81–90 of 124 posts
OPEC and the United States keep fossil fuels artificially inflated through constant wars and their barbaric sanctions against Iran & Venezuela. How much would a barrel of oil cost if they were allowed to sell on the free market?
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Electricity requires a wire, which is far less costly to build. Have you tried? The marginal cost of driving an existing truck 10 mile down an existing road is negligible. Getting electricity to a place that is even half a mile from the nearest place that currently has electricity can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. Even just applying for the right permits and getting the go ahead from the local power com…
Tried what? Running a wire vs building a road? Of course non-existent wire vs existing road is not competitive. If both exist, electricity wins. If neither exists, electricity wins. And electricity has that added advantage that you can buy an equipment that will produce it in place without consuming additional resources. The only case where fuel is competitive is when roads exist, electricity distribution doesn't, an…
Are you sure? I'm not. Especially not when we're talking the sort of electrical infrastructure that can support charging multiple electric cars and trucks (although there's no point in having an electric car if there aren't any roads).
Obviously electricity is the right long term answer and where we should be going, but I doubt it is the cheapest immediate solution in many parts of the world.
But all the small electric cars are just starting at the shamed price of 35/40k € ( Peugeot 208, VW ID.3 and so on). That is a huge barrier of entrance. At the same price, one can buy a BMW or Audi. We need an economic model to let the EV industry boom
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Yes, and the grandparent's calculation can be accomplished by simply dividing the fuel volume by the "area" of the car's efficiency (or multiplying if using MPG, which is inverse area) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%283m%29%5E3*24.9mpg
Pico hectares are a good unit of area to use for this. For a car that gets N miles/gallon, for 1/N gallons/mile, that works out to 235/N pico hectares. That results in nice small, but not too small, numbers for most current cars, around 50 pico hectares for a Humvee in the city to around 4 pico hectares for a Prius on the highway.
The entire article is 100% bullshit and has nothing to do with EV per se. All you need to do is look at general electricity prices, which have been going up, not down, especially in the countries that have the highest renewable rate (Denmark or Germany). https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Line-graph-of-average-el... Once electricity prices start collapsing and battery capacity issues are resolved, I'll start believi…
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With existing infrastructure, for most locations, electricity is far easier to transport than gas. Even with some necessary scaling to support widespread car charging, electrical infrastructure is far more robust, redundant and safe than the gas.
Transport != store. I can transmit, assuming there's a sink on the other end (though loss is an issue over distance). Considering there is neither enough lithium nor enough cobalt to make a Tesla for every American, battery tech will be a huge bottleneck.
>renewable electricity has a short-run marginal cost of zero, is cleaner environmentally, much easier to transport and could readily replace up to 40% of global oil demand Hmm, not sure about that "much easier to transport" part. A cube 3 meters on a side can contain enough gasoline to power the average car for its entire lifespan. The gasoline is a liquid, it is relatively easy to move it between containers. Any tec…
That really is a remarkable visualization! So much so that I had to compute it for myself - 27,000 liters of gasoline will move an average car 287,000 km assuming 9.4L/100km which is the average 2017 fuel economy for a "car, light truck, SUV" in the US.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles
> Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days As A Transport Fuel Are Numbered I know the article was about cars, but fossil fuel will always have a place as aviation fuel. The only thing I can currently see ending that trend is widespread use of vacuum tunnel trains.
I see the claim that we need fossil fuels for airlines and rockets raised frequently, but once we have widespread renewable electricity, what’s the barrier to creating fuel from air and water, using electricity? AFAIK, it’s not really fossil fuels that are needed for planes and rockets, but high energy density liquid fuels, and these can surely be created renewably once we have a renewable energy infrastructure. Or h…
But all the small electric cars are just starting at the shamed price of 35/40k € ( Peugeot 208, VW ID.3 and so on). That is a huge barrier of entrance. At the same price, one can buy a BMW or Audi. We need an economic model to let the EV industry boom
One probably needs to develop and produce EVs in cheaper country than Germany. BMW and VW engineers earn ~100k € early, they are unionized and can’t be fired. As a result one gets ID.3 for 40k€. That’s already very expensive car for most Germans despite some pre-orders: https://electrek.co/2019/07/22/vw-zwickau-factory-electric-c... Last but not least: electricity. If you don’t have a garage, EV does not make sense.…
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I see the claim that we need fossil fuels for airlines and rockets raised frequently, but once we have widespread renewable electricity, what’s the barrier to creating fuel from air and water, using electricity? AFAIK, it’s not really fossil fuels that are needed for planes and rockets, but high energy density liquid fuels, and these can surely be created renewably once we have a renewable energy infrastructure. Or h…
Yes. And small electric planes are in fact beginning to show up. It is my understanding that going electric enables more efficient designs, and with those one or two decades of further battery tech development might actually get us large planes too.