveled out between 2010 and now. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
I had a Honda Civic hybrid that had its battery pack die back in 2009. It was going to be a $3000 repair with a 2 week "its in the shop" while waiting for the battery (it wasn't something they stocked).
I bought a new car (an Insight) because I needed a car (it was on a road trip). The value of the Civic as a trade in would be near zero - the value of the trade in was similar to the cost of the repair.
This can be seen even today with my Insight if I was to try to trade it in or repair it - my 2010 Insight has a trade in value of $2620 - $3707 (and it is in fine working condition).
If this was about a car that had a value of $3000 when working that needed a repair of $3000 to get it back into that range of working - that's the insurance definition of totaled.
A battery pack for the Honda is Insight is $2049 : https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/hon...
If the battery fails on my Insight, I'll be getting that repair rather than getting a new car because it's still cheaper than a new car. But if it was a "dealing with insurance" then it is by definition totaled.
I still pick the train because I can read stuff for 20 mins uninterrupted. I don't have to get worked up about traffic, someone merging without indicating, etc.
But the same connection is scheduled every 10 minutes, so I don't need to plan around it.
On my last job with a 15 minute car commute vs 30-50 minutes by bus (the bus was often not on schedule), I always picked the car. Especially because I can't read in the bus anyway from the way it moves.
I might have picked the bus if it didn't only come every 15 minutes and sometimes be delayed by 20. Especially because connections then become less time intensive.
Public transit works well when you don't need to check the schedule and can just go at any time, certain that your train will come in the next 3-5 minutes, and any connection does the same.
I'm confused, what problem do you think they are fixing ? Because they cannot fix an inherently practical problem.
In most countries on this planet, you have three "problems" when it comes to EV demand, and none of them can be fixed by "100s of billions in capital" by private industry.
Thee are :
This leads to two (because there's nothing you can do about point 3) super-hard, super-expensive "problems" that need fixing for all these EVs: Now, on the subject of power stations, you will probably come back and say "but, but .... renewables".Well, yes, renewables are cool and quick(er) to build than power stations, but they are not the panacea.
Grid-level bulk solar is cool, but all those panels take vast amounts of space that most countries don't have to spare. Solar is also cool, until it gets dark at night.
Grid-level wind is cool, but then on hot summer days there's not much wind. So you end up relying back on the old-school power generation (nuclear, coal, gas etc.).
Hydro is cool, but for obvious reasons not available everywhere. And nobody's going to be rushing out building large numbers of new dams any time soon.
Bulk-storage in batteries at grid level is not feasible to deal with all millions of EVs coming on stream. You would need millions of batteries, which as we know, batteries don't last forever....
So ultimately whether you love em or hate em, you still need old-school power generation.
Which brings us neatly back to my point (2) ... Building new power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not enough of them.
Hence 2030 is a pipe dream.
Also, maybe we shouldn’t expect one kind of transportation to dominate like happened for cars? There can be different solutions for different use cases. Driverless taxis, electric bikes, and public transportation all work sometimes, and they can be usefully combined.
Only if you give in to the strawman that it's either fossil fuel or EV, when in fact our top priority should be retiring most private cars anyway.
Independently from the engine type, developing our infrastucture and cities around car usage is unsustainable.
Maybe PG&E, or whatever they have in Texas sucks, but as a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't assume that grid operators are stupid.
Also European here. The problem for EV charging is gonna be the last mile, not the grid. Upgrading the grid is the easiest part. The charging points are the painful part to fix that nobody seems to have an answer to or want to talk about in the first place.
In my city, most of the residential streets where people live (in flats) are full of parked cars on both sides of the street. How will all those cars charge once they switch to EV? Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will this work?
Currently all EV owners here are well off people who own their houses in the suburbs or in rural areas, and can install their own chargers at home for their EVs, but how will the people living in flats who have to park on the street charge their cars? Effectively those who aren't well off to own their own houses are penalized by the lack of EV charging infrastructure where they live.
Ideally, we'd get rid of private cars in the city completely and replace them with better public transport and cycling infrastructure, but looking at the real life facts, there's no political will to push car owners out of car ownership, and car owners are by far a majority of the voting population, even among the low earners. And upgrading the public transport and making it run frequent enough to make people give up cars ownership voluntarily would most likely make tickets too expensive for car owners to justify. And public transports is already subsidized.
Edit 1: Also, regarding the last mile charging infrastructure stations, another one of their weaknesses compared to filling up with gas at a gas station, is that they suck, the billing & payment systems sucks, the UX sucks and they often have faults or are broken, making them unusable or seeing people struggle to get them to work. MKBHD did a video on this proving this point and is definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA2qJKU8t2k
Edit 2: Another issue with EV adoption is the EV range and charging durations. Many Europeans hop into their cars in the summer and drive their family to the south of Europe hundreds or thousands of km. The range of a cheap EV still is subpar compared to a cheap ICE and so is the charging duration VS the refueling duration, making long holiday trips by EV a nightmare compared to a ICE car. We'd need a lot more charging points around these routes to cover summer or winter holiday trafic, and by a lot more, I mean a lot a lot more. Even some gas stations can have 15-20 minute queues for a 3 minute tank refuel at peak holiday season in summer or winter near popular routes like Austria, Italy or Croatia, so imagine what EV charging queues would look like when a charge easily needs 30 minutes instead of 3.
Another way to think about it is where does your car spend its time, 24 hours a day? Is there any time where you car is somewhere for an hour or more, sitting idle? That's where chargers should be.
