The idea of going "carbon neutral" is the biggest crock of shit. Literally sitting and breathing is not carbon neutral, all human activity spews out carbon and even in the craziest case if you plant a gazillion trees and bury them it only delays the carbon emissions by a few hundred years.
Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
51–60 of 282 posts
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
tipping point, indeed... and not in a good way: let's take 100,000 vehicles with (I'm conservatively guessing) a 100 kWh battery each, that's a 100,000,000 kWh load each night! 100,000 Mega watt-hours is roughly the output of about 10 nuclear power plants in a 24H period. Unless a lot of new capacity comes online, it could easily overwhelm the existing electrical grid's capacity. Let's hope this is a gradual transiti…
It costs 6kW to refine a single gallon of gasoline. We can shift our energy away from the refineries as their demand tapers off.
6kWh to refine a gallon of gasoline? That's not a bad conversion rate given that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is 33-34kWh.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
These seem like they'd never work in the US. They aren't fast enough to go on the highway and their range is limited to 62 miles.
These trucks are solving the "last mile" delivery. Do you see many USPS delivery vans on the highway? That's the market.
In a dense urban environment, 62 miles is still less than most delivery trucks drive. In the US, the actual average overall is more like 2-3x that.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
tipping point, indeed... and not in a good way: let's take 100,000 vehicles with (I'm conservatively guessing) a 100 kWh battery each, that's a 100,000,000 kWh load each night! 100,000 Mega watt-hours is roughly the output of about 10 nuclear power plants in a 24H period. Unless a lot of new capacity comes online, it could easily overwhelm the existing electrical grid's capacity. Let's hope this is a gradual transiti…
It costs 6kW to refine a single gallon of gasoline. We can shift our energy away from the refineries as their demand tapers off.
I'd say that number is a bit suspect as the amount of work to refine Texas Sweet (WTI) vs the more difficult to refine oil you find from Venezuela or the entire Middle East (it is heavier or more "sour") is vastly different. This gives a primer on it:
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more correct question is: Liftime EV-Van Footprint = Production-Footprint(EV-Van) + Operational-Footprint(EV-Van, lifetime-miles-driven) vs Lifetime ICE-Van Footprint = Production-Footprint(ICE-Van) + Operational-Footprint(ICE-Van, lifetime-miles-driven) This calculation overwhelmingly favors the EV van, increasingly so as the carbon footprint of the operational electricity source itself reduces in footprint (i.e…
I think it's clear the lifecycle calculation favors the EV, but I don't think it's night and day[1]. Likely the emissions associated with the manufacture of the ICE and EV vans are similar (the batteries in the EV may even make it a little worse). But there's no doubt that the EV is a huge improvement in use, and switching a large portion of the trucks in our cities to EV would be giant win for air quality. As you sa…
> (the batteries in the EV may even make it a little worse)
I'm not sure it makes it worse. Lithium is a common, non-toxic element that is easily recycle-able. Pound-for-pound batteries are "just" mostly replacing steel and lead (and oil-based lubricating fluids) ICE engine components, which can be toxic, sometimes nearly impossible to recycle, and produced in very unclean smelting, machining, (and refining) operations.
It's easy to forget that the electromagnet motors in an EV are not just a lot fewer moving parts than an internal combustion engine, but are a lot fewer parts entirely. The emissions savings in all those ICE parts is presumably pretty big given how huge the relevant supply chains themselves are. (Ever glanced at a Bosch parts catalog? And that's just one supplier of dozens.)
I've never seen a good breakdown of the emissions costs of a contemporary internal combustion engine and exhaust system, but that's a much better comparison versus the emissions associated with batteries than a lot of the current battery emissions breakdowns assume as if batteries were in addition to a traditional engine, rather than almost a full replacement for one.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sooner Amazon helps get all of the oil and gas out of the ground, the sooner we'll be forced to adopt electric cars.
Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pull all of the fossil fuels out of the ground. There are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil shale (confusingly, not the same as shale oil) in the Green River formation in Wyoming/Colorado alone. If it was all extracted and burned and put into the atmosphere (assuming none makes it as ocean acidification, etc), it'd raise the CO2 level from the current 400ppm (about 3 trilli…
> And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska
Say what? There is only 909 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves in the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#57Warning: petty partisanship ahead.
Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criti...
He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes-for-rema...
Anyway, yay, the auto plant that funded my upbringing is back in action.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#58Wow, 100k is no small change. Hoping this accelerates the "tipping point" for electric vehicles - in my mind that's when the infrastructure for EVs (e.g. charging stations, or something in the future like battery swaps) actually makes it easier to own than a gas vehicle.
I honestly don't understand why electric vehicle manufacturers went direct to consumer. Fleets are the ones that are looking at pure economics and would have the most to gain by cutting down on energy consumption.
I don't think they have. There are already quite a few cities around the world with a large percentage of electric buses.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#59The idea of going "carbon neutral" is the biggest crock of shit. Literally sitting and breathing is not carbon neutral, all human activity spews out carbon and even in the craziest case if you plant a gazillion trees and bury them it only delays the carbon emissions by a few hundred years.
Even if that was true, so what? It's clearly better to emit N minus X tons of carbon after buying electric trucks than it is to emit N tons before.
Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
#60For once, mighty Amazon comes late to the show. Germany's parcel service DHL builds up a fleet of small electric delivery vans since 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter Living in Bavaria, I see these drive around everywhere now.
I remember the fury of one of the top VW executives when he discovered that DHL developed their own vehicles instead of hiring VW to do that. Good for DHL. I would buy such a thing if they sold them to consumers.
I've heard that DHL urged VW and Mercedes for years to develop e-delivery trucks, but both manufacturers did not show any interest. It was kind of last resort to search for partner and start a joint venture to build those trucks.