This is hilarious: " The only strategies likely to significantly reduce vehicle use are steep charges for road use and parking, a move few politicians or voters in the U.S. would support, and a massive increase in shared-ride automated vehicles, which are not likely to scale up for at least another 10 years."
They have already scaled up! It’s called public transit.
FFS, we’re gonna boil…
Is it also enough if you have several rainy and cloudy days? Electricity generation will be reduced on days when you don’t have full direct sunlight, so you may not get a fully charged battery multiple days in a row, which might cause you to run low at some point.
Either your utility or Tesla is using the batteries as a load management tool for the benefit of the grid-- not necessarily for you. California is looking at programs where you can get payment for this service.
The California plan is ambitious, but the CCS stuff is like magic fairy dust. We’re scaling up from literally nothing. The rollout of the electric generation is actually probably doable. We’re already deploying renewables and storage at a torrid pace.
That’s exactly what it is. I know that the promise is that people will be paid for the power that’s extracted. Cold comfort if you actually need that energy yourself.
Nothing happens in Arizona or the southern half of California without water. Specifically Colorado river water. We are damn near dry. Lake Mead is almost at “deadpool” meaning no flow thru Hoover dam and that is catastrophe. It’s due to a 20 year mega drought.
I continue to be creeped out by this.
Okay, that’s freaky but so is this. A watch powered by slime mold. It’s going to be a race between whether the robots or the bioengineered products kill us off first.
Did you have an EV1? If so, things have changed since then. Most electric car owners I know are very happy with them, and get extra smirky when they talk about never again having to do oil changes or smog checks. I’ve got one buddy with a chevy bolt EV on a 3 year lease, and his cost of ownership is insanely low, though I suspect that was due to every bolt lease letting chevy sell a brodozer to someone else.
Of course, you can drive your 100 KwHr tesla model X into your garage, where you had a permitted charging system installed. You can even power your house with it, though I think it would not be very cost-effective given that doing so would hasten the day the batteries need replacing.
20% of CA new car sales in 2022 Q4 were zero emission, mostly electrics. That’s up from 12% 2021 Q4.
There is a subgenre of news reporting devoted to Tesla spontaneous combustion events.
Do electrics burn more or less often than gasoline cars, on a per-car basis? High density energy storage has risks, no matter what the means.
Meanwhile, it may be many generations before we forget about the Hindenberg.
FFS, it was the rocket fuel they painted the dirigible’s skin with that ignited, not the hydrogen. Sure, the hydrogen burned after the ignition, but the hydrogen did not cause the hindenberg disaster.
Bullshit. They haven’t for nearly 20 years since they broke Enron’s energy embargo cartel. They did have an incident in 2020 during a prolonged heat wave. https://abcnews.go.com/US/california-blackouts-power-grid/story?id=89460998
Also in 2022. Maybe we just hear about them during heat waves, to be avoided.
The system is on the edge:
Without storage the idea that you can generate twice as much electricity as now from renewables is far fetched. True the electric vehicles have some flexibility on when to charge (or maybe give back to the grid) but that’s not enough.
As renewable percentage grows so does the intermittency issue. Zero marginal cost electricity from renewables poses very difficult economic problems for the system.
Sabine is consistently one of the most troubling voices on the climate issue—not because of any bias, but purely because she’s looking at the pure physics of each of these sections of the issue. That’s what she does, after all: she tells the truth about physics, and other physics communicators, from Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space-Time to Neil DeGrasse Tyson have made it clear that honest science is all she’s about.
And, of course, the phone will ring.
Hydrogen? It doesn’t actually reduce emissions, it just shifts them to the Hydrogen production facilities. Trying to do it cleanly won’t happen unless we get our heads out of our asses on nuclear power1, but just spinning up the reactors will take 5 years, and that’s after overcoming NIMBYness. And good luck getting hydrogen-powered vehicles to work in the winter in NoCal.
Carbon capture/sequester? Great in theory, really difficult to do at scale in practice. After all, it takes power to run the filters to pull it out of the atmosphere, or even to do it at the power plant itself, which means it creates some of the emissions it’s trying to curb. And you can’t just put it anywhere! Put it someplace where the rocks move, like anyplace with tectonic activity, and it’ll escape right back into the atmosphere over time.
Offshore wind? We’re seeing evidence that it may be screwing up the ecosystems below it by slowing the winds and simultaneously introducing breakwaters in the form of the towers themselves and their footings, which all combine to interfere with the waves, currents, and thus movement of nutrients through those ecosystems.
And solar, still, requires basically strip-mining and processing rare earth elements… which means emissions there, too. Just like in our current batteries.
Politicians and activists like to paint a can-do picture… physicists and chemists aren’t so upbeat.
1. Yes, nuclear power is dangerous if your facilities aren’t properly maintained and you try to cut corners. But let’s check the safety record of the single largest operator of nuclear power plants in the world, over the last 60 years. Major nuclear or radiological incidents: 0. 1 instance of a coolant leak, detected, decontaminated, repaired, and back in operation the same day. And that’s an org that’s mostly a bunch of 20-something kids, the US Navy. There are definitely issues regarding the disposal of spent fuel, but we’ve got exactly the same issues regarding where we can sequester carbon. It’s ironic, but the environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s may have fucked US efforts to curb climate change. Hurray, Short-Sighted Crusaders!
