EV or no EV?

[anders_nor]

Norway, since everything is pretty open here, you can actually get to tour hydroplants quite a lot of places if you want.

I also have lots of customers in wind based energy here, and family if your ever over.

 

[Lauren]

Norway, since everything is pretty open here, you can actually get to tour hydroplants quite a lot of places if you want.

I also have lots of customers in wind based energy here, and family if your ever over.

I can imagine the look on my husbands face when I tell him our next vacation is going to be to Norway to tour hydro plants

 

[PinnacleJim]

EVs don't work for me currently. Won't get me to the mountains without a long charge, not enough convenient charging stations, etc. We are making progress, but I think we are at least 10 years away before one will make sense for me. Will take a breakthrough in battery technology and a huge investment in the grid and charging infrastructure to get to point where the EVs will work for most of us.

 

[crgildart]

Hot swap standardized batteries eliminates the charging time/driving distance objection. So does wireless charging directly from solar panel roads and parking lots. The latter is a more of a pipe dream than the former. We had to standardize ICE fuels too.. Why not standardize batteries and just pull up to a station for a quick flip when low?

 

[DanoT]

Arguably the two biggest and best mass market car builders, Toyota and Honda are not heavily invested in EVs. Honda was the first with a hybrid, Toyota is committed to offering a hybrid option for every model vehicle that they sell.
Toyota is also a leader in hydrogen powered electric, which is a type of hybrid (hydrogen is part of a chemical reaction that produces electricity, fed into a battery and electric motor). Toyota, head office on an island nation with virtually no natural resources, is heavily into hydrogen power which can be extracted from water....hmmm.

The world will eventually run out of fossil fuels and wind and solar without huge advances in battery tech are only part time systems that only work when the wind blows and the sun shines. Hydrogen has a future, imo as being the real replacement for fossil fuels.
Switchable empty for full hydrogen fuel cells makes sense for highway 18 wheel truck/trailers because carrying around heavy batteries instead of freight is not as efficient as a replaceable hydrogen tank fuel cell.

 

[Seldomski]

Regarding hydrogen fuel cells...

Roughly 5kg of hydrogen is required for 300-400 miles range. It takes approximately 300 kW-hr to produce and store that hydrogen at high pressure from electrolysis. A BEV requires less than half that much energy to charge a battery to travel the same distance. You are trading efficiency for shorter time at the pump. So unless you subsidize it, the full tank of hydrogen is going to cost you more per mile than the BEV.

Note also that fuel cells and eletrolyzers are both temperature sensitive. They want to operate somewhere between roughly 2 and 40 deg C. Batteries are also sensitive to this. I'm just pointing out that you have the same problem with both forms of storage.

What I don't know is the lifecycle cost for the BEV vs the fuel cell. How much energy are you paying for each and what materials are in each?

 

[Andy Mink]

Why not standardize batteries and just pull up to a station for a quick flip when low?

That is one solution, at least in part. Unfortunately, the manufacturers can't even currently agree on a standardized plug.

Then I think of what the gas lines at Costco look like. Literally there will 18 cars at the pumps with at least that many in the queue at times. Even tossing that out as an extreme example, the infrastructure to store, unload, and load enough batteries to keep a flow of traffic through the station would be daunting, let alone trying to charge all the incoming batteries.

 

[Alexzn]

Swappable EV batteries is a pipe dream. It's literally the largest and heaviest part the the vehicle. Imaging the mqchinery necesaary to swap it and the additional hardware to make it secure. Tesla is now making the battery a structural part of the car, so even less opportunity to make it swappable.

Besides, you charge an EV at a station only return you are doing long trips, in normal life you never go too a charging station and charge at home or at work. Different MO.

 

[raytseng]

Don't look at costco, instead look at gas stations where there is one every 10blocks. Also it is not a flip where one day or 1 year all the vehicles turn electric, but more gradual so the market and infrastructure will shift to meet the market.
They had the same argument about the internet, if everybody was downloaded mp3 at the same time the internet would be overloaded and grind to a halt they said. And now ppl are doing streaming 4k.

I have spotted some gas stations have converted areas and added a few ev charging stations so they see the future. Isnt most of a station's profits from minimart and carwash anyway and they just break even on fuel?

I see the key in addition to new battery tech will be handinhand improvements with fastcharging tech which will be just as important in practice.

On the toyota topic As the market leader in volume they have different constraints,
so i dont think you can knock them too hard . I think toyota is right on the eco front right now that the hybrid is a better use case over pure bev. If the limiting constraint is batterycells, its currently better to allocate their supply as small batteries in more vehicles and meet the sales volume and get it out there versus putting a 5x large battery into a 5xfewer halo vehicles that 99% the battery capacity is not used and is is lugged dead weight.

 

[Dakine]

its been raining nonstop for 5 days, our reservoirs are full, we had negative power prices this weekend.

our gear on hydroplants are 100+ years some places, with new more effficient turbines we could double the output.

My source was Bloomberg, normally pretty reliable.
Norway Hydropower

 

[Dakine]

Swappable EV batteries is a pipe dream. It's literally the largest and heaviest part the the vehicle. Imaging the mqchinery necesaary to swap it and the additional hardware to make it secure. Tesla is now making the battery a structural part of the car, so even less opportunity to make it swappable.

Besides, you charge an EV at a station only return you are doing long trips, in normal life you never go too a charging station and charge at home or at work. Different MO.

The Chinese have a different take on this.
SAE was well on its way to developing a swappable EV battery standard when Tesla said it wouldn't play.
Marketing guys want to claim their batteries are unique but the differences at the cell level are quite small.
Once again marketing triumphs over practicality.

