Elecgric Vehicles - F250 Lightning - Event Date: 16 Mar 2022

OK LA, if I remind you of the old elevator engineers then you remind me of the gulls who invested in Theranos.


More than likely I adopt new tech faster than you do. I don't have time or money to be in the innovator category of tech adoption, trialling the bleeding edge beta stuff, but I typically am next in line for things that make sense to me making me a so-called early adopter. For example, I set just set up my Starlink system last weekend. I've been wait listed for close to a year now, and finally got my gen 2 system, with the covered rectangular antenna that cats can't sleep in, blocking the signal. The first gen would have been a problem for me in the winter, I have three barn cats who would have loved its nice warm snow melt feature.

Ever heard of "fake it till you make it"? I can't find one single auto manufacturers who has partnered with Ample. Can you? They modified those Nissan Leafs, and they don't say how many there are. The Leaf uses laminate type cells which are fabricated into blocks and are air cooled only, no liquid cooling like everyone else uses. So they're prone to running hotter and having shortened battery life. But relatively easy to modify. The statements that that woman at Ample made in the video that everyone uses similar batteries is flat out a lie.

If you want to see a real world battery swap system look up what Nio is doing in China. That is interesting and appears to work in that market to some extent, which is an urban use market. the Chinese do not have a century of history of travelling around their huge country in autos or big trucks towing trailers, nor do they have a century of investment in sprawling suburbia. The newly minted middle class Chinese live in urban high rise apartments and use their spanking new cars in their urban locales. the battery swap business model has benefits in this kind of environment.

The issue here is not that I am rejecting new technology it's that you are not seeing where the technology is headed. Every month batteries get cheaper, lighter, and faster to charge. Each of these steps whittles away at the battery swap business opportunity. Why would anyone want to swap batteries in 10 minutes if they can recharge them in 20 the few times they need to charge on the road? No one is going to even consider it unless they don't have a way to way to charge at home. I think it's likely that battery swapping is a technology whose window of opportunity in the mainstream US EV market has come and gone

Re hydrogen, that was a non starter.
There are many things that just don't pass the smell test from a physics and engineering standpoint. One is hydrogen fueled vehicles. It is horribly inefficient compared to batteries and there isn't going to be some magic tech that changes that because that would violate physical laws. Hydrogen is promoted by the fossil fuel as "clean" but it's anything but. The vast majority is produced from methane with CO2 as a byproduct. One of those cases of the "cure" being worse than the disease.

Re Gemany, they plan on shutting down their last nukes this year. Let's see if they actually do it. Their grid is running on around 40-ish percent renewables, of which only a small fraction is hydro and biomass, the vast majority being solar and wind.


Gemant electricity

Can they get to zero fossil fuel content? Certainly they can deploy enough renewables and very cheaply too. The issue is of course storage. Grid scale storage solutions other than batteries require storage of gravitational potential energy, which in turn requires heavy mass at a height. There aren't a lot of places to put more large scale pumped storage, so things like cranes and concrete and or heavily loaded trains on long grades would required. I think V2G EV technology will be a leading player as well. We'll see if they can do it. They can if anyone can, just as they were the world leaders pushing solar forward0 all through the '00"s.

Very few folks are going to voluntarily give up theyr high energy consumption lifestyles. The problem is that more and more people around the world are achieving a level of consumption that we have had for many generations. It's unfair of us to think that they will give up that opportunity just to let us continue to enjoy our way of life.

That's what the folks who complain about the carbon reduction agreements that allow the Chinese and indians to surpass our emissions don't seem to get. Those countries have 3 or 4x our population so can be higher CO2 emitters while their per capita emissions remain far below ours. It's like the population of tiny Luxembourg (579,000 people/10 megatons total annual CO2/17.5tons per capita) complaining about the US (323,000,000 people/5 trillion tons/15.5 tons per person) being a horrible polluter. We'd tell them to go look in a mirror, right?

In the end we need to expect that everyone want to have a higher standard of living so per capita emissions will be similar throughout the world. So, we need to get over our entitled attitudes and solve this global problem together. Either the high per capita emitting countries cut back and the low per capita emitters stay low, we reduce the global population, or we all brush up on our swimming skills.

Yep and quite wasting energy doing incredibly stupid stuff like "mining" cryptocurrencies. I'd hate to think what our great grandchildren will make of us for that nonsense.