In my neighbourhood (London) there are now some charging ports coming out of lamp posts, and some coming out of the floor. There is a short cable required to connect the car to the charging port, but it's not too bad a trip hazard as it's only between the car and pavement.
EDIT: looks like this https://imgur.com/a/H9aqMCo
Lamp posts don't really exist in my city. All city street lights are hung from overhead cables wired between the residential buildings on the sides of the street/sidewalk.
Like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0814083,15.4423363,3a,75y,24...
- at work (need parking anyway)
- charge station with fast charge (not that different than gas stations, but slower)
My city has no lamp posts since sidewalks are too narrow. Lights are hung from overhead cabels between buildings.
>- at work (need parking anyway)
I don't drive my car to work anymore (thank god) but good luck forcing employers to spend money on installing enough charging stations for everyone. Some employers don't even have enough parking spaces for all employees so it's a game of music chairs already.
>- charge station with fast charge (not that different than gas stations, but slower)
Fast chargers are not ubiquitous yet, nor are EVs with it, especially affordable ones. And even EV fast charging is still much slower than filling a tank of gas in a cheap car.
It’s way easier and safer to charge an EV than to fill a gas car (electricity is everywhere), so you can expect the solutions to come progressively (with some bumps along the way of course)
It’s a good thing, EV will become a big part of the battery we need for a renewable grid, absorbing the excess electricity in period of overproduction.
In Tokyo it’s illegal to own a car unless you have a deviated car space near your apartment. Within 1km (if I’m not mistaken).
You must prove you have a space to rent (they will come an inspect it) before you can register.
Maybe a model like that should be introduced ?
No one owns a car in Tokyo and taxis and bikes are happy, it’s an incredible city to visit.
In my opinion, if people care about the environment, it needs to be bikes, and delivery / utility vehicles only. Everyone else should be on public transit.
Are you aware how shitty the grid in most residential areas actually is?
“The market will take care of that problem” seems to only benefit a small group of people and we’re not seeing the requisite proof that any future development will do any better
Many people are already thinking about this problem, including https://ev.energy. We go one step further and actively control EVs and EV Chargers to match their charging to when the grid is most clean. This may be overnight, but it could also be during the daytime when solar generation is highest. It is better for the grid not to use simple peak/off-peak pricing, but instead create tariffs that reward flexibility and move the exact charging times to best suit the grid.
"[T]he current system cannot reach stringent carbon budgets without adopting highly aggressive and disruptive policies. Electrification, including moving the phase out date forward, results in cumulative emissions 7 times greater than the Tyndall carbon budget for the “well below 2 °C and pursuing 1.5 °C” global temperature target. Rather, a combination of aggressive policies is necessary so that future emissions reach levels comparable to the carbon budget. Of these policies, the most important is reducing car travel activity. Policies that decrease car distance driven and car ownership by over 80% as compared to current levels are highly effective in edging close to the designated carbon budget."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37728-x
Cities are slowly waking up to the fact that more people are biking, and more biking infrastructure leads to even more people biking.
I'm not trying to say that the problem highlighted here isn't valid, I'm merely trying to highlight that the scale of the problem might be lower than we expect.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21016306/electric-bike-e... [2]: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2023/04/12/why-an-e-bike-inc...
See for example https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/best-cities-for-bike-co...
Bikes pair very nicely with public transit for last mile connectivity.
Setting a known location (like home) means that you can charge at 12A because you can tell the car there's nothing else on the circuit. Otherwise, it will charge at 8A to avoid overloading the circuit.
The Bolt charges about 3.5 miles per hour on 110V, which is 35 miles of range or more overnight, which is fine for this situation.
Somebody in the neighborhood has a PHEV Subaru. They park on the wrong side of the street (can be ticketed for this in Portland) so they can run their charging cable out a window and plug it into the car. It is almost certainly another 110V.
The local utility offers $25 off if you let them control your smart thermostat during the winter and summer (not spring or fall) seasons. You have to participate in at least half of the events to qualify.
The typical recommendation for EV batteries is to charge them to 80% unless you need more. There are times where energy prices have gone negative because utilities have too much electricity from solar or wind power.
It doesn't seem impossible to do some combination of "let us fill you to 100% if we have too much energy" or "please go plug in your EV" along with time-of-day rates. 240V can draw up to 32A for the Bolts, other cars up to 50A (on a dedicated 60A circuit) and is easily multiples of 110V, which might not be worth really worrying about it.
There are solar panels on this house and there'll be ones on the next one, too.
We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last decade has seen.
Sure the country produced 300 destroyers, tens of thousands of aircraft and tanks, and that production is what ultimately won the war , but you have to keep in mind the country produced little else any other normal economic activity was severely curtailed and even basic life needs were rationed.
It not only ramping up but also ramping down are problematic, for example even though military doesn’t really want congress keeps budgeting for M1 tanks so it can keep those jobs.
Suddenly producing 20 destroyers in one year and nothing for next 15 is going to impact labor market massively and also you are going to loose all the skills acquired
In peacetime you want a low constant throughput for your military.
Yes, with 40% of GDP going to war production:
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2020/february/w...
And every other form of manufacturing shutdown or rationed for the war effort. Even how jeans were stitched together was regulated (to save on resources):
* https://www.ropedye.com/2013/05/levis1944-501/
* https://www.levistrauss.com/2020/09/30/world-war-ii-levis/
> It might not be impossible but something has fundamentally changed.
Societal priorities and focus against an existential threat.
Who will pay for upgrading an old coal plant in Asia to a new nuclear + solar plant, or something like that?