More subsidies from exhausted California taxpayers cannot compensate for hard realities
Paul Driessen
The first justification was that internal combustion engines polluted too much. But emissions steadily declined, and today’s cars emit about 3% of what their predecessors did. Then it was oil imports: electric vehicles (EVs) would reduce foreign dependency and balance of trade deficits. Bountiful oil and natural gas supplies from America’s hydraulic fracturing revolution finally eliminated that as an argument.
Now the focus is on climate change. Every EV sale will help prevent assumed and asserted manmade temperature, climate and weather disasters, we’re told – even if their total sales represented less than 1% of all U.S. car and light truck sales in 2016 (Tesla sold 47,184 of the 17,557,955 vehicles sold nationwide last year), and plug-in EVs account for barely 0.15% of 1.4 billion vehicles on the road worldwide.
In recent months, Tesla sales plunged to nearly zero in Hong Kong and Denmark, as huge government subsidies were eliminated. Now Tesla’s U.S. subsidies face extinction. Once its cumulative sales since 2009 reach 200,000 vehicles in the next few months, federal tax rebates will plunge from $7,500 per car to zero over an 18-month period. The same thing will happen to other EV companies that reach 200,000.
Subsidies clearly drive sales for EVs, which are often double the cost of comparable gasoline-powered vehicles. Free charging stations, and access to HOV lanes for plug-ins with only the driver, further sweeten the deal. For those who can afford the entry fee, the ride is smooth indeed. In fact, a 2015 study found, the richest 20% of Americans received 90% of hundreds of millions in taxpayer EV subsidies.
Where were all the government “offices of environmental justice” when this was happening? How much must we subsidize our wealthiest families, to save us from manmade planetary disasters that exist only in Al Gore movies and alarmist computer models?
Perhaps recognizing the reverse Robin Hood injustice – or how unsustainable free EV stations are for cash-strapped cities – Palo Alto (where Tesla Motors is headquartered) announced that it will charge 23 cents per kWh to charge plug-in vehicles in city parking garages. Others communities and states may also reduce their rebates, HOV access and free charging, further reducing incentives to purchase pricey EVs.
Meanwhile, Lyft and Uber are also decreasing the justification for shelling out $35,000 to $115,000 or even $980,000 for an electric car that gets very limited mileage per charge. Long excursions still need internal combustion engines or long layovers every few hundred miles to recharge EV batteries.
Intent on advancing its renewable energy and climate change agenda, the California legislature recently enacted a new cap-and-trade law that will generate revenues for Tesla and the “bullet train to nowhere,” by increasing hidden taxes on motor fuels, electricity and consumer products – with the state’s poor, minority and working class families again being hit hardest. State legislators are also close to passing a $3-billion EV subsidy program, primarily to replace the $7,500 federal rebate that Tesla could soon lose. Electric vehicle buyers could soon receive up to $40,000 for buying Tesla’s most expensive models! Coal-billionaire and California gubernatorial hopeful Tom Steyer vigorously supports the new subsidy.
We can also expect a battle royale over extending the federal EV subsidy beyond 200,000 vehicles – demonstrating once again that lobbyists are now far more important to bottom lines than engineers, especially when lobbyists can channel enormous contributions to politicians’ reelection campaigns.
As U.S. government agencies prepare to reassess climate change science, models and disaster predictions, it’s a good time to reexamine claims made about all the utopian electric vehicle and renewable energy forecasts, expanding on the land and raw material issues I raised in a previous article.
In his Forbes article on Battery Derangement Syndrome, energy and technology analyst Mark P. Mills notes that Tesla is also getting $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies to build a huge $5-billion lithium battery factory in Nevada. Batteries, it’s often claimed, can soon replace fossil fuels for backing up expensive, intermittent, unreliable, unpredictable wind and solar power. Mills explains why this is … deranged.
In an entire year, all the existing lithium battery factories in the world combined manufacture only enough capacity to store 100 billion Watt-hours (Wh) of electricity. But the USA alone uses 100 times this capacity: more than 10,000 billion Wh per day. Worldwide, humanity uses over 50,000 billion Wh daily.
Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day – to power homes and businesses around the globe for the 12 hours per day that photovoltaic systems will generate power on sunny days in the 100% solar world of the utopian future – would require 25,000 billion Watt-hours of battery power (ignoring future electricity needs to recharge electric vehicle batteries).
Replacing the gasoline in the tanks of 1.4 billion vehicles worldwide with electric power would require another 100,000 billion Watt-hours. That brings total global demand to well over 125,000 billion Wh of storage. That means it would take 1,250 years of production from every existing lithium battery factory worldwide to meet this combined demand. Or we would have to build 1,250 times more factories. Or we could build batteries that are 10 to100 times more powerful and efficient than what we have today.
Says Mills, the constraints of real world physics on battery storage mean this latter option will not happen.
In a world where we are also supposed to ban nuclear (and most hydroelectric) power, the very notion of eliminating the 80% of all global energy that comes from oil, natural gas and coal – replacing it with wind, solar and biofuel power – is fundamentally absurd. Can you imagine what would happen when the power goes off and on repeatedly while we are smelting iron, copper, aluminum, cobalt or lithium ores … forging or casting metals into components … or running complex fabrication and assembly lines?
In the sustainability arena, has anyone calculated how much lithium, cobalt and other metals would be required to manufacture all those batteries? Where they would be mined – with nearly all the best U.S. metal prospects off limits to exploration and production, and radical environmentalists increasingly rallying to block mining projects overseas? The mines would have to be enormous, and operated by huge corporate consortiums. Will anti-corporate activists on our campuses suddenly have a change of heart?
Will homes, neighborhoods and communities have the electrical service (200 amperes or more per home) to handle all the lighting, computing, entertainment, air conditioning, medical equipment and other requirements of modern living – AND the power required to charge all the predicted electric vehicles? What will it cost to upgrade neighborhood power grids, and home and commercial electrical systems?
Lithium batteries and their component metals pose unique fire and explosion risks. What safeguards will be established to minimize those dangers, in battery factories, homes and public parking garages?
Some factories and batteries will invariably be poorly built, handled or maintained. Some will invariably malfunction – causing potentially catastrophic explosions. The bigger the factory or battery, the bigger the cataclysm. Will we apply the same precautionary principles to them as more rabid environmentalists insist on applying to drilling, fracking, pipelines, refineries, factories, dams and nuclear power plants?
What is the life expectancy of batteries, compared to engines in gasoline-powered cars? Two or three times shorter? What does it cost to replace battery packs compared to engines? Two to three times as much? What is the true overall cost of owning an EV? Four to six times higher than a gasoline car? How will we dispose of or recycle millions or billions of batteries and their dangerous, toxic components?
Is the real goal of all this crony-corporatist wind, solar and battery enthusiasm – and anti-fossil fuel activism – to slash living standards in industrialized nations, and ensure that impoverished nations are able to improve their health and living conditions only marginally?
We would do well to raise – and answer – these and other essential questions now, before we let activists, journalists, legislators and regulators con us into adopting more of their utopian, “planet-saving” ideas.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
[update, Math error corrected 100,000 billion Watt-hours~ctm]
I think you have a math error. If it takes 100 billion Wh to replace cars in addition to 25,000 billion Wh to sully our other needs, the total is not 125,000 billion Wh. Either it is 25,100 billion Wh, or replacing vehicles is off by 3 orders of magnitude.
The energy storage requirements for a car are around 25KWH, so I would venture his estimate is off by about a factor of 3 as you suggest, otherwise storage would be less than 100WH/car. For comparison, my wife has a hand-held charge pack for her cell phone that has a capacity of 1.3 AH @ 5V, or 6.5 WH. I doubt that two of these packs would run a car for very long.
