It would be better to remove all subsidies, so the true cost is revealed to and paid by the consumer. It would be a bit difficult to remove all fossil fuel subsidies though, since that would include a large part of the defence (sorry war) budget that is spent keeping the oil flowing.
We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.
In Australia we have so much solar that wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day. Despite that we still have high retail prices. Domestic battery installations are getting popular and will help.
1. Time arbitrage of energy. Store energy from times when it is abundant, and put it back when it's more scarce. This is profitable on most grids with at least high single digits of percentage of renewable generation. And to say it's profitable for battery operators is the same thing as saying it's reducing costs, if the grid/utility is operated in a fair way.
2. Location arbitrage of electricity by making use of times with less grid congestion. The grid itself is the only location arbitrage we have had up until grid-sized batteries. But it's expensive, and the costs are not even. Some locations are far cheaper to service than others. Battery storage has long been a "non-wired alternative" that in many cases is cheaper than stringing wires to expand capacity.
There's probably more that I dont understand. Battery storage on the grid is a disruptive technology, because up until now the grid was pretty much the only major system I could think of that doesn't have any storage. (Computer networking is kind of similar, but buffers have always existed. It just turns out that buffering is not tremendously useful in the network itself when the endpoints have tons of storage...)
In the US, transmitting and distributing electricity is more expensive than generating it. That imbalance is going to widen far further as solar and wind get cheaper, which they will for a minimum of a decade, based on the current pace. They could get cheaper for multiple decades. We don't really know what the floor is going to be, but we do know it will be electricity far cheaper than we had imagined from any other technology up until now.
More domestic batteries reduces the electricity demand at night, meaning power companies need to buy less natural gas and coal powered electricity from producers.
They lose some solar generation during the day that is now going into charging the batteries, but they have too much of that already.
Net result a lower proportion of (more expensive) fossil fuels in the overall mix, meaning total cost of power generation comes down, and retail prices come down.
This is happening in the US too. We're creeping closer and closer to the day where just installing off-grid battery + PV is cheaper than dealing with regulations + politically inflated grid prices.
In most states, the power company cannot seize your home for cancelling your account + not paying your bill. Also, in most states, the power company gets to regulate the design of grid-attached solar. They're artificially driving installation costs up (building codes do too, and are a separate problem).
This means there's a big step function coming. The price of grids (which are subsidizing the AI data center boondoggle, and also legacy fossil fuel plutocrats) are currently a little higher than grid attached battery + PV. We're maybe one more price halving to the point where it makes sense to go off grid.
At that point, a market for off-grid (non-subsidizing) system installations will materialize. In distorted markets, this will drop prices non-linearly (2-4x), and then everyone will act surprised.
EVs are better than ICE in term of local emissions, however they do not solve all environmental issues.
The answer is fewer cars and more shared transportation. People always mention lack of public transport possibilities, affordability and rentability but the offer would develop immediately and would be much more efficient than what we have now if private passenger motorized vehicles weren't allowed as it would reduce the overall traffic significantly if only emergency, public and good transports were allowed.
It is figured out though. Pre-heat the battery, or drive a little while before charging. A fast charging stop will significantly heat up the battery, heat that can then be transferred to the cabin.
I live in Norway and for most people, EVs are an improvement during cold weather in my opinion. They get warm inside much faster, drive better, and while the range is obviously a lot lower, it isn’t a deal breaker if you buy a good EV.
EV wouldn’t represent 97% of new car sales in Norway if they were worse in the cold IMHO. The country put incentives but they are phased out and many people don’t mind paying a lot.
Vast majority of worlds population doesn't live in places where cold weather range is a problem. Even where it is, cold weather range is a 3 month inconvenience of having to charge more often.
Yeas sure there are use cases where gasoline is more convenient than BEV. But just because the usecase is relevant for you doesn't mean it's globally relevant in the big picture.
Also how much people are ready take inconvenience depends how much they have to pay for the luxury of using gas. Even ignoring the global warming aspect, the EROI of oil drilling is plummeting. We'll never run out oil, it will just get more and more expensive as the easy sources of oil are all used...
It will be a non-issue with the inevitable additional (charging) infrastructure roll-outs along with mandates for on-board heat-pump battery management.
Not only in cold weather. Good luck trailing something big for a long distance even in the summer. In my model X the range is reduced to hardly 150 miles. Really inconvenient.
This is like the argument that LED traffic lights are bad because they don't get hot enough to melt snow on them.
It's something that doesn't matter most of the time and when it does matter you use something else. LED traffic lights started getting built with heaters in them.
I looks really pretty, but it's bloated. The home page is 10 times the size of the original (630 kB vs 56 kB).
And the code... everything is just divs and spans, instead of more semantic markup. Where are the lists, headings, and paragraphs? And tailwind classes everywhere — yuck. The beauty of HN is the structure is very regular, so that it would be extremely easy and efficient to style everything using element and descendent selectors, without having to put classes on every single element.
The existing HN table markup is pretty crap also btw, but this isn't an improvement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
reply