271–280 of 424 posts
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The Leaf was built with Japanese climate in mind, where peak temperatures are usually not as high. I always found that strange, given that automotive components are usually tested for outlier conditions.
A Korean car company made a car with the Japanese climate in mind? Perhaps you meant the Korean climate?
It’s remarkable what energy dense batteries have enabled. Drones and the entire quadcopter scene wouldn’t be possible without them. Some maneuvers made on a 5” quad can pull more than 100 amps on a 6S, 22V battery. That is around 2,200 watts—more than most consumer microwave ovens! The fact that a battery weighing no more than half a kilogram can supply this much power almost instantly is truly remarkable.
Neither would my 300 gram plane that can fly for an hour and 60 kilometers. Technology is great.
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> Unfortunately, even a very small amount of noise in the data makes is basically impossible to know where you are in an S-curve. While true, my point is that when combined with the fact that we are pre-inflection point, and the economics now stand on their own (renewables, Electric Vehcile TCO and various Energy Storage applications being already cheapest, competitive or very close too) it is not unreasonable when m…
Build enough PV to generate 24 hours worth of power for the reactor in daylight hours, and store the excess in batteries to power the reactor overnight.
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drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.
> And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
That's certainly a real limit, but what is it a limit on? It is not obvious from first principles that it takes n atoms to implement n transistors.
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Neither would my 300 gram plane that can fly for an hour and 60 kilometers. Technology is great.
Do you get live video over cellphone networks at that weight?
It’s remarkable what energy dense batteries have enabled. Drones and the entire quadcopter scene wouldn’t be possible without them. Some maneuvers made on a 5” quad can pull more than 100 amps on a 6S, 22V battery. That is around 2,200 watts—more than most consumer microwave ovens! The fact that a battery weighing no more than half a kilogram can supply this much power almost instantly is truly remarkable.
This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perf…
> while a car lasts only 10-15 years While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation). I bought my 2015 L…
Why not? There are already companies who specialize in replacing early-model LEAF batteries with new, higher-capacity ones. By 2030, I imagine this could be a pretty widespread industry - perhaps even rebuilding/remanufacturing OEM battery packs with new cells.
And so long as the battery still works, that LEAF will always be "economically viable" because unlike combustion vehicles, there are practically no ongoing maintenance costs.
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Why is that? Is it because North Americans use electricity for cooking and heating whereas other countries use gas for that?
Air conditioning isn't needed in many EU countries except for a few days a year (so it's not worth to even install it in private homes, modern offices mostly have them though for some reason). Also depending on the country few people use cloth driers - you just hang your clothes on a cable and let them dry by themselves. Houses in colder parts of EU are also usually better isolated than in US ([1] that's a typical Po…
They need it for ventilation because 6th floor office windows don't open for obvious reasons.
This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perf…
This same problem has plagued climate science as well, giving munition for deniers and otherwise just confusing the public. You want to see the real writing on the wall? The IPCC report takes 10 year old settled science and makes models using it. The real, more recent data is much, much worse.
Where can I read anything on this?
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They are exactly the same kind of error in that both assume stability over time. One assume prices are stable; the other assumes the rate of change is stable.
The rate of change has been stable over the last 15 years, do you bet it continues for a 16th year or that it stops this year?
At some point, there's going to be a price floor that the research, materials supply and competition simply won't break through.
Guessing when that is going to happen is more luck than anything. I do not see it continuing to get exponentially cheaper for long, though.
LiFePho has removed most of the precious metals out of the equation, and the demand for electric cars will continue to compete against the growth in demand for battery storage for renewables. For an analogy, lumber prices have shot through the roof over the past few years where I live due to construction booms. Nothing about the technology has changed, and supply hasn't fluctuated greatly. These same pressures are going to be pushing against lithium batteries getting exponentially cheaper over the next few years. I don't doubt that they will find room to bring prices down, but there is a floor out there somewhere close by.