Seems like what they are after accomplishing is to slash the standard of living for the industrialized nations of the world to align with the 3rd world nations living standards. Once they match…”See, we normalized the living standards of every nation in the world.” Now all third world nations have the same living standards as the industrialized nations.
Energy storage for a decent car are 50-250Kwh.
a litre of diesel is roughly 10kwh, so 50 kwh is 5 litres of diesel. but a diesel engine is about 30% efficient so lets say a 50Kwh equates to 15 litres of diesel. Or around 4 US gallons.
Would you buy a car that only had a 4 gallon fuel tank? Or a 2 gallon one for 25kwh?
A high end Tesla Model S has (evidently) a 70 KWh battery (read that in this morning’s SJ Murky News, front page story about Tesla ripping off California Taxpayers in the form of ludicrous California State subsidies for Tesla Car purchases.
There are other problems. Batteries are commonly rated on the basis of their “20 hour rate”.
That is the rated battery capacity that is advertised is measured at a constant discharge rate over 20 hours (and is discharged at that point). So a 100 Amp hour battery, which is a very common deep discharge 12 V lead acid battery used for electric trolling motors on small boats, is capable of delivering 5 Amps for 20 hours.
Now of course, such a battery can deliver much more than 5 Amps, but the internal losses are an I^2.R consideration, So it won’t deliver 20 Amps for 5 hours, or 100 Amps for one hour.
Car starter batteries are of course designed to deliver perhaps a couple of hundred amps for the few seconds it takes to start an IC engine in good condition at normal Temperatures.
now that is lead acid technology, and Lithium Ion batteries are something else, but similar considerations apply. My camera Lithium batteries are less than two Amp hours, and with the supplied charger, they normally take three hours to charge from fully discharged.
Now there are faster chargers, and I can charge my AA and AAA NiMH cells in about 30 minutes with a very high tech Temperature regulated fast charger.
Elon Musk is putting “fast chargers” at strategic locations.
No driver is going to put up with a three hour charge time putting out 25 KW to charge a 75 KWh Tesla battery. Well it would also have to put out more like 30 KW as the chemistry cycle is not 100% efficient. So I could drop into a Dennys, or a McDonalds for a quick half hour meal, while Musk’s “fast charger” is recharging my fictional Model S every 150 miles (I don’t own one).
If you don’t believe that fast chargers wreak havoc on the number of charge discharge cycles you can get out of a rechargeable battery; I have a high speed train from nowhere to nowhere else, that I would like to sell you a piece of.
I have an average of 6 years each on my three Subarus, and I fully expect them to be running properly after another six years.
So what is the resale value of a six year old Tesla Model S with no taxpayer subsidy available to a potential buyer, and a six year old 75 (?) KWh battery that has enjoyed Elon’s fast chargers for those six years.
The rest of the car, I would expect to be in good shape; but I wouldn’t bet on the battery.
When you start accounting for the total system, I don’t see an all electric transport system as meeting the average person’s needs.
G
I suspect the 100 billion is 100,000 billion. Otherwise, each of the 1.4 billion vehicles would require only about 70 Watt-hours (enough to keep a light bulb on for an hour).
Also factor in the limits on battery charge/discharge cycles for the amount of batteries needed. In order to have the Li-ion batteries get a long life, the charge is maxed at 80% and the discharge is limited to 20% of full capacity. Which means only 60% of a given battery is useful. Nearly doubling the amount of batteries required.
How many locations and what volume of space would be needed to power the average neighborhood, What about big cites? Put the battery farms in the suburbs where a battery failure wouldn’t cause disruption in the city?
Seemingly doable if you only get a few LED lightbulbs, no A/C and bundle up in the winter.
Sounds like a dismal lifestyle.
Budgeting for 12 hours per day for PV solar is sheer lunacy, even ignoring cloud cover.
I’m talking CAVU days in say mid latitudes like USA. 8 hours per such day would be generous.
Circular motions have a way of generating sinusoidal projections. Izzat a 2/pi average ?
And that is for houses fortunate enough to have south (or north) facing roofs (or rooves).
My Teslaized neighbor has a pretty good south facing home. I’ve seen houses around here with solar panels on north facing roofs.. And those are places without tree shadows. Tree shadows play havoc with solar panels, as selective shading leads to current hogging by shadowed cells..
Silicon solar cells have a 60 mV per decade of current change (or irradiance). So shadowed cells can short out unshadowed cells, which is worse than just not generating themselves.
G
G
“Tree shadows play havoc with solar panels, as selective shading leads to current hogging by shadowed cells..” doesnt really have to be the case , depends if you use a single inverter or micro inverters at each panel and AC out.
If you don’t mind increasing the cost even more.
Market distortions are about greed, status and votes (power).
60 Kwh good for 95 percent of daily driving needs in USA but less for Europe and Asia . 60 Kwh X 1.4 billion is 84 billion Kwh.
“Is the real goal of all this crony-corporatist wind, solar and battery enthusiasm – and anti-fossil fuel activism – to slash living standards in industrialized nations, and ensure that impoverished nations are able to improve their health and living conditions only marginally?”
That may be the goal. Possibly the goal is for a few already wealthy individuals/companies to amass even more wealth. Or maybe it is to reduce the human population. Most likely it is a combination of all 3, depending on which supporter you are talking about.
Of course, there is a 4 option. That the supporters are all just bat-sh*t crazy.
DDP – I vote door number 4!!
“It is not necessary to ascribe to malice that which can be achieved by stupidity”
Apologies for quoting from memory.
Agreed. Most liberals I know are well-intentioned, they are just misguided, blinded by noble cause corruption, and haven’t thought the issue through in an unbiased, thoughtful way. They just think it must be incrementally doing “good”, and don’t think much about the cost or the unintended consequences.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to quite a few greens who feel that the Earth’s population has to be reduced to under one billion. Preferably under 100 million.
This article correctly states:
“In a world where we are also supposed to ban nuclear (and most hydroelectric) power, the very notion of eliminating the 80% of all global energy that comes from oil, natural gas and coal – replacing it with wind, solar and biofuel power – is fundamentally absurd.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/26/britain-faces-energy-crisis-engineers-warn-green-isnt-working/comment-page-1/#comment-2130660
[excerpt]
The following numbers are from the 2015 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, for the year 2014:
http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/energy-economics/statistical-review-2015/bp-statistical-review-of-world-energy-2015-primary-energy-section.pdf
Global Primary Energy Consumption by Fuel is
86% Fossil Fuel (Oil, Coal and Natural Gas),
4% Nuclear,
7% Hydro,
and 2% Renewables.
That 2% for Renewables is vastly exaggerated, and would be less than 1% if intermittent wind and solar power were not forced into the grid ahead of cheaper and more reliable conventional power.
This is not news – we have known this energy reality for decades. As we published in 2002.
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
We also write in the same article, prior to recognition that the current ~20 year “Pause” was already underway:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
Regards to all, Allan
So basically you hate your children so much you wish to leave them a lesser world because you are not willing to accept a small inconvenience to save the atmosphere.
So basically you hate your children so much you would rather have them living in a world with full government control, less vegetation, and larger deserts because you are unwilling to accept the small inconvenience equal to the effect of a three degree change in latitude (about 210 miles) on temperature.
JImGord wrote: “So basically you hate your children so much you wish to leave them a lesser world because you are not willing to accept a small inconvenience to save the atmosphere.”
Question: How does one answer a comment like JimGord’s that is so completely imbecilic?
Jim. Do the planet a favour. Don’t breed so that someone with a brain can have an extra couple of kids.
