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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

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Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#121

Post by sokoloff »

natch wrote: post #103
willcipriano wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.

You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question… Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?

Where are the incentives taking the price of a Bolt that low? My LEAF just turned 7 and I'd probably buy a Bolt immediately if I could get one in the $11K range. (The LEAF has been great all around, but only being able to count on 75 miles is annoying from time to time.)

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#122

Post by Gravityloss »

gpm wrote: post #46
FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

Internal combustion engines are very complex. Yet they can be produced really cheap.

It's a bit like microchips.

Vast sums (think tens to hundreds of billions) have been invested into the "machine that makes the machine". Cranking out engines at this point is relatively simple.

Path dependency is a very powerful force.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#123

Post by sokoloff »

philistine wrote: post #120
tshaddox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHEVs are more complex, but arguably not more complex than having both a BEV and an ICE vehicle. If a BEV covers 95% of my driving needs, that sounds great, but it still means I need two cars if one is a BEV.

5% of your drives sounds like a problem solved by a car rental, not by owning two vehicles.

Unless those 5% of rides start an airplane flight away, I can't imagine very many people are going to pay all the costs to own a car and all the costs and hassle/time-wastage of renting a car once or twice a month. They'll buy a PHEV, hybrid, or conventional car and wait for the BEVs to improve. (I'm a LEAF owner, but can trade cars with my spouse when I need to. I think twice in 7 years we've both needed to drive a distance in a single day where the shorter drive would stress the LEAF.)

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#124

Post by philistine »

zenexer wrote: post #117
Armisael16 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer). Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.

I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideratio…

Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#125

Post by codazoda »

gpm wrote: post #46
FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

And, not being in the industry, I don’t quite understand why.

Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does?

Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Instead, they are complex vehicles with EXTRA transmission like components.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#126

Post by olivermarks »

DenseComet wrote: post #102
olivermarks wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to get used to using the term 'power consumer' instead of emotive terms like 'gas guzzler' to describe IC engines. Currently coal powered BEVs are considered by some to have superior efficiencies to gasoline powered vehicles.

I would expect that to be true. Not the best numbers, but Wikipedia puts coal power plants at 37% efficiency and combustion engines at 20-35%. This makes sense too, power plants have space, money, and an incentive to increase efficiency. And in reality, no power mix is 100% coal, increasing the overall efficiency to above 37%.

Electricity doesn't transport well over wire. iI don't think mass market BEVs are viable until battery technology significantly improves and small modular nuclear reactors can provide local clean power.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-subm...

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#127

Post by Retric »

Gravityloss wrote: post #119
FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Yes, exactly. One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2. You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000…

Plug in batteries don’t last very long because they charge and discharge every day. Due to this they end up either costing several times as much manufacturing capacity as you’re assuming or they simply get driven as non plug in hybrids which makes them less efficient than EV’s.

Further ramping up battery production isn’t any kind of long term barrier, so plug end hybrids just result in less investment in battery manufacturing and thus slower adoption of EV’s.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#128

Post by pandaman »

tw04 wrote: post #45
FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just goin…

BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#129

Post by toomuchtodo »

H8crilA wrote: post #89
toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas). By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance…

FYI, coal is still absolutely huge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons... Don't get fooled by stats from rich countries as those countries "cheat" by importing goods and materials with large entry footprints embedded into them.

True, but even China and India are moving to renewables rapidly. Renewables are absolutely exploding (confirmed even by the growth rate from your wiki reference) and will like replace most global fossil generation over the next 10-15 years.

> By 2026, global renewable electricity capacity is forecast to rise more than 60% from 2020 levels to over 4 800 GW – equivalent to the current total global power capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear combined. Renewables are set to account for almost 95% of the increase in global power capacity through 2026, with solar PV alone providing more than half. The amount of renewable capacity added over the period of 2021 to 2026 is expected to be 50% higher than from 2015 to 2020. This is driven by stronger support from government policies and more ambitious clean energy goals announced before and during the COP26 Climate Change Conference.

> The growth of renewables is forecast to increase in all regions compared with the 2015-2020 period. China remains the global leader in the volume of capacity additions: it is expected to reach 1200 GW of total wind and solar capacity in 2026 – four years earlier than its current target of 2030. India is set to come top in terms of the rate of growth, doubling new installations compared with 2015-2020. Deployments in Europe and the United States are also on track to speed up significantly from the previous five years. These four markets together account for 80% of renewable capacity expansion worldwide.

https://www.iea.org/news/renewable-electricity-growth-is-acc... (IEA: Renewable electricity growth is accelerating faster than ever worldwide, supporting the emergence of the new global energy economy)

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#130

Post by tw04 »

mattlondon wrote: post #98
tw04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just goin…

Many I've seen in Europe are pretty fast - Merc 350e for example has 0-62mph of 5.9s and top speed of 155mph. BMW 330e is 6.1s and 140mph. Granted some are slower, but no one ever bought a brand like Toyota etc expecting high-performance, so it is not surprising if they are slower (FWIW my Toyota non-plugin hybrid is actually pretty fast from a standstill, but won't win any races beyond 20mph) 6s to 62mph is pretty n…

A model 3 performance does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with some guys going faster on a track with sticky tires. Someone looking at a Benz (at least in the US) isn’t buying the base model 3.

The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.

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