It looks like electric vehicles are going to be shoved down our throats
- Thread starter grampi
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I do? Always placing faith in the here and now can blind many to the future. They have the money, they have the desire to be dominant, and they have the engineers to do it. As much as I do not want to see it I am not about to ignore such a potent competitor. Should we wait 10 years to see who was right? If I was then now what???
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It’ll never happen. The world runs on fossil fuels.
wemay
Site Donor 2023
...not to mention the resources.
As the experts try all the alternate ideas, oil consumption will climb back to 100 million bbls per day and will actually climb beyond. We are no way near peak oil consumption if the airlines get going again, and everyone knows what needs to happen for that. How about this : Jan 1, 2023, 100 million bbls/ day consumption.
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The closest Tesla charger to me is 35 minutes away. So, I spend nearly two hours of my time every time I need a "refill"?
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
You are being quite generous. A coal plant is in the mid 30's, a nuke a bit lower. Yes, CCGT's are capable of ~50% but no grid is exclusively using CCGT's and peakers are FAR less efficient.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Where are you going to get the power for the rest of the day? PV works reasonably well, with some storage, to depress daytime peaking. Trying to use it as a primary energy source is a fool's errand of epic proportions. At best, you couple PV with some already ultra-low emissions tech like nuclear and/or hydro and then let it displace gas peaking.
Well, you could put a stack of batteries under it, and hope that they don't get hot in the desert sun, then not too cool in the nighttime.
Transmission line losses have be huge over that many miles.
You realize the reason they don't use batteries is that it would take a LOT to store all that excess power right? I mean just think of the cost of the battery pack for cars. Plus you also have losses when you store it and get it back.
Definitely, I should have thought more about my response, it was more tongue in cheek. You can do an infinite amount of work as long as you have an infinite amount of resources. My boss has a plaque that reads "Nothing is impossible (for those won't won't be doing the work)"
It's an interesting concept, oversize the array, dump power into a battery. As you state, conversion efficiencies are a problem, as is the amount of space, followed by transmission line loss. And then you have to actually find all the raw materials to make all of the necessary items.
If you look at figures like a Tesla battery pack at $10-12k and they talk about getting that cost down to $6k so under $100/kWh. Now if you want to talk about a few megawatts or gigawatts of storage, it gets pretty expensive. You also have a limited number of cycles. If you charge and discharge every day, you'll burn up that pack in a few years and you're in for another big cost for batteries.
Oh yeah, you should look at the numbers you'd have to do to be able to build a collider big enough to make mini black holes. Then you could use the energy from the evaporation of the mini black hole to power your space ships. Or just skip that and just make antimatter.
Right I understand that. I'm just wondering in an average case scenario how feasible it would build enough solar arrays and to run lines all the way from say, Death Valley to New York City. This is based off this article.
I think we need nuclear powered cars...No range anxiety.
The MPGe concept isn't worth wrapping one's head around. Between ICE vehicles the exhaust-CO2 figures in g/km or miles are okay for comparing and between BEV the kWh are equally fine. Beyond the pretty-pretty stuff then across the palette the total CO2 effects are the most relevant. For a decidedly bad fictive electricity mix of 800 g/kWh (meaning an additional two times 43g driving an Egolf since its 43g are for a current electricity mix araound 260 g/kWh) such a BEV would be on par with a Prius Hybrid overall:
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OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
There's a lot of fantasy going on in that article and it's concerning when they conflate power with consumption (Watts versus Watt-hours)
-The space assumed for panels, not actual farms
-The ignoring that the demand profile isn't in MWh/GWh/TWh, yes, that's the final figure in terms of consumption
-The cost
-The cost, and space, for the storage necessary to back it up
Let's use a couple of examples here:
- The Gemini solar project is 690MW and occupies 7,100 acres and cost $1 billion dollars, but that includes a bit of storage, so let's say 800 million for the PV.
- The Australia Tesla "big battery" has 150MW capacity and 194MWh (so just over an hour of storage) at a cost of $161 million for both phases
The US consumes ~4,200TWh/year:
Electricity generation, capacity, and sales in the United States - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
U.S. annual electricity generation and generation capacity by fuel/energy sources and definitions of important electricity terms.
Let's say that solar in Nevada has a CF of 24%, this means that Gemini can produce 1.45TWh/year. You would need 2,900 Gemini solar farms to produce ~4,200TWh. This would consume ~21 million acres of land, or 32,800 square miles, so significantly more than what the article states. This would cost $2.3 trillion dollars. But wait, there's more!
US generating capacity is ~1.1TW, so we are roughly double that, but that's fine, as we need that capacity to charge our storage, which we are going into next:
We know that the US consumes, on average, 5.75TWh over a 12 hour period, which is 29,640 of our Tesla big batteries, which is $4.8 trillion dollars.
So, you'd spend $7.1 trillion on a project that would probably take 20 years to build, and by the time you are done building it, you are going back to the first phase and replacing the panels that have already hit end of life. On top of that, given the lifespan of Lithium ion batteries, your $4.8 trillion in storage would already need replacement half-way through the construction phase.
It's a complete pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Want to do it the easy way? Even with Vogtle being a complete gong show and costing $25 billion, that 2.4GW of capacity will produce ~20TWh/year, so, you'd need 210 2-unit AP1000 plants to match the entire US's energy consumption, which is $5.2 trillion, so it's even cheaper, and these have an 80-100 year lifespan.