Jim
First you have to prove something is going wrong with the atmosphere before we need to do anything. The atmosphere is in way better condition today than it was when I was a boy.
As usual the article and you mislead by ignoring the total well to wheel energy requirements. An electric vehicle that gets its electricity from fossil fueled electric generation is still more efficient than burning it in a gas vehicle. In states where electricity comes from nuclear or hydro it is even more efficient. All adding up to less environmental damage.
What environmental damage?
So let’s all go nuclear and hydro – or would you protest that if it were announced?
JimGord – you set up a false strawman argument and then shot it down – a dishonest troll tactic.
The subject comments were about grid-connected wind, solar power and most biofuels, which are grossly inefficient and ineffective. We knew this fact decades ago, yet trillions of dollars of scarce global resources have been squandered on these green energy scams, and entire electrical grids have been destabilized due to the intermittency of solar and wind power.
These foolish green energy policies have increased energy costs – this harmed the economy, drove away jobs, caused energy poverty and increased Excess Winter Mortality that especially targeted the elderly and the poor. State-wide electrical grids have failed due to wind power nonsense, at enormous cost.
These green energy policies were not only exceedingly costly, they were utterly imbecilic. It is difficult to imagine just how stupid and corrupt politicians have to be to make such obvious errors, and to continue doing so for decades. The campaign contributions by green energy companies helped to perpetuate this fraud, which involved huge subsidies to the green energy producers and the usual kickbacks to the politicians.
Most green energy technologies are not green and produce little useful energy. Repeating, we knew these facts years ago. Trillions of dollars of scarce global resources have been squandered and millions of lives have been wasted due to green energy nonsense. That is the subject of this conversation.
That’s not true if you factor in transmission and conversion losses of electricity.
Is there anything you know that is actually correct?
They also consume less electricity.
Like all the best socialist schemes, it looks better if you do not consider the cost or other implications.
Many people who advocate electric cars assume that the pollution just “goes away” not that it is, in reality, just moved.
Even if you convert entirely to renewable sources, the other issue is that you cannot just plug everyone’s cars into the electricity supply and expect it to work. We need to generate another 30% to 50% more electricity first. That never seems to be factored in.
To get a handle on possible costs, try finding out how many batteries would be required to store enough energy (not just electricity) for the USA for, say, a week. Then calculate the required production rate of batteries just to keep those batteries working. That is, you need to replace each one when its life is up. How many Tesla Giga Factories would be required to do that? Then ask how long will the factories last so you know how many you need to build every week.
And even if you did manage to generate 50% more electricity, how are you going to recharge all these electric cars? What are the limitations and practicalities of recharging?
What is the recharge time? When on the road, how long will cars have to queue in order to have access to recharge points? How will this extend journey times?
If recharging at home, is there actually sufficient capacity in the power lines in the street, and in the home itself to run not only all electrics for the house but also for recharging.
How are 2 car, 3 car, 4 car families accommodated?
What about people who live in flats and/or those whose houses have no garage/no drive and the car is parked on the street? Will people be running cables out to cars parked on the street?
There needs a lot of infrastructure upgrades before any of this is possible en masse.
…and what is the first thing to go out when there’s a national emergency
“They” don’t want “you” to have a car. Public transportation, see. Make conveniences too expensive and difficult and the masses will have to conform.
Reminder POS Obama said he wanted electricity rates to skyrocket, to kill coal, change behavior, and control the masses.
““They” don’t want “you” to have a car. ”
Come now, it’s purely a coincidence that the Communist Manifesto called for ‘centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.’
Nothing to see here, no sir.
Electric vehicles are mostly charged at night with 95 percent of next day driving met with overnight charge. no higher peak load requirements. Daytime solar and other renewanles and new distribution grid will handle the rest. Catch up
Not all car use is driving to work. I just drove 180 miles from MA to ME. There were hundreds, rather thousands, of cars making more or less the same trip. I wound up at a small cottage on a lake. We have basic utilities. I then went out to dinner in town How and when will I charge my car? Whence comes the energy?
“Not all car use is driving to work. I just drove 180 miles from MA to ME.”
Many families have 2 cars (57%). Have one that is electric for commuting, a second that is gas/diesel powered for commuting (for the other person) plus longer trips.
“catch up” with what? the world of wishful thinking?
“Electric vehicles are mostly charged at night with 95 percent of next day driving met with overnight charge”
In the UK (where I live), 43% of households (8.3 million vehicles) don’t have access to offstreet parking. So they have no safe electric charging ability overnight absent the buildout of a brand new charger network.
Also most homes are fitted with relatively low amp main fuses (80 amps) which any decent charger (say 11 kWh) would overwhelm.
In a recent electric car pilot having just 5 owners charging EV’s overnight on 3.5kwh chargers in an area of 134 houses caused voltage issues throughout the network. 3.5kwh chargers take about 15 hours to charge a Tesla.
“Daytime solar and other renewanles and new distribution grid will handle the rest”
Seems unlikely when EVs at the scale you imply would mean significantly higher electricity generation requirements using intermittent unreliable power sources that are currently about 2.4% of total primary energy (in my country at least)
JimGord is one of those people that believe wishful thinking is the same thing as being able to do something.
He has zero facts, probably cannot do 6 grade arithmetic in his head, and has never taken a science class in his life.
But since he reads the NYT, he thinks he is a very smart and modern dude.
In reality he is a technological retardate.
“We need to generate another 30% to 50% more electricity first.”
I did the calculation for Germany based on gasoline consumption. It’s 27% for all cars or 13% for passenger cars only.
Short summary of my calculations:
Total consumption of gasoline in Germany was 34.8 million ton in 2013. Diesel fuel 18.4 ton. Average ICE car consumes ca. 230 MJ/100km or 64kWh/100km. Average electro car consumes 17.4 kWh/100km. All numbers are from spritmonitor.de – real world consumption.
That means conventional cars consume 607 TWh total. To replace all ICE with electro, we would need 165 TWh. Total production or electricity was 610 TWh in 2013, so we will need additional 27%.
People drive a lot less in Germany.
Electric vehicles on average are far smaller than the average ICE vehicles.
The US has vast numbers of SUVs and pickup trucks and other similarly large vehicles.
Europe in general has few of these.
The vast majority of the land area of the US has no public transportation. Only a handful of large cities have subways and commuter train service.
Here in the US our networks of old train tracks are being converted to bike paths.
In any case, the US has vastly decreased CO2 emissions, and power costs are way down in most places due to fracking and nat gas.
Germany has skyrocketing power costs and has not cut emissions.
How much has the amount of renewable power you have now cost?
How easy will it be to make 27% more power and have all of it be renewable?
We have discussed the problems with getting as far as has been gotten over there…burning brown coal, buying power from other countries, selling power at a loos at other times.
The US power grid is a gigantic and incredibly expensive infrastructure that has been built up over many many decades…the idea we will snap our fingers and have a vastly larger grid capability is ludicrous.
In big cities like NYC and Philly it would require digging up literally the entire city to expand conduits.
Gigantic power line easements would be needed to get power from where it is made to where it is used.
And none of this addresses to main point of the headline article…storing electrons over one single night is a ludicrous proposition on the scale of total power consumption. And we would have to have several days worth to prevent frequent massive blackouts.
Even rare local blackouts have caused enormous riots within minutes.
All of this was obvious to people like me and Allan MacRae years ago, and if he is like me, it took about ten seconds to know intuitively that it would not work…a little longer to do the maths so we could try to explain it to wide eyed lackwits.
But they never listen.
Several comments right here make it obvious that the headline article was either ignored or all the way over many heads.
Thinking it is not the same as being able to do it.
