Just responding to claims already made. But I will gladly respond to your question:
Even if you followed it with another question:
containing an untruthful premise - EVs are the MORE expensive technology. Even the biggest greenies on this board would have a hard time backing you up.
My view - the only people that can afford to virtue signal with their transportation choice are rich people. The rest of us must consider our wallets. Most of the people driving around the planet aren’t rich. Therefore, you won’t see most people driving EVs until EVs make financial sense for most people. We’re getting there, but we’re having to do a lot of subsidizing in the process. I personally don’t like voting to take money from everyone and have it benefit some people that don’t particularly need it, even if it means a little less carbon emissions. EVs will eventually be competitive without the need for subsidies, but it will be a much longer time before ICE cars go extinct. That is because of the infrastructure that ICEs currently enjoy that EVs don’t have. Also, what we’re seeing with EV’s hitting the market isn’t similar to the case of ICE cars coming along to replace horses. Horses were expensive and difficult to maintain and fuel. ICE cars when they first came out, were also expensive and difficult to maintain and fuel. Most people could afford neither. But in a generation, that changed. Cars became cheaper and easier to maintain and fuel than horses. And they only improved. Here we are generations later and the median full time worker can buy reliable ICE transportation for only 1 month’s wages. Not so with EVs. We are into the 2nd generation of EVs and they are still more expensive and more difficult to fuel (and if you count battery replacement, some are also more difficult to maintain). Will that change? Eventually, but it’s at least a decade away, maybe 15 years. But it’s not because EVs aren’t improving quick enough. It’s because we’ve come so far with ICE car technology in the past hundred years. Which is why it’s so damn easy and cheap to own an ICE car. And that just means EVs have much further to go to become accessible to Joe Sixpack. Once accessible, EVs must go further before most Joe Sixpacks pick EVs over ICE cars. That’s my prediction at least.
I think standardization is a given. There’s no reason for car manufacturers to all be in the battery development industry, just like they’ve never been in the fuel refining industry.
Someone is going to have a key development breakthrough, and everyone will adopt that design. Like computer manufacturers all using the Windows OS - imagine the market chaos if Dell, Gateway, etc, etc had each went all-in on developing their own operating system? Sure, there will the holdout oddball like the Mac that does things different (at this point, probably Tesla), but everyone else will get on the same bandwagon for the good of market growth and everyone’s sales. That will the starting point for mass EV acceptance.
There are several caveats. For one thing, Saturday’s 94.5% figure — a record, as confirmed to me by the California Independent System Operator — was fleeting, lasting just four seconds. It was specific to the state’s main power grid, which covers four-fifths of California but doesn’t include Los Angeles, Sacramento and several other regions. It came at a time of year defined by abundant sunshine and relatively cool weather, meaning it’s easier for renewable power to do the job traditionally done by fossil fuels.
Exec talks about autonomous car features. Autonomous cars are legal in China but there must be a driver behind the wheel. The new car has autonomous features and the driver has to take a tutorial and pass a test before unlocking the feature. This is the car that also has Lidar, additional to cameras, which gives exact distances from objects.
Very impressive article on renewable energy in CA.
Must be one main reason for months I get these calls to go for solar energy.
The caller tells me how cheap installation of solar will be for me. In fact they are almost giving solar away.
Most new homes in my area are placing the solar equipment on roofs My son who lives in the foothills of Sacramento (Placer County) has solar equipment. He says it saves mucho on electricity bills.
This is probably a lease offer. They install the panels for cheap and will maintain them, but you don’t own the panels or the electricity they make, you’ll just pay them for the electricity at probably lower rates than what you pay to your current electricity provider (PG&E?). Financially it’s better to own the panels. And depending on the size of the system, it could pay for itself in just a few years and save you a ton of money for decades after that (and they increase the value of the property – “ugly” is just your opinion, most people don’t care how the panels or the roof look).
There’s no doubt that wind and solar can provide power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. The problem is what do you do when they are not? You can either have a black out or pay for an alternate source usually a fossil fuel powered plant to be on standby. That is what Germany has had to do with their alternate source being extremely dirty coal. In some places you can use Hydro power to store energy but those are very limited and with the vehement opposition by the environmentalists no more hydopower will be coming online here in the US.
Remember I told you I have 2 PG&E bills. My home bill in winter runs $500+, but last month only$390+, getting warmer outside. So probably a solar system would cut that down.
You’d be surprised, I’m not the only person that thinks the solar panels are “ugly” items on the roof.
Geez that sounds like a lot for heat in California. (you’re in CA right?) Are you up in the mountains maybe?
If its just electric heat, have you checked on a heat pump system ? Dunno if it would be applicable for your situation but heat pumps are often 1/2 the cost of straight electric.
My wife too. Ugly panels is one challenge for solar. Tesla roof is meant as a solution to that but its overpriced.
All the article is is a wish list. None of these technologies they suggest work and they are usually in efficient use of materials such as lithium which extremely destructive to the environment to mine.
Here’s the conclusion of the article:
It is uncertain whether and how much the costs of energy storage will continue to decline. Yet the accumulating pledges by governments—including at the state and local level in the U.S.—to achieve carbon-free electricity production will provide a continued push to bring more and more storage online.
Sounds like a kid expecting Santa to deliver goodies
Just a little back of envelope math from that article and a couple other links:
We have gone from a few mWh of energy storage to 866 mWh of energy storage in a decade. We’ll come back to this.
The US average residential daily consumption of electricity is 11.8 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per person. If we wanted to store one day’s worth of electricity for 300,000,000 people, we would need 3,540,000 mWh of storage. Maybe 1 full days worth of electricity for everyone is way too much, but 1 full day’s worth for 10% of the population isn’t a crazy goal, is it? That’s 354,000 mWh. That’s 400 times more storage capacity than we have currently.
The current global reserves of lithium are estimated at 165 times the 2018 lithium production level. If we don’t increase out lithium usage AT ALL, we’ll run out in 165 years. Now imagine we increase it 10 fold each year (which isn’t crazy if we need to increase our storage by 400x). Now there’s only enough lithium to last us 16 years. And that’s just US. I would think a bunch of other countries will be doing the same thing, no? There isn’t enough lithium in the world for utility scale energy storage. Even if I’m off by a factor of 10 and we only need capacity for 1% of the population’s 1-day electricity usage, we still can’t make it happen even theoretically without a revolution in battery storage technology
Yeah its not a lot vs total US electricity use/generation. And using energy storage won’t replace all the natural gas or coal tomorrow or next year.
I personally don’t expect that lithium batteries will the the only long term storage system. PUmping water up a hill and running it back through a turbine is a whole lot more simple and doesn’t require any lithium.
But over the next 10 or 20 years theres no reason that energy storage of some form (paired with reneweables) can’t replace a reasonable % of the fossil fuel production we have now.
onenote stated that a problem with solar and wind is that they don’t work at night or without wind blowing. Yeah thats a problem. But energy storage of some form is a viable solution.
Jeezuz. It’s not probably, it’s definitely – your entire system would probably pay for itself in 3-6 years, and after that it would save you thousands per year for decades. You’re hunting here for the highest interest CDs and savings accounts while ignoring a huge money-maker right on your roof just because you don’t like the aesthetics.
The finite amount of lithium on the earth, the difficulty of mining it and turning it into batteries, and the current technological limits of battery storage are the reasons we will not see energy storage replace 25% of the fossil fuel usage of energy generation we enjoy right now in the next 10 to 20 years.
Ugly panels is one challenge for solar. Tesla roof is meant as a solution to that but its overpriced.