Nio Swappable Batteries

 

[Dave Marshak]

think it's incredible how hydros built that long ago are still standing and producing power today....the craftsmanship in some of those hydros is astounding.

You can tour Hoover Dam. The generator floor there looks like a cathedral. You expect to see the archbishop at any moment. It's amazing what we could build during the Great Depression compared to now.

dm

 

[raytseng]

For swappable batteries, I don't think you can call it yet.
It may not work for Tesla only because that's a luxury halo car and the situations and behavior of the Person that would buy / own a Tesla are unique.

It could be completely different market acceptance for this option for owners of appliance/cheaper vehicles who aren't in the Tesla owner demographic.

 

[Dave Marshak]

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future, and always will be. Building out an H2 distribution system is just too costly.
The electric system is already more than adequate to power EVs. EVs are all revenue and very little cost to the electric company. It will be eyes bleeding expensive to charge up on summer afternoons, but otherwise it will be cheap. Batteries will only improve in both cost and energy density. All those batteries connected to the system will allow greater use of intermittent solar and wind energy. Some day the utility will pay you to connect your EV to the grid.
All the objections to EVs remind me of the time my grandfather told me Model Ts would never replace horses because of all the naptha they would need and how much it would cost to pave all the roads.

dm

 

[djetok]

Electric power consumption will more than double according to Musk. Where will it come from?

This is a very good question to me. You already have rolling blackouts. What happens when more and more convert to ev. This is the biggest hurdle in my opinion. Fire up the coal and gas plants?

 

[James]

Not so.
The diurnal variation of wind speed is well understood.
Most wind comes from temperature differences which are greater during the day.
Even in a windy place like Maui the night time winds are a fraction of the daily max.
View attachment 143964

Well is that because Maui is an island in the middle of the Pacific?

Stability is apparently important also for wind power output. Daytime is more unstable.

Looks like 2 days better during day in the graph below-
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Based on the actual wind power output data of one wind farm in a certain region, this paper analyzes distributed wind power output from two aspects of output characteristic curve and output characteristic index, and the following conclusions can be obtained:
(1) Taking 5 minutes as time interval, wind power output data of the wind farm every day in a week were collected to study and analyze the distributed wind power weekly output curve. The results show that the randomness of wind power output in a week is different between night and day, and the wind power output at night is more, while the wind power output during the day is less.

————-—

https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2019/05/e3sconf_arfee2018_03017.pdf

From US, 2012.
—————————
…This variable power can be predicted by looking at atmospheric stability, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Sonia Wharton and colleague Julie Lundquist of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory…

The team found that wind speed and power production varied by season as well as from night to day. Wind speeds were higher at night (more power) than during the day (less power) and higher during the warm season (more power) than in the cool season (less power). For example, average power production was 43 percent of maximum generation capacity on summer days and peaked at 67 percent on summer nights.

"We found that wind turbines experienced stable, near-neutral and unstable conditions during the spring and summer," Wharton said. "But daytime hours were almost always unstable or neutral while nights were strongly stable."
———————

Power generation is blowing in the wind

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- By looking at the stability of the atmosphere, wind farm operators could gain greater insight into the amount of power generated at any given time. Power generated by a wind turbine largely depends on the wind speed. In a wind farm in which the turbines experience the same...

www.llnl.gov

Red is wind-

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/HosteFinalDraft.pdf

 

[anders_nor]

EV's are a

My source was Bloomberg, normally pretty reliable.
Norway Hydropower

yeah they were talking about % lowering and we needing rain, but then we have had nonstop rain rainrianrainrain and some flooding..

had rain today, and forecast is 3-4 more days of insane rain.

All the rain has crashed with moose hunting season, people are upset as even mooose doesnt bother getting up to walk when it rains that much.

 

[James]

I can imagine the look on my husbands face when I tell him our next vacation is going to be to Norway to tour hydro plants

Well, you go there for the hiking, fjording, etc. The hydro is everywhere you want to be. Pretty sure there’s even glacial melt hydro.
Going to want good rain gear.

September. Lots of those Fjords are deep, so ships can go many miles inland.

 

[Dakine]

@James
"Well is that because Maui is an island in the middle of the Pacific?"
Maui is situated in the trade wind belt and the easterly trades are as good as wind gets.
You hit on the answer, it is vertical atmospheric stability and temperature gradients.
When the sun goes down and the land temp follows, the lack of vertical temperature gradient keeps the strong higher altitude winds from penetrating to the surface.
It is still blowing at 500 m but at sea level it is calm.
As a windsurfer, knowing about wind is like a powder hound knowing about snow.
It can get very frustrating when the kite guys are ripping with their kites in a good breeze while the windsurfers are schlogging without much.
In south Texas in the spring you can almost set your watch by when the vertical mixing starts and you can sail.
As the land heats up, mixing starts around noon and the wind can go from 5mph to 20mph in a half hour.
Now that I have aged out of my favorite sport I'm getting used to it but I sure do miss it.
Maui No Ka Oi!

 

[anders_nor]

Well, you go there for the hiking, fjording, etc. The hydro is everywhere you want to be. Pretty sure there’s even glacial melt hydro.
Going to want good rain gear.
View attachment 144004
September. Lots of those Fjords are deep, so ships can go many miles inland.

if you loose something of the dock or cruise ship there, you cannot retrive, even just a few feet from land, it can be sevral hundred feet deep, and some places up to 3000 feet deep!

a buddy has a boat he trailers arounds on fjords to drive around, you can go flat out for hours, soooooooo vast. done some pwc hooning around there, was reported for "enviromental crimes" ... someone didnt like the pwcs...