I think there's a small amount of truth and a large amount of PR (aka hot air) coming out of corporate mouthpieces about "green tech."
They discovered "sustainable technology" is a product you can sell like any other and they're selling it, to the point that if you want to e.g. find a firm that's e.g. trashing some wetlands in your neighborhood going down the list of approved development contracts and looking for buzzwords like "sustainable growth" or "ecologically responsible" isn't a bad way to start.
Yeah, 'road service' is the general term for it. But a tow takes more work and equipment than a limp-ten-miles charge. Maybe the charge and tow will have different pricing. So what? It's not a common scenario, you can afford it every decade or so.
I think you spend time looking for something to complain about. Like I said, I'm no Musk fan. I just think the issues you have with buzz words is rather pointless. PR is not just Puerto Rico.
Sounds cheap to me. A 1 GW nuke plant costs more like $15 to $20 billion.
I believe the $160 million battery Musk sold Austraila paid back it's cost in about a year I seem to recall. It was 100 MW so about the same cost per. The compressed air facility is 10 GWh and that's a lot of storage. Hornsdale is only 129 MWh.
Yeah, I think they are getting their money's worth. That's a lot of solar panels and EV charging. Now they need to get on the stick about making level 2 charging much more universal. Once that happens people will stop being neurotic about EV charging.
There are a some people who can't easily charge at home. But for most of us that's the way to charge an EV, home, work and while out running errands. But for public visibility I think Tesla needs to keep up with Supercharger installations making those red and white pedestals more and more visible. Eventually they will saturate the consciousness of the public.
At low (tropical) latitudes, the quoted capacity factor is about 30 % all year around, so that is about 8 hours of nominal power a day. Of the 12 hours the sun is up, the first two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening generates some electricity, which compensates for the small drop outside noon.
At higher latitudes the winter days are shorter and thus the morning and evening production drops away, thus there are fewer nominal power hours. While the days in the summer are longer than 12 hours, it doesn't help, since the sun will shine on the back side of the panels during early morning and late evening. Thus the summer illumination time is limited to 12 hours, so you might expect similar 8 hour nominal power as in the tropics.
At higher latitudes the sun never reaches zenit, so the light has to go a longer path trough the atmosphere, which attenuates the light (Air mass losses) and reduces panel output.
When you compress air, it will heat up. If you have good thermal insulation, you could store very hot gas for a while and when released, it is about the temperature of ambient air.
However, compressors usually have coolers at intermediate stages to limit the compressed air temperature and allowing a large mass of air to be stored. If you have productive use for this released heat, fine, but if you have to release it into the environment, it is lost, reducing system efficiency.
While the principle that you pay for the roads as much as you use it makes sense, but how are you going to implement it ?
Any GPS based system is very dangerous from the privacy point of view. As soon as someone start storing coordinates in which a certain versicle is at a specific time, there are both commercial (e.g. Google) and political entities (like the government) who wants to run cross check between various data bases and detect exactly where a person moves and who he/she meets. This would be as effective as Orwell's 1984 Big Brother !!
There seems to be a quite a few religious zealots for various religions, such as Tesla, electric vehicles in general, renewable sources or various aspects of climate change,
While this newsgroup is officially in the sci.electronics group, much of the discussion is of various sorts of engineering, in which people try to find workable solutions despite all the constraints.
Roads don't actually have variable costs other than for very large vehicles such as semi-trucks. So it doesn't make sense to apportion charges by miles unless you want to set fees for utility which is very different concept than cost based fees. A combination approach can be made where large trucks have a mileage based charge which factors in weight. This is not hard (at least in the US) as logs are required already and are inspected.
For passenger vehicles a pure mileage based approach based on odometers or GPS is hard to enforce without giving a heavy incentive to cheating. So I suggest a combination of an assumed 12,000 miles per year base (perhaps different in the UK) and an odometer based add-on for excess miles, or just the fixed tax. While that does not match the utility based fee model it does match the cost based fee model well.
This is only regressive if you want to think of it as a function of miles. You have fixed charges on your utility bills too, no? Do you tax residents based on the weight of their garbage or how many times they use emergency services? Every operation has a combination of fixed and variable costs and most services bill that way. Since it is hard to bill by mileage for passenger cars without cheating (how fair is that?), have a large fixed fee with an excess mileage add on. Then the impetus for cheating is greatly reduced and the costs are recovered fairly.
... Undoubtedly fossil-fuels will be part of the mix but solar power is revolutionizing progress in Africa and India. They are both rich in solar energy.
Photovoltaics are ideal for microgrids to provide lighting, power for charging cell-phones and powering cellular base stations and can do this without huge expenditure on infrastructure.
Even a few Watt-hours per day from a solar panel and small battery can provide lighting to allow children and women to be better educated at a far lower cost than using kerosene that can require significant effort to obtain when the nearest supply may be miles away.
Solar power in India (Photovoltaic and thermal) has a significantly higher growth rate than power from coal and expected to exceed coal within the next decade or two.
On Sunday, 2 May 2021 at 07:52:44 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...
Stranding as a result of a discharged battery is a non-issue.
The software on the car constantly monitors the power usage, current charge level, predicted energy usage to get to the destination, the weather and charging station availability on the route. If there will not be sufficient margin due to unplanned usage it recommends the user about mitigations (such as recommended speed or heating/AC usage).
I know of quite a few people who have travelled to the Tahoe area in Teslas without any problem. Many have commented that the all-wheel drive versions do especially well.
You frequently comment on the low utilization of the charging station in Truckee - I can't see why I would use it as charging would not normally needed near the top of a climb. There is a great deal of regeneration on the downhill section.
Most people charge at the destination - even if it is only a 120V extension cord from their cabin.
On a trip to Reno from the Bay Area the charging recommended by the software would be at Loomis with no other charging to reach Reno.
That was my question too. Unless you include additional complexity to recover the heat lost to the environment during the compression stage back into the expanding air during its release (to drive a turbine genset) to mitigate this energy loss, it strikes me as a really shit way to store energy (even with such mitigation).
Also, again unless this high pressure air is stored in dozens to hundreds of separate pressure vessels, this has the makings of an extremely hazardous explosive energy release event in waiting.
I know that all high energy capacity storage systems present such hazards (dam failure in pumped storage hydro schemes and so on) but storing energy in the form of an extremely high pressure gas (air in this case) strikes me as being the least palatable of containment failure risks.
Mention of hydro pumped storage reminds me that, IIRC, it has about an
85% round trip efficiency (not too far from what can be obtained from a lead acid battery under ideal conditions). However, unlike even the most optimised lead acid battery energy storage schemes, the number of charge/ discharge cycles is in the tens of thousands and rising.
The problem with hydro pumped storage being the limited number of suitable sites, most of which have already been spoken for. Even if compressed gas energy storage can only manage 75 to 80 percent, it does offer more choice of suitable sites but I do wonder what the actual round trip efficiency figures are for such schemes. Can compressed gas energy storage even approach 70% in this regard?
After checking out wikipedia (something I aught to have done to begin with), it seems my guessed at 'best figure' for CAES was uncannily spot on with figures dropping to 50% and even as low as 25%.
One can only suppose that in the case of intermittent renewables, even a simple (hence lower cost) 25% efficient CAES is better than nothing.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.