Really struggling to see a way that all electric will work in that short of a timeframe (and the reality is that there would still be so many legacy ICE vehicles to support still that they aren't just flipping a switch on them...).
I see a scenario that offers both ICE and electric - my commuting (pre-covid) would support an electric car (and I've even thought about it with a Fusion energi) but I have other needs that don't fit that mold. So have one electric to take advantage of that mold, and one ICE to support everything else (like the 1000 miles I just drove the last day and a quarter...)
I see a scenario that offers both ICE and electric - my commuting (pre-covid) would support an electric car (and I've even thought about it with a Fusion energi) but I have other needs that don't fit that mold. So have one electric to take advantage of that mold, and one ICE to support everything else (like the 1000 miles I just drove the last day and a quarter...)
There's a lot of fantasy going on in that article and it's concerning when they conflate power with consumption (Watts versus Watt-hours)
-The space assumed for panels, not actual farms
-The ignoring that the demand profile isn't in MWh/GWh/TWh, yes, that's the final figure in terms of consumption
-The cost
-The cost, and space, for the storage necessary to back it up
Let's use a couple of examples here:
- The Gemini solar project is 690MW and occupies 7,100 acres and cost $1 billion dollars, but that includes a bit of storage, so let's say 800 million for the PV.
- The Australia Tesla "big battery" has 150MW capacity and 194MWh (so just over an hour of storage) at a cost of $161 million for both phases
The US consumes ~4,200TWh/year:
Electricity generation, capacity, and sales in the United States - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
U.S. annual electricity generation and generation capacity by fuel/energy sources and definitions of important electricity terms.www.eia.gov
Let's say that solar in Nevada has a CF of 24%, this means that Gemini can produce 1.45TWh/year. You would need 2,900 Gemini solar farms to produce ~4,200TWh. This would consume ~21 million acres of land, or 32,800 square miles, so significantly more than what the article states. This would cost $2.3 trillion dollars. But wait, there's more!
US generating capacity is ~1.1TW, so we are roughly double that, but that's fine, as we need that capacity to charge our storage, which we are going into next:
We know that the US consumes, on average, 5.75TWh over a 12 hour period, which is 29,640 of our Tesla big batteries, which is $4.8 trillion dollars.
So, you'd spend $7.1 trillion on a project that would probably take 20 years to build, and by the time you are done building it, you are going back to the first phase and replacing the panels that have already hit end of life. On top of that, given the lifespan of Lithium ion batteries, your $4.8 trillion in storage would already need replacement half-way through the construction phase.
It's a complete pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Want to do it the easy way? Even with Vogtle being a complete gong show and costing $25 billion, that 2.4GW of capacity will produce ~20TWh/year, so, you'd need 210 2-unit AP1000 plants to match the entire US's energy consumption, which is $5.2 trillion, so it's even cheaper, and these have an 80-100 year lifespan.
7100 acres. That is really big. I hope our future is not planting solar panels all over the place. The Mojave already has too many. It ruins the scenery. Visual pollution I call it. Windmills too.
I wish I could give this two thumbs up.There's a lot of fantasy going on in that article and it's concerning when they conflate power with consumption (Watts versus Watt-hours)
-The space assumed for panels, not actual farms
-The ignoring that the demand profile isn't in MWh/GWh/TWh, yes, that's the final figure in terms of consumption
-The cost
-The cost, and space, for the storage necessary to back it up
Let's use a couple of examples here:
- The Gemini solar project is 690MW and occupies 7,100 acres and cost $1 billion dollars, but that includes a bit of storage, so let's say 800 million for the PV.
- The Australia Tesla "big battery" has 150MW capacity and 194MWh (so just over an hour of storage) at a cost of $161 million for both phases
The US consumes ~4,200TWh/year:
Electricity generation, capacity, and sales in the United States - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
U.S. annual electricity generation and generation capacity by fuel/energy sources and definitions of important electricity terms.
Let's say that solar in Nevada has a CF of 24%, this means that Gemini can produce 1.45TWh/year. You would need 2,900 Gemini solar farms to produce ~4,200TWh. This would consume ~21 million acres of land, or 32,800 square miles, so significantly more than what the article states. This would cost $2.3 trillion dollars. But wait, there's more!
US generating capacity is ~1.1TW, so we are roughly double that, but that's fine, as we need that capacity to charge our storage, which we are going into next:
We know that the US consumes, on average, 5.75TWh over a 12 hour period, which is 29,640 of our Tesla big batteries, which is $4.8 trillion dollars.
So, you'd spend $7.1 trillion on a project that would probably take 20 years to build, and by the time you are done building it, you are going back to the first phase and replacing the panels that have already hit end of life. On top of that, given the lifespan of Lithium ion batteries, your $4.8 trillion in storage would already need replacement half-way through the construction phase.
It's a complete pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Want to do it the easy way? Even with Vogtle being a complete gong show and costing $25 billion, that 2.4GW of capacity will produce ~20TWh/year, so, you'd need 210 2-unit AP1000 plants to match the entire US's energy consumption, which is $5.2 trillion, so it's even cheaper, and these have an 80-100 year lifespan.
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