101–110 of 153 posts
This will cause renewable energy to become somewhat less attractive financially, but the alternative is a grid that becomes unreliable over time as gas power plants are decommissioned and don't get replaced.
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No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.
I've always dreamed of trolley-bus like wires strung along interstates paired with robotic self-attaching trolley-poles. In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?). Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric inter…
If paved roads, then you're forgetting the enormous wear that heavy vehicles put on road surfaces (which would get much worse as labor costs were taken away as a downward pressure on road freight volume.)
If rail, then I think you could see some version of that as a logical upgrade to a high-utilization rail network in a high-trust society with a strong safety culture. I see the US becoming lower-, not higher-, trust.
We should take a moment to acknowledge the Power MOSFet in this story. For a guy who paid money for his first germanium transistor generating grid scale power with transistors is TOTALLY amazing.
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No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.
We can't really build useful railways any more, though. Towns and cities are too large and too dense and too insanely expensive in terms of property prices to get new lines into or even close to. (This might be less of a problem for freight compared to moving people, but many lines are mixed freight/passenger use, aren't they?)
In reality, such a series of actions could only exist in a society that got seriously focused on moving away from private auto, and that means density would increasingly be in style. As soon as the NIMBY floodgates came down, property prices would plummet in all but the smallest cores of desirable areas, since it would be readily apparent that you can't build all expensive areas to the level of intensity that justifies insane land values seen in sprawling cities.
Again, we could, but I recognize that we don't. Let's just not say that we can't.
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Volatility in terms of policies, not prices. E.g., the it's fairly certain the subsidies for gas that are in place this year will continue next year. Price volatility has a lot more market dynamics at play.
I have lost the thread. The og parent said that political uncertainties were responsible for gas plant economic issues. You are now saying that gas plant lobbyists create more political certainty. I don’t know if that is true but it is beside the point.
In other words, if you think it's hard to implement a new energy policy in part because of monied interests, those monied interests are providing certainty in policy. To ground it in more real terms, I may not want to bet on new energy tech if the have an economic advantage based on who's in the White House. By contrast, betting on fossil fuels has more certainty because those interests are protected almost regardless of who's in the White House.
It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.
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Not to mention taxes, mandates, sanctions , and even wars
I've often wondered if anyone has ever studied what the "all in" cost of gasoline would be taking account of all those externalities.
One way to start thinking about the question is to benchmark society before gasoline.
Mass use of gasoline kicked off around 1900, with the popularization of the automobile.
You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. The world definitely had problems and Wars before 1900.
What the world would look like today had gasoline never been discovered is a lot more tricky, but my gut feeling is that we would be worse off than today.
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Not sure why the cost would be borne by sellers. More likely consumers will pay for it as part of the grid infrastructure in my opinion.
Well, currently the sellers are the ones directly paying for the grid infrastructure. It makes much more sense. They are the ones that can choose what part of the grid they plug on, and they are the ones choosing if they provide the service or not.
Typically electric companies pay for the grid infrastructure and operation currently. Electricity producers like solar plants out in the desert is not paying to maintain the poles to your house.
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24 cents per gallon of diesel aren't a significant portion of fuel costs nor do they come anywhere close to paying for the roads.
I'm guessing you're just reading federal taxes. There are a barrage of taxes applied to fuel. California shows over $1.24 per gallon in total. Nationally it's over 64 cents/gal. That's tens of billions of dollars nationally, and more than we spend on the energy & environment in total. One of the major problems with infrastructure spending is that these numbers have barely budged in decades. Combine that lack of polit…
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A major problem here is that intermittency isn't consistent. Okay, solar doesn't generate at night, so you would need to charge some batteries during the day and discharge them at night. Maybe that's fine. But solar also generates less in winter. If we want to transition heating from oil and gas to electric, we need a lot of generation in the winter. If we build some more solar to do that, now there's way more than e…
I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new. Winter affects how much air conditioning and heating is needed - and probably even when people go to work and return. You had to take that into account before solar issues. Now both consumption and production are affected by the season, sure, but that's still a known mechanism. Same for cloudiness vs air conditioning (and heating and lighting). But wait, in mo…