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Are you gonna get an electric car anytime soon? (Or do you already have one?)
I would bet anything that was staged. The "acting" was terrible.
It merely represents what people have taken to doing if they take the Tesla on a long trip.
But these next two pictures are not staged... Tesla obviously has some serious design flaws in their battery packs. And never ever get a Tesla battery pack submerged in either fresh or salt water. Even the dealerships are going up in flames...
The bottom line is that the charging infrastructure simply does not yet exist to make EV ownership viable for someone who does not have off-road charging at home, and/or regularly makes long road trips, unless those trips are only along high traffic volume corridors (e.g. between the LA Metro and the Bay Area), that now have just about viable charging options. If you have a garage at home and very rarely take your car more than 100 miles from it, then a current state of the art EV could make sense. I know four EV owners, and they all fall into both of these categories.
I had two scheduled service calls yesterday, and had to shoehorn in a third emergency one at the end of the day. If that hadn't happened, my home to home mileage would have been around 200. It ended up being 312. There were no EV chargers that would have been available for me to use at any of those three calls. If that situation has changed in three years' time (when I anticipate next replacing my car), if the cost of EVs has declined to near parity with equivalent ICE-powered ones, and if the risk of a fatal fire following a minor collision has been seriously mitigated by that point, then I'll consider an EV. But that is what needs to happen, as a bare minimum.
That video must have been staged, there's no way that many people could be that stupid about what a Tesla is and how it works.
Could have very well been stages. But none the less the same thing happened to my friend from Alabama. He now carries a similar generator on long trips. L<ike I said he was going from AL< to Kankakee, IL and ran out of juice in Southern Il,. He even went by the standard Tesla range calculator to know where to stop and charge.
That video must have been staged, there's no way that many people could be that stupid about what a Tesla is and how it works.
Could have very well been stages. But none the less the same thing happened to my friend from Alabama. He now carries a similar generator on long trips. L<ike I said he was going from AL< to Kankakeel, IL< and ran out of juice in Southern Il,. He even went by the standard Tesla range calculator to know where to stop and charge.
Truth be said... This actually happened to a friend down in Alabama that has a Model, S. He was driving to Chicago from Dothan. Unfortunately he did not have an alternator in his trunk... But he does now...
Wind and solar are not completely clean...considering their manufacture and disposal and that can have other unintended environmental impacts.
Disposal is about to become a big headache. There was an investigative piece on a talk radio station I listen to while on the road about this issue in California. Typical rooftop panels have a useful life of 20 to 25 years before their output declines significantly and they require replacement, meaning that the first ones, installed in the early '00s, are now reaching EOL. It literally costs more to recycle a panel in compliance with California law than it does to buy its replacement. Apparently this is largely due to the chemical adhesives used to bond the photoelectric materials to the chassis, and the anti-UV treatments applied to the glass outer cover. As a result, vendors and installers are simply refusing to haul away used panels when they replace a set, leading to increasing reports of panels dumped in freeway rest areas, etc. If that's a problem now, imagine the scale of it in a few years time, when panels start to hit EOL in significant numbers. It is now legally required that all new residential structures have photovoltaic panels on their roofs. If a more economically viable means of recycling them isn't developed soon, this will become a huge problem.
Normally, for long transmission, you get the voltage WAY up. losses in the wire are due to current. Power is power that is, the simplest electrical expression is Pin = Pout. Power in a wire is i2R. That i2 is what gets you on transmission lines. So, you want to get the current as low as possible for a long distance where R is going to go up linearly instead of current going up to the square. Getting the voltage up lowers the current which dramatically lowers the current in the transmission lines.
I could see how wind will fluctuate. That said, think of your car's electrical. Your engine speed fluctuates too. The battery will, essentially smooth that out. One would think that:
The wind farms are smart enough to catch the wind reasonably well (and automatically rotate to catch the wind the best.
The choice of location is such that there is normally a good supply of wind and that its average output is reasonably well known over a period of time.
That the design of putting the power on the grid is well thought out to minimize fluctuations and be at a suitable voltage to work with the infrastructure.
