Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I like your reasoning, but they did not do it because they are smart. They did it because their bullshit was finally exposed.
Using EV requires extremely efficient and reliable grid. Consider transport we have today. Some percentage of it, still very small, is powered through the electrical grid. All the rest is some form of fossil fuels or biofuel. They wanted ALL of it to go through the grid. But some gov institution in Germany simply calculated that increasing the # of EV by 10% would collapse the existing transmission grid. All this energy suicide is aspirational bullshit, If you do not want NG, oil, coal, and nuclear the alternative is to die, freeze, and vanish in some other way. And that's what the "green" position in Europe was until Putin invaded Ukraine. Now Germany is polluting Europe burning coal at unprecedented rate.

 

The "green" position is virtue signaling and painting a reality based on how you like to be.. Thats how it seems to me. Not enough logic/science based knowledge and lack of pragmatism

Show the public working solutions and set realistic goals etc..

A 2 cm diameter nuclear fuel ("coin size") pellet fuels an aparment for 1 year. Wait now that I think of it.. Try to heat a house with solar panels on private property. Even with heatpumps.. Though call. Can be done but not that easy to achieve off-grid. I think they have no clue how these things work.

Well, actually private home owners are good. They have options and can make it work.. I guess bottom lines is do not go nuts with the "green" mentality and use what actually works.

 

I genuinely believe in clean energy or how I fundamentally see it, not crapping your bed and peeing in your water.

Problem is exactly what you guys are saying - it's done by people with blinders on who seem like they haven't done any due diligence with regards to "the science and math of it all" along with "the bigger realities at hand" and they implement crappy half baked solutions that may even actually set us further back from an actually cleaner and well implemented "green" future. Yeah, probably so they can virtue signal and feel like their otherwise relatively noncontributing existence "has meaning and contributes" or buy votes by letting people play the above. Not that my life is necessarily SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL AND GOODER, I'm just more OK with the fact that most of us don't "really" make that big of a difference in the world.

 

IMO this may help but I think that at the end of the day, if some sleazebag is "that much better than you" at their game, whether it be at "talking" or "reasoning" or "being a brutal dictator" - the last of which we are relatively powerless against without the ability to legitimately fight back, they will win regardless of what any one person may have in place. This whole SBF thing may have just been a hype / fomo train which seems to happen frequently enough in business and finance anyways.

At a simpler level, I also think of the general public's desire for IG, tiktok, or consumption of marketing. Or how people can be fooling into following dictators, bad leaders, and/or inefficiency at their own cost (from socialism to right wing juntas to disorganized chaos like the "CHAZ" that was in seattle) for often times what seems like only the "belief that it will get better". On and on and on.

 

Having just "decent" thinking models.. The limitation of these marketing words is real.

Language is symbolism.. "Green" is a oversimplifying a complex underlying system aka the real world. "Green" does not = good & positive outcome, automatically.

Words renewables and sustainable at least have some logic behind.. Green does not "must" = sustainable.

 

@mediumroast It’s very true that not enough is done to make the grid fit for an EV only world. Much more money must be invested to make that work without problems.

But your scenario isn’t based on realistic thought, either. There will be no point in time where 500k combustion engine cars will suddenly be replaced by 500k electric vehicles. The plan was to forbid to sell new cars (and cars only, not trucks, e.g.) with combustion engines. From 2035 on, it would take at least ten years, if not 20, until the majority of the cars used in that hypothetical city are electric cars, let alone all 500,000. More than enough time to make the grid fit for the task, slowly, one step at a time.

In your calculations, you also charge each car at 10 kW. While this is possible with wall boxes, it’s not required normally at all. I’m charging my EV at 2 kW with a normal wall socket. Sure, it would take an eternity to load the battery from zero to full this way, but that’s not a realistic scenario. Going 20km altogether to work and back every day? That energy is charged within 1.5 hours at 2kW, and you have the entire night at your disposal. Even if I come back from a trip with a nearly empty battery, I can charge more than enough for a daily commute overnight at 2 kW. Only when there’s another long trip planned on the next day, I actually need a 10 kW charger.

But people will have them, you say, and they will all use them at the same time when they come home? They won’t if it’s cheaper to let the provider decide when to charge the car, only configuring when it must be ready.

It’s not that hard at all, actually.

