271–278 of 278 posts
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Why wouldn't you be comfortable?
Because I might have to go somewhere without hours of notice. Maybe I need to go somewhere I can't leave the car plugged in. Maybe I'll get stuck in a traffic jam. Maybe I'll have to drive to a hospital a hundred miles away, as has happened before. I might sign up for this if my household kept at least one ICE vehicle, but not otherwise.
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Because I might have to go somewhere without hours of notice. Maybe I need to go somewhere I can't leave the car plugged in. Maybe I'll get stuck in a traffic jam. Maybe I'll have to drive to a hospital a hundred miles away, as has happened before. I might sign up for this if my household kept at least one ICE vehicle, but not otherwise.
I think you're view is based on politics.
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And keep in mind it's to store energy from renewables (minus hydropower), i.e. mainly solar and wind. Solar is nonexistent at night. And although it varies, wind is generally strongest during the day and delivers less energy at night. But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes, at least currently that's the situation and it would necessitate a ton of new infrastructure to change that. H…
Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.
If everyone has an electric car and that car is always plugged in when not in use, regardless of where you are, then car batteries are only out of grid use while they're being driven.
The electrical grid must be such a difficult thing to manage, even with cars acting as local grid storage we'd need supplemental neighbourhood/regional storage units as well as a way to handle any unexpected peaks.
I mean I know there's the whole "Coronation Street finishes and everyone turns their kettles on" thing but imagine if at x time on x day everyone collectively did turn their kettles on - literally everyone, every single household. It would blow the grid no matter what the operators tried to do.
In a way we need grid storage in the form of batteries to enable better use of green/local energy sources, but I think it would be smart to include some sort of chemical based generation capacity with that local storage, some way for us to store energy in a solid form say, then never use it apart from very unexpected peaks where the system needs to scrabble to find more juice.
Unfortunately a lot of potential fuels are also flammable, not really the best thing to have a huge stockpile of in your neighbourhood. Maybe a huge flow battery fed by massive underground tanks, if we ever manage to improve that technology...
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I don’t think the crises or emergency phrasing is particularly accurate. We have already locked in a great deal of climate change over the coming decades and urgent actions now won’t change that. I don’t think ‘emergency’ should apply to situations where things get worse over the next 30 years but actions today may cause them to be less terrible in 80 years. The narrative about shrinking economies doesn’t make sense…
US domestic emissions have fallen slightly - much less than US manufacturing was moved overseas. Also, I am definitely in no way advocating for authoritarianism. I'm advocating for realistic, charismatic politicians to present the real situation to people and help them understand the urgency of this threat to the future of the world. Not to mention, there is plenty of room for reducing economic activity without mater…
I don’t really have much of a response to the rest of your comment. I can’t tell if the foundation of the argument in your comment above is on that false claim or not.
I don’t think it’s true that a charismatic leader will cause people to vote for to make their lives worse in the short term with a truthful promise of making their lives worse in the short term. If people vote for such a leader, they will vote them out when their lives get worse. I don’t really understand why I should be convinced that the way forward is for some supreme charisma to appear (from where?) and persuade the World’s people to suffer hardship for the greater good. I am particularly unconvinced because I think that kind of suffering is unnecessary and not particularly helpful for reducing GHG emissions or climate change.
I continue to not think it’s an emergency for the same reason that your mortality is not an emergency when you are in your mid fifties.
I roughly expect: government-support / industrial policy causes low-carbon power generation to grow a bit faster than predictions, and gets cheaper to the point that fossil fuel power generation becomes uneconomical apart from leaker plants which take longer to die out; new cars to become mostly-electric sooner than predicted because most car companies get good enough at them and the electric cars are just better cars (potentially hybrid cars should be preferred as a policy if cars are limited by battery production: most miles are short journeys so would still be all on the smaller batteries); global warming / climate change to continue increasing for a while; maybe some improvements to carbon capture but I’m a bit doubtful it would be done much unless power gets a lot cheaper; much migration and ensuing strife due to the uneven consequences of climate change; some powerful country that cares less about the ethics of it (eg China) doing some big geoengineering thing (eg silver particles in the upper atmosphere) to try to reduce the effects of climate change they suffer. Bit of a mixed bag but not entirely hopeless.
Love subsidizing public infrastructure directly as well as paying taxes!
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A sibling comment mentions (but maybe doesn't realize the importance of) what battery storage is primarily useful for: night power. Solar is cheap and easy for power when the sun is up, but doesn't exist when the sun sets. The "evening commute" is mostly during the time when the sun is up; where you run into issues is: 1. After the evening commute in the early hours of the night, people are still awake at home using…
> The "evening commute" is mostly during the time when the sun is up I admittedly live on the eastern edge of my time zone (Boston), but my evening commute is fully past any meaningful solar production for almost half the year (solar is producing under 25% for ~14 hours per day on a year-round basis, more in winter). As we continue to electrify space heating, more electricity will be demanded on winter overnights (wh…
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Absolutely. As an EV owner who wants to keep his car for at least ten years, it doesn't make sense to me to dull out the high capacity batteries to support the grid. It seems to me that it would be better to use recycled batteries for home PV storage etc. I'm not too obsessed but it was easy enough to look up the data on what charge states result in the least loss of range over time.
What if your car battery had a chemistry that could sustain ~10000 cycles if well handled, and aging in general was a bigger issue than cycle degradation? We’re approaching this with the recent LFP generations.
People are afraid of actually using their batteries, and engaging in FUD about their aging. It's weird.
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What if your car battery had a chemistry that could sustain ~10000 cycles if well handled, and aging in general was a bigger issue than cycle degradation? We’re approaching this with the recent LFP generations.
LiFePO4 batteries I bought in 2017 were rated for 4000 cycles of 80% depth of discharge. Shallower discharge counted as partial cycles. Even at such a heavy use, that's almost 11 years of heavy use every single day -- after which the battery still continues to operate just fine, with slightly lower capacity. People are afraid of actually using their batteries, and engaging in FUD about their aging. It's weird.
And some of the same people change cars a year later (talking about EVs, of course — because it doesn't have HW4, 4680s, etc.). Some of it is human nature, though.