Then some wise-ass like Jim Gord comes along and pretends that the green climate mafia has not prevented any investments in actual solutions to the imaginary CO2 problem…like nuclear power or building out hydro wherever possible.
Anyone want to place bets on the same people who protest pipelines letting power easements be put in, in a massive build out of the grid?
And why do these people pretend that warmth is antithetical to life, and that CO2 is a pollutant, to begin with?
It really steams my oysters when people who know close to zero about infrastructure or logistics or science pretend they know shit from shinola.
I would add that with electricity and the advancement of tech that more populated cities are going 24/7/365 too. Where long ago the single 8 hour day has gone to multiple shifts with globally trading companies. There will not be the kind of storage of energy time that’s been talked about.
OK, here is the same calculation for US: 2016 gasoline consumption 143 billion gallons. To replace gasoline only we would need 1.230TWh of electricity, that accounts to 30% of current US production. U.S. On-Highway diesel fuel consumption is roughly 37 bln. gallons, that is equivalent to 370TWh or 9% of US production.
So, 40% is good estimate, I assume.
You are missing the point. Americans are not going to trade in their pickup trucks and SUV’s for little electric cars.
Our lifestyle here is different…people need the vehicles that they have.
And electric vehicles will never have the kind of range that many people need in their daily lives.
So we never even get to how ludicrous it is to suggest a 40% increase in power using renewables alone.
You are not getting the point, it’s not SUV -> small, I’m using fuel consumption, it’s direct one to one equivalence. By the way, 1600TWh is ten-fold of the German requirements (US population is only 4 times bigger), that means bigger cars and larger distances are already accounted for. And I’m not suggesting doing it.
http://free-energy.ws/nikola-tesla/
Anyone remember the Sinclair C5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
Looks like the Obama car to me, did he steal the concept?
While he flies around willy Nelly in private planes undermining the current president and vacations on huge private yachts in exotic places with his California buddies
Friend of mine has an electric motorcycle. He loves it, but it was expensive. Don’t remember the exact amount but over ten grand as I recall.
Likely a Zero motorcycle. Decent performance, but $16K is too steep for me.
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/promo/time-to-ride/?PCA=GAD-R-NA-US-D-Keywords&PKW=electric%20motorbike&gclid=CJyLj7_A9csCFQiqaQod-5AEPw
Nothing new here. The government policy of trying to pick winners and losers has always fails, and always at great expense.
I disagree. The purpose of a government subsidy is to reward cronies.
How is it then that the $5.4 trillion in annual oil and gas subsidies is not picking winners and lovers?
Solar and wind get the same subsidies as oil and gas, and far larger ones on top of that.
Part of the trick is by redifining subsidies. What most people think of as subsidies – money paid out by the government- is now a sub-category of disbursements, while tax breaks are now also considered subsidies. If two companies get the same tax treatment, but one sells ten times as much product, it has ten times the ‘subsidy’, even though it had no advantage from the government. The study that claims $5.4 trillion world-wide for coal, oil, and gas goes even further by pulling numbers out of thin air based on “undercharging for global warming” and other fictional claims, and counting them as subsidies as well.
In reality, the US government gave $137 million to fossil fuels in the form of direct disbursements in 2013. For the same year, renewables got $8,363 million in disbursements.
For tax credits, fossils got $4,138M, renewables got $5,453; but those are based on sales, and fossil produced far more energy than solar and wind. On a total dollar basis, wind has received the greatest amount of federal subsidies. Solar is second. Wind and solar together get more than all other energy sources combined. However, based on production (subsidies per kWh of electricity produced), solar energy has gotten over ten times the subsidies of all other forms of energy sources combined, including wind. Between 2010 and 2016, subsidies for solar were between 10¢ and 88¢ per kWh and subsidies for wind were between 1.3¢ and 5.7¢ per kWh. Subsidies for coal, natural gas and nuclear are all between 0.05¢ and 0.2¢ per kWh over all years.
So yes, the subsidies for energy are definitely picking winners and losers – solar and wind being the big winners.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
Jim you are mistaken again. There is no subsidies for oil and gas. Oil and gas companies pay hundreds of billions in taxes world wide to the various governments every year. They get a tax break from the reduction of the value of their property as the oil or gas is removed. Subisties on the other hand are tax revenue handed out by the government to companies that are not profitable. Giving someone tax break to keep some of the money they earned is not a subsidy.
“Subsidies” in this case are tax credits, direct payments from Uncle Sam to the consumer…When I drive my IC car for a year I don’t get a check for a portion of the gas that I bought..
Those aren’t subsidies. The are depreciation allowances, the same as every other business in the country gets.
People like JimGord think that every dollar that is not stolen by government taxation is a subsidy.
I worry that “Tesla battery, subsidy and sustainability fantasies” is itself an over the top fantasy and easily shown to be in error. I hope not. Disclaimer: I’d love to have an electric 2 door hatchback to zip around town in.
On another note, yesterday I bought a pack of four LED light bulbs at Walmart for less than $1.50 a bulb. The manufacturing cost must be more than that. There wasn’t any other kind of light bulb on the shelf.
The United States is coming up on twenty $Trillion in debt. Where will it all end?
That’s hundreds of millions for just EV subsidies. How much in subsidies for all of it? Electric vehicles AND the light bulbs, wind mills, ethanol, solar power, etc?
Why do you believe that the manufacturing costs of LED bulbs “must” be more than $1.50 per bulb?
I was at Wal-Mart this weekend, and all types of bulbs were on the shelf. Incandescent, fluorescent, LED and some specialty bulbs that I couldn’t identify.
LED bulbs are getting cheaper because they are getting cheaper to make as manufacturers gain experience and as volumes ramp up.
Depends upon what you think of mercury in your light bulbs.
No mercury in an incandescent bulb. Environmentally innocuous. A little sand, some Bauxite, and a little tungsten. Oh and I almost forgot the bulb is filled with Argon( The third most common gas in the atmosphere).
No mercury in an LED bulb…that element is only in fluorescents.
MarkW is exactly right…LEDs have become cheaper for the same reason that flat screen TVs are cheaper every year.
LEDs and other energy saving technologies make sense…they save people money, and lower energy usage.
The opposite of most of what we discuss here every day.
The human instinct to survive and reproduce, which is a fundamental basis of all life, will either cause society to finally face the realities as described above, or, when the life blood of organized civilization that is cheap affordable energy is no longer available, 7-8 billion people will burn every branch and twig and eat every living animal while society descends into chaos and perpetual conflict just to survive. This is the only possible end that can come from cutting the foundations out from under our complex and highly successful society. I am fairly certain it won’t happen because the signs of that ultimate end will be visible to most from a great distance, but a whole lot of harm may yet be done while the majority of politicians and policy makers still cling to the eco-religion that is preached by the humophobic greens. Just watching the chaos and despair that is Venezuela, North Korea or Syria is enough to show what happens when government fail to meet the needs of their people.
Spot on.
It’s what has happened plenty times before in ‘our’ history but ‘only’ as local extinctions. The Himyar knew as much about the Maya as they knew about the Phoenicians or Ancient Greeks knew of the Rapa-Nui.
And doncha just love how modern archaeologists *always* blame Climate Change for the demises of those people. Fact is they simply grew too numerous, stopped moving around and trashed the dirt the were trying to live off.
Water and plants (being mostly made of water anyway) control the climate. Push the dirt so hard it stops growing anything and of course the climate changes.
Cause & effect get mangled yet again.
This time, next time, the crash will be global. Thank you, technology.
It is already underway – has been for 10,000 years since farming was invented.
We are not meant to eat carbohydrate. period.