Renewables are not the stand-alone answer, at least not at this time. But there is no reason that they cannot contribute to the solution. Coal is problematic in that it is a consumable and not a renewable so it isn't something one would want to depend on indefinitely. It is dirty from start to finish.
Wind and solar are not completely clean...considering their manufacture and disposal and that can have other unintended environmental impacts. Nuclear has the potential for the greatest, longest lasting power generation. It does have, at present, the side-effect of what to do with the spent rods and how they behave when things don't work as planned. There are sufficient examples of what that is a strong concern. There are other reactor types that can be explored that can address those concerns, however.
I was talking to a guy who works at one of the power plants in Colstrip, MT, which is 37 miles south of here. I take his words with a grain of salt because after all he is a "coal guy." There is a new wind farm about 50 miles northeast from here. They built a power transmission line from the farm to connect to the "main" transmission infrastructure which is currently fed by that coal power plant. Distance from the wind farm to the main transmission line = about 90 miles. From there the power is sent on to eastern Washington, about 900 miles west of here, which has used power generated in this area for the past 50 years or so. My friend said that they have to employ these "boosters" on the wind power because it isn't as steady as the coal power (since it relies on the wind blowing, of course) and also the power diminishes over the course of its long journey, so it has to be "boosted" to be high enough amperage for what's required at the other end.
My knowledge of "big power" is pretty limited, of course, but it does make me wonder about the efficiency of the wind power vs the coal power. I mean, how much juice does it take to run those boosters? And where is THAT power coming from?
It's clear, based on the graph that Geoff posted, that Natural Gas is what is displacing coal in the US. It is also surprising how little the renewables are contributing to the overall picture though if things continue, wind will overtake coal in the not-too-distant future. However, half of that speed is coal's decline and not all attributable to wind increasing. I also am curious if wind increases will start to plateau as good places for turbines decrease. The graph also doesn't indicate costs of upkeep of the various sources. I, personally, would like to see nuclear increase and, more importantly, development of nuclear into safer forms.
I read in.another article this am that a Tesla Model S only reduces CO2 emissions by 20% as compared to a gas fueled car if driven 100,000 miles.
when I worked for Claco I drove a V-8 powered vehicle that ran on gas or CNG. It ran fine on CNG but was way less efficient if you drove it over 65 mph. At 70 mph, it could make it from Salt Lake City to Evanston, WY on one tank at 65 to 70mph. Then from Evanston to Rock Springs and fill it again. There were no CNG fill stations after Rock Springs, so then it had to run on Petrol. Overall the CNG was way less expensive, but inconvenient and often the fill stations were not right off the intestate. So filling up could also be time consuming. The NCG conversion was also very expensive and payback time could go beyond 10 years.
EVs are wildly more efficient than gasoline cars, so much so that even if charged on a 100% coal fired electric grid(which exists nowhere in the us at this point), you're using less energy and producing less CO2 than a gasoline car.
Can't find the source after a brief search just now, but I've heard it claimed that the energy inputs into the manufacturing process are significantly higher for EVs than ICEVs, most of the difference being in the battery (mining the ingredients, transportation, and production); so much so that an EV does not start to pull ahead of an ICEV in terms of total lifecycle energy consumption per mile driven (taking into account everything - manufacturing, planned maintenance over the design life, and then EOL disposal/recycling) until it's clocked up 60-70K miles. That is significantly more miles than the average American owns their car for.
Power lost in grid transmission is something else to factor in to the overall equation when charging EVs using electricity generated at a station hundreds of miles away, too. It's the same reason as why very few ultra long haul (ULH) flights are operated, and the few that are tend to be business/premium class only. Fuel burns fuel carrying itself. The more you take on board at the start of the flight, the more you burn carrying the extra fuel needed toward the end of it. Likewise, the resistance in long distance transmission cables consumes a certain amount of power before it even makes it to the EV charger.
All EV's do right now is to move the CO2 output over to another source.
I keep reading that it produces some large amount of waste, something like 150,000 pounds of toxic stuff, to create an EV battery, but how much tonnage of exhaust fumes would that same car running on gas put out in its lifetime?
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