Synthetic fuels have their merits. I do believe that they will play a role, e.g. for transportation, or for people who have to go thousands of kilometres a day, where charging a battery just takes too long. But they are a terrible waste of energy, too. If you just put the electric energy you have into a battery, you can drive much, much farther with it than if you convert it to a liquid or gas first and then use it in a combustion engine. I hope we will once have so much renewable energy that this doesn’t matter. Also, it makes a lot of sense to produce such fuels when there’s too much energy in the grid because the sun is shining like hell and the wind is blowing restlessly all over the country.

Note that I’m not a fan of political discussion in an audio forum, but I couldn’t just let that go uncommented. I’ll try to refrain from further comment on the subject if I can.

 

I see your point and I agree on the " I drive 40 km per day" matter. Actually then you'd need to average out over a span of say week or month the realistic consumption. Btw.. No one is going design the grid exactly on how an average week was supplied but with overhead obviously. I see a lot of travel on highways. People need to move and they cant have their work next door in a lot of cases.

The realistic power consumption is gona be 2x of normal.. In the ball park.

They say for example Scotland has major break through producing most energy with wind. I'd assume Scotland is one of the windiest place on planet too.

I read that Germany increased reliables, decreased nuclear yet increased fossile fuels. Its not that anyone did somethign wrong put its isnt directly progression either. All the base power was still either produced from other powerplants or bought in. If this matter is not solved.. it cant be ignored either. If country A has it all on renewables and it works - thats great news. All I have heard is that Scotland works and Tesla installed a Battery pank for solar panels in Australian desert. This is an open discussion, I dont have fixed mindset regarding these issues.

Regarding renewables.. Maybe over installation is gona work to cover lows. I see problems with decision making where to put renewables solar panels in fields and where to install wind turbines. I dont even know .. They are gona install some massive wind farm in the Baltic sea.. That was the idea. Well see how this plays out.

Regarding "fleets" and replacement. Well.. In 2045 all the last production internal comb. engines are gona be 10 years old. Then you are gona need to replace the Net energy deficieny in the grid. Who is going to drive around in 10 year old cars? Edit. Cars as you might have noticed have 50kW to 500kW engines (high power - trucks and sports cars/luxury cars). I belive even private home owners very rearly exeed 10kw consumption. Mostly stay around 1kw to say 6 kw. Then you are gona need to figure out these extra loads one way or another. Net production needs to cover it.

 

A scenario. If they make decision to ban and factories produced EVs yet it comes out that there isnt enogh power on the continent to be had for these it would mean constant "power crisis." Oh well. Lets hope this does not happen then.


https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

 

It is enough to take a look at this graph, it is 2017 but so called renewable energy moved from 11 to14%. And in this bucket, renewables, biomass and hydro is still almost 70%. But the coal increased, and overall use of fossil fuels increases app 3-4% a year, the same source. Humanity never abandoned any source of energy ever discovered. We still burn wood, coal, we just added NG, oil, hydro and nuclear. The idea that we abandon fossil fuels is just plain silly.

If we are serious about reducing CO2, and we should be serious, currently advancing nuclear is the only realistic option. Of course we can and will discover new sources of clean energy, but not with Greta as a leading energy "expert",

Of course going full wind and solar is plain and simply suicidal on the global scale. In spite of the "success" in Sri Lanka I do not think the people in the developing nations are willing to die, and they know that the countries at the bottom of the energy consumption leader will be sacrificed first.

 

I'd think that something like 20kWh average would be more realistic.. Lets say on the high side. For some reason there a lot of cars on the roads all the time (think highways). Its company cars, medium long distance work and logistics.

I talked to an EV owner with the original Nissan Leaf. Point was .. he was the eco guy, right. He was quite happy and said that the bill was like non-existant with city driving. Sounds good to me.

 

Admitting upfront that I'm not particularly knowledgable about energy production and consumption generally...

But sometimes I wonder about our (the western world, broadly) faith that technological advances will save us. There do seem to be heartening developments in green energy (again, term applied broadly), but what about "old" technology like trains, buses, car pooling, etc? With the exception of NYC, SF, and to a certain extent Chicago, even our largest cities have crappy public transit. Never mind inter-city travel, which is basically useless anywhere but the east coast.

It's really not hard to imagine a high-speed train connecting, say, NYC and Chicago (the third most flown route in the US). Heck, there's a 200mph+ train linking Paris and Zurich (pop. 400,000). Italy, not exactly an economic powerhouse, has high-speed rail. Imagine doing NYC to Chicago in six-hours or less. That would be a game-changer, and the tech has been there for decades. (The political will has not.)

I realize why people, particularly Americans, need to own cars. But I don't see a real strong need for anyone to own, say, a luxury SUV. It's not a work vehicle. Ban them. And work toward banning short-haul flights. Give people real incentives to carpool and use public transit, too.