It destroys not only our bodies (fatness and diabetes) it rots our brains and nervous systems. (What is the first usually unrecognised symptom of diabetes – Peripheral Neuritis, =excess glucose killing the nerves in your fingers & toes, identical to the nervous tissue that forms our very brains. Except brains don’t feel pain.
And growing the stuff, what is/are regarded as ‘staples’ is destroying the dirt.
How will it unravel, lack of energy or lack of dirt? Same thing really.
We are using ‘energy’ to strip the dirt of all nutrition, when the energy dries up, so does the food.
Even/especially the tasteless and nutrient free mush that passes as ‘staple’ for now.
How do you use the output from a solar panel or lithium battery to grow wheat, corn, rice or potatoes?
I assume you know very little about farming. Fertilizers and crop rotation along with Soil respiration to Hydrophonic Greenhouse farming. As a diabetic it is an imbalance that caused it and many never get it that carbohydrates are essential to fauna. That ancient people knew as little as you seem to and did destroy their land by over population and over use of planting what little land that was farmed is not what’s done today. Science is a great thing when shared between people.
I live in British Columbia, Canada and I remember when Mt. St. Helen’s blew. There were dire predictions that the vegetation in the fertile Yakima Valley would be destroyed and there would years of of poor crops in the future. I told my friends “Nonsense, the volcanic ash is full of nutrients”. Sure enough the next year they had their best harvests in living memory.
Sometimes it was over use of a resource, sometimes it was just cyclical changes in the climate.
It wasn’t always man’s fault.
Where did you get this absurd notion that carbohydrates are poison?
Every now and then some comment thread causes many commenters to reveal that they are really just “against stuff”.
They do not understand nuance.
The idea that soils are being robbed by growing “staples” is ludicrous.
have you seen a chart of agricultural production over time?
It is far higher than ever in the 1990s, and growing fast.
The truth is, we use energy to replenish the soil on farm fields.
We mine nutrients and transport them to where they are needed, and others are manufactured using energy intensive industrial processes.
Every atom that was on the Earth 10,000 years ago is still on the Earth.
Destroying the dirt?
Damn that is a dumb thing to say…and I wish I did not have to point that out.
So burning fossil fuels to the point that all the world’s coastal cities are flooded resulting in untold trillions in losses of money and millions of jobs and the migration of millions to higher ground and loss of 50 percent of food production resulting in the survivors still burning every branch and twig left to survive is a good thing? Wow!
You live in a delusional fantasy world. That’s as polite as I can say it.
Jim,
Please try to get two brain cells to rub together: All your numbers cames out of somebody’s donkey.
Sea level rise has been constant since the bottom of the little ice age 400 years ago. There has been NO acceleration in recent decades.
Jim Gord, thank you for providing a caricature of the warmista delusions that have infected the minds of the uneducated.
Yours is truly a fact-free world.
I read somewhere that Bill Gates, who has invested billion$ into researching the holy grail of EVS – battery technology, said that the obstacles to overcoming existing problems are on the order of a magnitude. Does anyone know if that is true, or where he said that?
Meanwhile, Bill Nye, “the not a science guy but he plays one on TV”, says solving the battery technology problems will be easy.
Dont know whether or where he said it, but it is true. I have been involved in energy storage since the early 1990s. Have two fundamental patents on a superios suoercap carbon. LiIon works for portable electronics. For EVs it has about half the requisite energy density, half the power density (evidenced by charging rate) and less than half the useful life (further shortened by rapid charging). Multiplied together, an order of magnitude shortfall. Moreover, there is no technical solution on the horizon except maybe Fiskars Nanotech LiC. See my guest post on that at Climate Etc.
Rud, do you have any thoughts on John Goodenough’s claims?
https://news.utexas.edu/2017/02/28/goodenough-introduces-new-battery-technology
I have met John at U.T Austin where I was invited to give a talk on my technology. Wont be able to comment on this until patent applications issue. Usually solid electrolytes have poor power density so slow charging. So there must be something to this.
You need to catch up. Li-ion advanced chemistry and battery thermal management for vehicles is far different from your electronics toys. Good for life of car. Tesla batteries showing as low as 1 percent degradation per year.
Last time I checked, the only difference between the LiIon batteries used in “toys” and the LiIon batteries used in cars is size. Same technology makes both.
1% per year sounds like the degradation rate for an unused battery.
Most people with electric cars keep them topped off and never come close to draining the battery.
People who own Teslas are rich people who I would hazard a guess have other cars for wen they need to go on long trips. Does anyone know a single person who owns a Tesla and that is their only car?
Prius’s and other hybids likewise keep the batteries always topped up, which is known to prevent degradation.
Batteries that are discharged most of the way between charging do not last…those kept topped up last a long time.
Anyone who has read up on why these batteries degrade knows exactly why this is.
As for making batteries an order of magnitude “better”, good luck!
There has been less improvement than that since the first batteries were invented and marketed over a hundred years ago.
The big improvements have all been due to new materials.
There is no ten fold increase in storage capacity or lifetime coming for LiIon or any other battery tech.
JimGord, when is Tesla due to market an electric pickup truck?
I came I saw I left
Don,t worry !
” solving the battery technology problems will be easy ”
Jeremie Clarkson on his famous TV program had a electric car to try, I remember one of the modifications they installed in the car ,taking out all the passenger space, was a 1 mile electric extension cable ( which was to short. but there was no room for the required length )
If you mean we need an order of magnitude increase in battery energy density to have a viable electric car, and an order of magnitude cheaper, I’d say Gates was spot on the money.
I was flying electric model planes when LI-Ion first came on and it was really exciting. Instead of just about staggering a heavy plane into the air for a 5 minute flight we had vertical climb outs or we had one hour flights (not both) But I put pen to paper and concluded we needed yet another order of magnitude to fly a jet plane equipped with electric motors across the Atlantic.
And we were using state of the art packs devoid of safety circuits that caught fire and exploded routinely. I believe we were used to beta test technologies 🙂 Packs got higher and higher discharge rates until flattening a pack in two minutes was considered par. World speed record went up to over 400mph. We pushed recharge rates down to 20 minutes or less. The packs got hot and didn’t last, but it was doable.
And then we multiplied what our packs sold at by the number required for say a 400 mile range car, and looked at how heavy it would be, and got very disappointed, but Tesla did it that way. He took sh1tloads of model plane cells and build a 50Kwh battery with it and it cost every bit of the $25,000 I calculated it would,
And it still weighs a good fraction of a ton. And you would be lucky to get 200 miles out of it. It is however insanely powerful for a few minutes.
+++++
Gates is backing a new piston ICE that will be in production within a year or two.
for the fool, everything is easy until it isn’t.
It is the wiser man’s burden to dampen the enthusiasm of the ignorant.
EV is the future, no matter what the oil companies, the traditional car manufacturers and their puppet media say.
As lawn ornaments!
Maybe so, but I keep waiting to have a conversation with someone who believes this how that will happen.
It will happen, but to compete with fossil fuel cars an entirely new type of storage battery must be discovered first. The car must have a battery of simple design and built with materials that are plentiful and cheap, the battery must be lightweight and store at least 5 times the juice of present batteries, and must recharge fully in five minutes.
A tall order, perhaps a century away, but it will happen.
That battery is likely hydrogen.
Neither close, the new battery is already here – a metal casing filled with gasoline.
SteveT
Klem, you can’t just wish away the laws of physics.
If EVs actually do pan out (become economical and practical), “traditional car manufacturers” will be on it in a flash. Musk and his cries won’t know what hit them.
Remember Henry Ford and Thomas Edison thought EVs were the future. Put away your tin foil hat; it wasn’t conspiracy that doomed that project 100 years ago.
cries = cronies
But they are ALREADY on it.