2019 e-Golf. Cost of ownership was insanely low, acceleration incredible and range about 120 miles if hills involved. An issue for people living in a town 2 hours from everything commercial. California basically refunds the full sales tax and fees (10% of purchase price) if you had a lease of 36 months or longer. The federal tax rebate was something like $7000 if I remember on the 2019 tax return. SCE gave a break on electricity of 30% except between the peak hours of 4-10 pm.
There are different paths to hydrogen production. It’s part of Putin’s problems at the moment. The EU has chosen the Green Hydrogen path. Green Hydrogen is hydrogen produced by electrolysis. Russia and to some extent other petrostates favor Blue Hydrogen, which is produced from natural gas using steam methane reforming. In both cases, longer transport and storage involves making ammonia. Given that hydrogen and human stupidity are the two most abundant elements in the universe, a variety of hydrogen production methods have been proposed (grey, pink, yellow, turquoise, etc.), some which would delight both Joe Manchin and Vladimir Putin. In addition, the hydrogen economy would distinguish purpose, focusing on the most efficient uses for electricity and hydrogen. Space heating or making lukewarm water, could rely on low-enthalpy solutions such as geo with heat exchangers, putting those applications outside the hydrogen economy. Storage is also very simple for such applications as swimming pool heating. Finland, a country with lots of experience in keeping warm, has developed sand batteries. I believe it is still legal in many parts of California to heat swimming pools by burning natural gas, and even marketed as efficient. Certainly generating a carbon footprint of 10 tons of carbon a year is not as environmentally sustainably as a zero-carbon solution. But convenient, of course.
PG&E was driven into bankruptcy for two reasons: the Enron organized power embargos of 2000 and 2001 that forced PG&E to purchase power at insane markup, and then sign under duress 30 year contracts to purchase power at very disadvantageous rates. Although they were able to void some of those contracts, due to the republican “leadership” (governor and AG) they couldn’t void them all. Some $10 billion of power purchase contracts finally come off the books in about 2031. The second is that PG&E more or less achieved regulatory capture, and used that advantage to “invest” in stock buybacks while postponing maintenance on power lines and gas lines and accumulating variations of technical debt. That strategy blew up both figuratively and kaboomitively, resulting in the company being taken into receivership to resolve their liabilities for the people that died and property destroyed.
That does not mean the “system is on the edge”. For instance, the state has been hammered with snow this year (that’s a good thing), yet somehow one does not read about people freezing to death in the eastern parts of the state. Unlike, say, Texas. This recent photo is of a highway that leads to South Lake Tahoe:
Storage is a solvable engineering problem. There are techniques that do not involve lithium batteries. For instance, during the power embargoes of 2000 and 2001 Oregon and British Columbia were pumping water upstream at night so they could run it through the dams’ turbines during the day, when they could sell that power to California. CA is the 4th largest economy in the world, is running a multi-year budget surplus, and has their big power company totally under their thumb due to the bankruptcy. Not to mention their inherent technical talent, quick access to capital, and employee mobility. Doesn’t mean they won’t make a moneypit hash of it (the High Speed Rail project, sigh), but if I were to bet on any state in the union pulling it off, this is the one I’d go with.
Also, please understand that when NYT writes about California, they frequently pander via concern trolling to their east coast readership.
Yeah, but that’s not making a huge dent. The EU just isn’t making enough of it it that way—and it’s not surprising, given how much it costs. Even if they weren’t prohibitively expensive, green hydrogen production is only low-emission in theory. In practice… it’s right around the same level of emissions as hydrogen produced from methane (the gray version, not the blue version that’s supposed to include carbon capture, but again runs into the problem of ‘where do you PUT the carbon?’). Nor is the infrastructure needed for a continent-wide hydrogen distribution and storage system anywhere near being ready.
And Finland, by your own link, has developed one commercially-operating sand battery. Just one. Nor does the company have a home-use version, or seem to have one planned. Besides that, you still need to generate the energy needed to heat the sand. So while it’s an interesting idea for a heat-capacitor, it’s not solving any fuel-dependency issues. Given the existence of the second law of thermodynamics, it really just creates more energy demand: because there is no such thing as a 100% energy efficient process, every step of this, from running the steam turbine to transferring the heat into the sand to circulating the air or water needed for heat extraction to transferring that heat into the end-use application… adds inefficiencies, and losses of energy.
The biggest thing that trying to effectively fight climate change is going to come down to isn’t minimizing inefficiencies or finding cleaner ways to generate power… it’s going to need seriously reducing the amount of power we use in the first place. And that… may require reducing the number of people using it. We’re not past the point of food capacity, but we may be above the population cap for safe electrical generation until we experience another massive leap forward in the physical sciences.
The EU green hydrogen target is for 2040. It will take time, for example, to implement a hydrogen grid. As we’ve seen with wind and solar, costs for generation decline over time. Indeed, by having some renewables already in place, Europe avoided the need to import about 50 billion euros worth of oil and gas during the quite chaotic first 5 months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, severely blunting Putin’s energy weapon. Given this strategic dimension, some countries want to move even faster to a hydrogen economy. Electrolysis does not necessarily involve carbon if the electricity input from a clean source (hydro, wind). Perhaps the tap water input may have some carbon in it, but I don’t live in Indiana.