While I'm in a grumpy-ish mood, I'm also semi-annoyed by the proliferation of e-scooter and e-bike programs in cities. We already have a great technology--the bicycle--that requires no charging and no battery and won't end up in a landfill in less than a year. I know that not everyone can use a bike, but, really, most can, and by far the most people I see using scooters/e-bikes in Chicago, London, NYC, etc. are under forty.

While personal transportation, and even flying, aren't the worst environmental culprits--industry needs to shape up, too--we've had some of the best, most efficient, cleanish tools (the train and the bicycle) for accomplishing it for more than two centuries. We need to remember how to use them and find the political will to get our governments to help us do so.

We tore up the railways, replaced them with highways. We can go back to proven technology just as much as we can move on to new

 

Zottels 1.5 x 2 kWh hourse fits into the model and so does a 40 ton loaded truck (and All the inbetweens). Hard to say what the average would be.. It isnt going to be trivial amount.
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Just confirmed by two sources. The average distance traveled by car in EU is 15k per year which is 40km. With a Nissan Leaf this would be like 7.2kWh per day. There are going to peak load hours.. So smoothing the peak is going to be a thing. Solvable , yes.. Like the Powerwall that Tesla has would kind of fix that.

People are still going to use fast charging which are high power loadings which can't be isolated. No one imagines waiting next to a 10kW charger in a "station" let alone 2kW.

 

Forgot to post above - while I would be fine with EV for every day use, still don't want gas and diesel "dumb cars" going anywhere. I don't see much value in gas / diesel "smart cars" for first reason below.

Since this is the politically incorrect thread, I do have a huge problem with how computerized they make electric cars (gas cars now are too, but not the same type / level) - i.e. just about anything with a computer can more or less be hacked, the NSA/similar .gov entities could request specific backdoors as they already do with Intel/AMD/Windows/etc... that .gov or a hacker could use to screw you (i.e. shut your car down, make you rear end someone, drive you off a bridge, etc). Similarly, I imagine 100% auto-piloted cars powered by say a big 5G network... that also requires biometric ID before you can go anywhere in said car... would be a wet dream for any dictatorship or similar government. Or in a simpler world, I imagine this also makes cars easier to steal once people "figure it out" for any specific car.

Otherwise, I can see many people still needing gas/diesel for work/industry use or if someone goes camping in a more remote area or need to be in an environment where it is otherwise not possible to charge a vehicle. Or let's just say it, if I'm in a bad area, it's already bad enough when I need to be at a gas station for 5 minutes to get gas. I really really don't want to sit somewhere like that and charge my car for 20 minutes (i.e. enough to get to the next place). That and until electric cars can weigh 2800-3500 lb, or just <4000 if I'm being generous, and the batteries don't overheat in 5 minutes of hard use... still want gas for anything I would consider a driver's car, much less say going to a track or whatever.

 

Software in cars & Software in general.

Based on my exposure to the field. I'd argue the same that I do not need it everywhere.
People would still like to have access to GPS navigation and streaming music.

What I wanted to get to.. Software can be great, I really like Open-source software. In many cases the best pieces of software. So in short.. I'd Like to install a my own OS in the car in the future, if the proprietary software is annoying.

It makes sense that you'd want to detatch "steering, breaking, gas" from the regualar networks or have higher crade reliability & security. It a complex ecosystem for sure. I have no idea how they are doing the self-driving or how they are going to do it in the future.

Regarding software security check this out.


LoL. You need 3rd party software to block this stuff.

Yeah.. I am a proponent to open source and Linux. The modern desktop environments are superb and in many cases ahead of the game.

 

What you go on to say does not seem politically incorrect to me

The age of being able to "root" one's car?

 

"Root" in as in hacking the 'droid ? No. I am not really interested in that.

If you mean su / sudo root - as in being the super user then probably yes.

I mean installing you own software like Apple Car Play and Anroid auto. Its just done by the open source growd and regular developers. Why not?

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Comma AI Open Pilot is an interesting project.

https://comma.ai/openpilot

 

Do you think people just junk their cars after 10 years? I drive an 18 year old car and see no reason it won't last another 5-10 years before it needs to be replaced. The average age of cars on the road in the US and EU is about 12 years old. That's an average, so you're talking many that are quite a bit older than that. This number has only been creeping up over recent years as cars get more expensive, which they'll likely continue to do. Factor in likely resistance to transitioning from ICE to EV, and I think you might be surprised at how long it takes ICE cars to be replaced by EVs on the road even once production ends.