Volvo, for example.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/volvo-car-electric-hybrid-vehicle-petrol-diesel-combustion-engine-a7824316.html
There isn’t a manufacturer not moving into EVs – not least because 1/12 of sales in china are being required to be EVs.
In little Griff’s world, if a politician requires something, then it is by definition economical and a good deal for everyone.
Griff,
that’s only true in another time/dimension. You need to keep your realities straight.
True, but only because telepresense is going to make long-distance travel obsolete.
Doesn’t matter if your electric car can only drive 20 miles if you never need to drive more than 20 miles.
a9udn9u
EV’s are the past. The first cars were electric back in the early 1900’s. Funnily enough they were really close to today’s EV cars in range and cost compared to the ICE vehicles of the day. I looked at one EV that sold in 1917 it had a speed of 50 mph and a range of 100 miles and sold for $8000. At the same time you could by a model T Ford for $450. Nothing has changed in over 100 years just minor improvements no quantum leap in technology.
I’ve lost track of the number of things that were declared to be the future, but never panned out.
The vast majority of things that have “changed the world” did so unnoticed by the leading thinkers of the day.
Nobody foresaw how things like, the car, the personal computer, or the internet, would change the world.
“EV is the future, no matter what the oil companies, the traditional car manufacturers and their puppet media say.”
Idiots do not know what the hell they are talking about, no matter how many times people like a9udn9u and JimGord repeated the witless warmista talking points.
Also I have read that EV owners charge their cars during off peak times at a cheaper rate. But what if everybody owns an EV car ? Then there will be no more off-peak times. There will be no more reduced rate.
There ae no peak and off peak rates for residential customers, not anywhere I have ever lived anyway.
There is, however, a higher rate for the second 500 kWh and even higher rate yet for the second 1000 kWh of monthly usage in a lot of places…maybe every place.
In other words, the power companies charge people who use more power a higher rate.
I pay about 8 cents for each of the first 500 kWh, 9 cents for each of the second 500 kWh, and about 10 cents for any kWh over 1000, based on monthly usage.
BTW, I live in SW Florida, which is thankfully still mostly devoid of the insanity sweeping much of the country and the world.
“Can you imagine what would happen when the power goes off and on repeatedly while we are smelting iron, copper, aluminum, cobalt or lithium ores … forging or casting metals into components … or running complex fabrication and assembly lines?”
I think that probably the bulk of people who have a pie-in-the-sky worldview of renewables have no real understanding of the world of which you speak – ie, the industrial world that runs 24/7 requiring tremendous quantities of stable, reliable, unending electric power. The world that allows them the privileged lives that they live.
In my opinion many of these environmentalists would be happy to live in tents while all the jobs and wealth moved to China.
Not a chance, money grubbing freeloaders.
Getting Indians to live a traditional life style is a hard sell even where the necessary skills still exist in the community. link Getting greenies to live on the land in tents would be a disaster even if they were stupid enough to try it.
LOL, but they did try it. And they left a bit of an environmental disaster in North Dakoda as they protested a pipeline, so you are quite correct.
“these environmentalists would be happy to live in tents”
Right up until Winter hits, or they run out of pot.
Terry Pratchett, in “Good Omens” refers to a hippie group that tried to live a ‘natural’ life in the countryside. They finally found out why the ongoing human drive for the last few millenia has been to get as far away from the ‘natural countryside’ as possible!
You don’t have to imagine it. It happened in South Australia.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alcoa-corp-australia-smelter-agl-ener-idUSKBN15337I
So a 6-hour interruption in power results in a 6-month interruption in production, along with a huge cost to repair the damage and get back online.
Perhaps the dysfunctional view of reality held by progressives is a result of the liberal arts classes they took where they learned to chant, “Support Science!”
I’m not gainsaying the Government’s responsibility. But I’ve been wondering something for a while. Aluminum smelters use huge amounts of electricity. On the scale of a whole town’s worth. Why don’t they build their own generation plants? Do the various countries have laws against doing so? I remember reading once that the car companies in Oshawa once did a cost benefit analyze of the concept when Ontario Hydro was planning on increasing their rates years ago. It would have paid for itself. They only backed off the plan when the province promised to give them a special rate.
I have to imagine the government in the present days makes it so difficult to build a power plant that no private company would find it worthwhile for their own use.
Peter – In some (many?) cases industry does provide their own power. The Kitimat, BC Aluminum smelter was built where it is specifically due to the private construction of the Kemano hydro power station, built to supply the smelter and the community. Bauxite was/is shipped up a long fiord from all over the world and aluminum was/is shipped out. Eventually, however, the government (BC Hydro) took over the power plant. In both BC and Alberta there are industrial plants that produce not only their own power but sell excess to the grid. (Wood processing plants that burn wood waste for power; petrochemical plants that provide their own NGT power plants and sell the excess among a few.)
Peter,
Most, if not all, profitable smelters do generate their own electricity. The EIA website and give you information on “utility” and “industrial” (mostly smelters and other extreamly high users) generation.
When I worked for a photography giant, they produced their own electricity (from coal) and those power plants also produced steam that heated all the buildings in a 4 mile long plant and even at one time powered the locomotives that ran the 10 mile long internal rail system (so as to not generated sparks in a chemical plant). Central utility buildings also provided various types of water to each building (drinking, chilled, distilled etc) as well as compressed air. All that just to make film and chemicals.
Sounds like Eastman Chemical, which spun off Kodak.
Peter
Aluminium smelters move around the world to where electricity is currently cheap and plentiful…
For example Iceland (geothermal and hydro), near new hydro dams, etc.
In many cases they’ve been attracted by incentives from govt or power plant constructors.
Griff,
I don’t think that is Govenrments that tempt Aluminum smelters to relocate to other countries but is instead the ammount of Governmrent regulations (i.e. Lack of government interference) and energy prices that attrace energy intensive industries to relocate. Unless you are in a Communist state, Federal government as an entiity, has very little influence on energy pricing. except where they can increase it through Crap and Tyrade policies (aka Carbon Taxation)
Yep! The aluminium (English spelling) smelters in Richards Bay, South Africa, ended up having to close most of their lines because of the destruction caused by South Africa’s ESKOM’s ‘load shedding’ (i.e. power cuts). AND it turned out that most of these cuts were faked, because ESKOM wanted panic in order to increase the (controlled) rates!
Our most basic and most profound problem: This is planet Earth. The decisions that are being discussed are decisions that are of a nature that we will not have options. The planet has already decided for us…..And no one is going to enjoy the decisions that have been made.
A relatively small subset of today’s population may be able to grow corn, oats and soybeans and then feed them to a horse — or maybe a jackass — then use the animal for riding or pulling carts but we should keep in mind that the amount of productive land that is needed to provide for a horse is several times greater than what is needed to provide for a human.
But then I don’t expect to still be living when the “day of reckoning” arrives. I won’t be easy and it won’t be fun for anyone. Do you really believe that slavery is a thing of the past?
what decisions are you referring to?
Thomas, the one and only reason that our technological society will crash and people will return to a preindustrial lifestyle is if the insane warmistas succeed in destroying actual science education and in dismantling our energy infrastructure.
Regarding that “This is plane Earth” thing…did that come to you in a flash, or did you work it out over a period of time?
The pie-in-the-sky world view crowd certainly understand darn well enough when their power goes out on a hot day or freezing cold night.
And they scream the loudest of anyone.
The main reason their fantasies are intact is because the power rarely goes out.
Yet.
These dreamers actually believe in the free market, believe it or not.
The idea is that, when things start out, they are expensive and crude. As they sell more units, the price goes down because manufacturers can take advantage of scale and, as well, the technology will improve. It totally worked for computers didn’t it?