I'm of the firm belief that no single thing will solve the energy issue. It will take all of the "solutions" we know of today, plus probably ones that none of us can think of. Solar and wind have the intermittency issue. Nuclear has safety and political issues (with the possible exception of fusion; but that is perpetually 10 years in the future). Geothermal has probably not been explored enough, plus it turns out there is a tremendous amount of lithium in at least "some" geothermal sites. I heard an operator of one geothermal site saying they can extract 20 thousand tons of lithium annually from just that one geothermal site. Fossil fuels have all the pollution issues we are all familiar with. Don't get me started on coal.

Ciberpine, the atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide heat trapping have been well understood for long over a century, no modelling required. That has nothing to do with whether plants like CO2 or not. Of course they do, photosynthesis can't work without it.

The point is that if you increase the amount of heat being trapped in the atmosphere the Earth's average temperature goes up until a new equilibrium is reached where the heat getting radiated back into space again balances with the heat being absorbed from the sun. Has to, the heat has to go somewhere, energy is not created or destroyed, just moved around.

So more CO2 means higher temps which means the glaciers melt more which means sea levels go up. That is happening now (measured, not modeled) and has happened in the past. Last time CO2 levels were this high was about 3 million years ago and sea levels were about 30-50 feet higher than now. That is called the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period.

Since about 10 percent of the world's population lives on low lying sea coasts all those folks will need to find somewhere else to live, make a living and get their food. I did exactly that 4 years ago, moved from Hatteras NC which is flooding more and more often, to SW VA at 2700 ft elevation. But we were lucky enough to have the resources to be able to do that proactively. Most people around the world do not.

Sea level rise is just one effect, others are stronger storms (because a warmer atmosphere contains more energy in the form of water vapor) and droughts in some areas and floods in others, as the climate shifts around.

None of the above takes elaborate modeling to understand. All you have to do is look at the actual temps, actual sea level changes, actual CO2 level changes, weather pattern changes, and the geological record. Where the modelling comes in is in trying to predict how soon, how much change, and which areas are going to be effected by what change.

That modeling is certainly imperfect but gets better all the time. And real scientists can't get away with lying because the whole point of science is to be able to demonstrate repeatability. If others can't replicate one scientists results then it ain't science and gets thrown out. So yes there are cases of scientists faking their data but that is a career ending event when discovered so it's quite rare.

But the big picture effect is not in doubt because you can measure it and it's happened before. Will it end the human race? Of course not, unless we do it to ourselves by fighting wars over resources or transmitting new diseases during the migrations.

Will it result in loss of biodiversity as many species die off? Of course. Plants and animals are adapted to live where they live. When things change they either have to be able to change too or move, same as the people. Some species will be able to do that but many others won't.

Will it change the world for some folks it in some really devastating ways? Yes absolutely. Will some folks be better off? Probably.

So what we need to do is decide to what extent we want to slow down and manage the changes. That's a political process which is out of bounds on this forum so I'll stop there. But the rest of the above is straightforward to understand without recourse to complex modeling.

In any event I'm happy even if climate change deniers (not saying you are one) adopt EVs and/or solar for other reasons. There are plenty of things to like about them and the result is the same regardless of the reasons. So it's all good

I would like to point out that what we think of as established science today might not be tomorrow as we find out more. Is the climate changing? Yes. It is always changing. We have everything from the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period to the Ice Ages. Which is the perfect climate? These happened long before our industrial age. Then there is the Little Ice Age ( https://instaar.colorado.edu/research/projects/cause-and-onset-of-little-ice-age/ ). How much of our warming is due to coming out of that still? Where is the equilibrium point that is the one for which we should aim? How do we get to it? If we were to have a couple of large volcanic eruptions of the Krakatoa scale, we would be back to talking about global cooling and how to keep that from happening. That was back in the 70's when talk was of spreading carbon on the ice to promote solar absorption to keep the earth from cooling. That appears to be quite foolish today. What we are being told today might appear to be equally foolish a few years down the road.

As I said before, there are a lot of very smart engineers and scientists actually working now on solutions to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels.  The are coming up with new ideas all the time, even using concepts that may have been previously rejected as impractical because they found ways around the impediments.  In every form of alternate energy there are problems that have to be overcome, whether it is serious environmental damage from lithium and nickel mining, energy storage and portability, and so on.  I am optimistic that most of these problems can be overcome and am not going to reject any ideas until they have been fully explored and proven to be unworkable.