It doesn’t always work that way.
Mark Mills’ article from 2016 (Battery Derangement Syndrome) also has this tidbit about trying to apply Moore’s Law to energy systems-
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2016/06/25/the-tesla-and-solar-city-merger-is-rooted-in-battery-derangement-syndrome/2/#61bd502917fe
“Today’s smartphone is more powerful and cheaper than a room-sized IBM mainframe from 30 years ago. But a Moore’s Law type of disruption in energy isn’t just unlikely, it can’t happen with the physics we know today. If energy technology actually could follow a Moore’s Law trajectory, a Pontiac engine, for example, would increase a thousand-fold in horsepower and shrink to the size of an ant. The inconvenient reality in the universe we live in is that when engineers do build ant-sized engines, they produce 100 million times less power than a Pontiac.”
Since the gains in computer pricing has been attained by miniaturizing the components, how would that be applied to cars?
Commie Bob,
Our computers still have a ways to go before they come close to matching the 2 or 3 pounds of mostly fat that inhabits our skull.
In terms of efficiency, maybe we need to make vehicles out of muscles and fueled with glucose.
A 135 pound person can run a mile on about a 135 Calories (large C…really a kilocalorie. This a little over 500,000 joules. A watt is one joule per second, so 550,000 joules in, say, 5 minutes (300 seconds) is 1.8 kW of power output using maybe 20 pounds of muscle. Since that power was exerted for 1/12 of an hour, that takes about 0.15 kWh of energy.
One slice of bread is 80 Calories…with butter, 150 Calories.
We need muscle powered cars.
Oh…wait…
https://youtu.be/4PMWpy2IbDU?t=1m2s
No telling how much bread and butter it takes for Newman to waddle a mile.
Currently watching the new SyFy show Blood Drive.
Well, EVs are going to happen anyway.
Look at this:
https://electrek.co/2017/05/09/china-gac-electric-vehicle-industrial-park/
which is because of this:
“China’s electric vehicle mandate requires automakers’ EV sales to represent at least 8% of their total sales in 2018, 10% in 2019 and 12% in 2020, which is why several automakers are announcing investments in local EV production. GM and Ford recently did, and now domestic automakers are also moving forward.”
Then there’s this:
http://europe.autonews.com/article/20170315/ANE/170319958/why-tougher-eu-emissions-rules-put-the-combustion-engines-future-in
“EVs 66% of the new car market in Europe by 2030”
And then India is working on all new cars sold being electric by 2030…
More wishful thinking, Skanky?
You’re a credulous little creature, aren’t you?
When are you going to apologise to Dr. Crockford for maliciously lying about her professional qualifications?
Dr Crockford does not study polar bears and is not an expert on them.
“Dr Crockford does not study polar bears and is not an expert on them.”
ClimateOtter has twice posted the necessary information that proves you to be a bare-faced liar.
Here it is again.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/14/more-polar-non-science/
Have you considered consulting a medical practitioner specialising in pseudologia fantastica?
Perhaps you should.
In Griff’s world, you aren’t an expert until those experts he likes, declares you to be one.
So Griff is proven to be a ridiculous liar like all the other warmistas?
Who knew?
I think I did, when I stopped paying a single bit of attention to his inane musings last year.
It’s impossible, but it will happen!
So sayeth the Griff!
In GriffWorld, if is perfectly ok for governments to use mandates, rebates, and tax incentives, as well as various and sundry methods of “punishing carbon” to push a product that few would normally buy except as playthings for the wealthy, because it’s “good for the planet”.
I’ve got news for you – governments accepting the science of climate change are indeed actively using all means at their disposal to increase renewables/reduce CO2.
They show no sign of changing tack on that.
and many of them also provide for their poorer citizens getting the benefit of renewables.
So little Griff is admitting that the only reason why renewables are doing well is because of government subsidies and mandates.
This kinda contradicts his earlier statements about how renewables are taking off and are the wave of the future.
PS: This consensus exists in your mind only.
Sounds like Government funded welfare states to me
“Griff July 24, 2017 at 4:52 am”
Yes, and the recent offshore, floating, wind farm off Scotland. That’s insane!
EV’s 66% by 2030- there will be a high percentage of hybrids in that number.
Norway and the Netherlands are often mentioned these days when there is talk about the increase in EV sales. Mainly all hybrids.
Peak Lithium?
If world Lithium reserve reports are correct (and no doubt there will be more found) there is only enough for 50 years of battery production for cars available once there are only BEV’s produced.
The 50 years is a stretch anyway as not all those reserves are proven. But recycling and improved technology will assist.
Now there is finally talk about huge batteries for storing power when the sun ain’t shining. For obvious cost reasons this was never mentioned before and politicians don’t care as it gets in the way of the message.
More, much more, Lithium needed.
Once we are through brine extraction and revert back to extraction from rock and soil the process is quite messy and I would not call it “green” as a green person might. But we can leave that to China, much like rare earth mining. As long as it is not in our back yard where we might realize that they are only green dreams.
Back to horse and cart again soon, now that is green ( the pasture that is).
Lithium mining is of course expanding as demand grows. For example:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-08/chinese-investment-driving-wa-lithium-boom/8252068
They already happened. The first three land speed records were set by electric cars. link It wasn’t until 1902 when a land speed record was achieved using an internal combustion engine.
There was a time when EVs were superior to gasoline powered automobiles.
Will they be superior again? You should read and understand Tetlock before venturing a prediction.
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/dayintech_0601/
Actually the Stanley Steamer held the land speed record for over a century before a gas powered vehicle beat it. Few Gas powered vehicles could obtain 127 mph, much less than do it as fast and for as far. The power of water is overlooked as the most abundant energy source we have and the byproduct is water. From Water we get Steam or HHO or hydroelectric and no other emissions than the water itself. Government regulations and Subsidies to all other energy sources and not for Water. Makes you see how Government’s capitalize off of energy sources they can tax and regulate to control economies. They cannot control water when it is available in mass quantity that falls from the atmosphere or comes from the ground or the vast natural sources anyone could get it without cost or refining. Government’s would lose money if Water Power became the Energy Standard and some would find ways to tax and regulate it too.
@johchi7
Actually the Stanley Steamer held aland speed record not the land speed record for over a century.
The Stanley 1906 record was beaten by an ICE car three years later. The record it held for a century was the one for steam powered vehicles, so the main reason it held it for so long was that people stopped building steam cars.
I never knew carpet cleaners were that fast!
Instead of Soviet 5-year plans, Griff prefers 13-year plans.
…powered by coal that India and China are building. Poor Griff, it is always worse then she thinks.
Except that India and China are not allowing new applications for building coal and have truly massive renewable power programmes – e.g India’s 175GW renewables plan for 2022 is well financed and new capacity is being delivered at an increasing rate
While global coal use is thought to have fallen by 4.6% year on year through the first nine months of 2015 – … A third of the new capacity in the global pipeline is coal (1161/3165 GW) …– and nearly 90% of this is in rapidly growing Asian economies.
An earlier study from the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative found that China had invested as much as US$38 billion (253 billion yuan) in coal fired power plants overseas between 2010-2014 and had announced plans for another US$72 billion (480 billion yuan) worth of projects, an almost 100% increase.
China’s coal footprint is particularly large in Asia. In 2015 coal-fuelled plants accounted for 68% of generating capacity built by China in the rest of Asia, and in future this is set to rise, according to an earlier paper co-authored by Hannam. In contrast, where countries built capacity without Chinese support, coal-fired plants made up only 32% of new capacity. Worldwide, the majority of China’s support to the power sector in the global south was funnelled into coal, says the paper.
China is the largest supplier of equipment to India, which is expected to double its coal capacity by 2031. Chinese firms account for 60% of the equipment ordered in the private sector and are involved in at least 19 projects across the country, the largest being a massive 4,000 MW plant in Gujarat, built by Huaneng and financed by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC)
In GriffWorld, government edicts trump the laws of physics…and just saying something can make it so!
On the other hand, when subsidies are removed, EV sales go to zero.
So much for “already happening”.
“Lithium batteries and their component metals pose unique fire and explosion risks.”
unlike gasoline?
ReallySkepical ,
Probably the key to appreciating the statement is the word “unique.” While gasoline is obviously flammable, which is why it is used in IC engines, it’s properties are well known to everyone. Properly handled and stored, gasoline is relatively safe. It isn’t known to spontaneously catch fire while just sitting inside the gas tank of a vehicle, unlike portable computer batteries in machines that are turned off. Thus, the “unique” risks!
Car fires:
Try 17 every hour in the United States, between 2006 and 2010. That’s more than 150,000 annually, which kill some 209 civilians every year.
Those numbers come from a September 2012 report by the National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA), brought to our attention by Reddit user lapearce.
In the model air plane hobby world it is recommended that you charge your lithium batteries in a fireproof container using only a charger designed for those batteries. There is good reason to follow these recommendations. Once the battery case is compromised by any event, be it accident or stupidity, the lithium will ignite.
ReallySkepical,
I didn’t say that car fires don’t occur. The key word is still “unique.” If you want to try to be objective, come back with the annual per capita rate of spontaneous gasoline explosions/fires versus the per annual capita rate of spontaneous lithium-ion battery fires.
Hey ReallyDumb,
How many car fires were caused by exploding gas tanks, or even by gas catching on fire?
The number is likely almost or exactly none.
Do you miss the point and go off on tangents on purpose, or is it that brain tumor again?
RS …. a little thought please …. look at gasoline exposed to air = nothing and I proved it when I filled the lawn mower earlier this morning. Li Ion … see the vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp3hv5ms9I8
reallyfakeskeppie:
Oh? Got any examples of spontaneous gasoline combustion while stored in tanks and canisters?
Lithium batteries are very unlike stored gasoline.
“unlike gasoline?”
YES.
The risks involved in the use of lithium are utterly unlike those involved in the use of gasoline.
Unlike lithium batteries gasoline can’t spontaneously ignite for a start.
Unique. We’ve had a hundred years of dealing with gasoline in automobiles and many hundreds of years dealing with inflammable liquids. We’ll figure out Li batteries to an acceptable level if there is a need to. It still needs to be dealt with though.
From the same group that proclaims that nuclear power will never, ever be safe.
Yes unlike gasoline. Thanks for asking, glad to help.
I don’t have a gasoline tank in my basement.
We get enough power outages here that I’ve thought of installing a battery backup for the house. But then I think about all that energy crammed into a big pile of possibly-Chinese lithium batteries and realize that I’d prefer not to burn my house down.
For the cost of a couple of Tesla PowerWalls you could install a gasoline or natural gas backup generator with an automatic transfer switch. If your home heats with anything other than electricity you could get away with a 10kW unit, 20 kW if you have central air.
Here’s an 11 kW unit at Home Depot for $3,137
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Generac-11-000-Watt-LP-10-000-Watt-NG-Air-Cooled-Standby-Generator-with-Whole-House-200-Amp-Automatic-Transfer-Switch-7033/300117779
The Tesla 10 kW-hr battery is $3,500. Hmmmm, backup power for my house for 1 hour, or for as long as I can find fuel? Decisions, decisions.
If you have nat gas piped in, you will never run out of fuel.
And if you do not, propane in a buried 1000 gallon tank will last for quite a while.
EV batteries decades from now won’t necessarily use Lithium technology. In point of fact the Toyota Prius hybrids use NiMH instead and their batteries seem to have reasonable lifetimes and high, but not terrifying cost. 150,000 to 200,000 miles and replacement cost $2000-$3000. (Comparable to a new transmission).
Presumably a few decades of R&D will improve lifetime and reduce costs for EV and grid storage batteries somewhat.
OTOH, “batteries” that will do what is needed to electrify transportation appear likely to be further away than anyone is planning for.
Might get a bit messy if/when dubiously well-crafted mandates and reality collide.
There is really nothing worse than being in a vehicle that stops working.
In the best case, it is highly inconvenient and you need to walk to a gas station and carry back a can of gas.
In a worst case, you are stranded and die in a blizzard or a desert…or in North Philly or the South side of Chicago.
Intermediate cases have you being very late for work, etc.
No one will tolerate being forced to accept trading a perfectly reliable vehicle that can be refueled in minutes at any of tens of thousands of gas stations, for one that will leave you stuck for hours in a best case where you roll to a stop at a charger when your battery dies.
Or you can carry a fossil fuel generator in its trunk as a backup power source. A picture on Facebook had one on the side of a country road doing just that.
There is something fundamentally dishonest about green advocacy – it always suggests that as in this case life can carry on as today, just changing the technology to non-emitting. And as the piece points out, and as other articles routinely point out, this is simply not possible. No, you cannot put everyone into electric vehicles and continue with the same living and shopping and working habits we have today.
The real implication of the green view of necessary reductions is the abolition of the auto industry, worldwide. This would require corresponding radical changes in where people live, what kind of housing they occupy, how they get to work and to shops and to leisure. You have to imagine the world of the US and Europe in the days before there were automobiles, modified by the availability of telecoms. But physically rather similar. People walking, cycling, taking trams, living in dense housing. The suburbs would have to change radically.
The issue is that most who oppose the green agenda from the political right will be appalled by this prospect and by implication defend to the death how we live now.
But its necessary to admit that the way we are living now is not sensible or appropriate either. At the moment we subordinate everything to the right of people to drive through places. The result on the places they drive through is noise, air pollution, and the taking away of public space. And the problem is that everyone lives and works somewhere this is happening, because of other people driving through, but everyone also is one of those who drives through some other neighborhood in which people are trying to live and work and shop and enjoy leisure, on his or her way to somewhere else.
Its necessary to admit this is not a desirable method of living and organising that we should be defending. On the contrary, its unfit for purpose and defective by design. We do actually need to get cars out of cities and we need to treat the urban environment as a thing in itself, not something to be driven through on the way to someplace else.
To this extent there are elements that are right and sensible buried somewhere in the green agenda. The problem is that they never get articulated because the whole thing is a mass of contradictions and dishonesty about what the aim is, and what it will take to reach it.
We should stop worrying about CO2 emissions. But we should not confuse this with the view that the present role of cars is in any way sensible or healthy or part of an improvement in the quality of life without them. The car is actually appallingly damaging to health and quality of life. It is worse than cigarettes as a public health threat, where this covers all aspects of well being. We should admit this, and find ways to stop it, at the same time as we do it for the right reasons, quality of life, and not for the idiotic one, the attempt to reduce CO2 emissions.
Your claim about the status quo is hogwash.
No, look at the number of deaths and serious injuries caused by car accidents. Look at the air pollution numbers in large cities from London to Paris to Beijing. Travel to neighborhoods where people are driving through. You can for instance visit the resdidential areas of Paris close to the Peripherique. Or take the A12 into London in the rush hour. Or walk down Oxford St. Or walk down any of the New York avenues in Manhattan.
There is a real need and justification for reclaiming our streets and our use of them from the car. The present situation is one which, had it been presented as part of a plan, would never have got approval. If for no other reason, the health and safety case would have destroyed its chances.
The problem is not CO2. The problem is not even the internal combustion engine. The problem is that it is deleterious to quality of life to have large amounts of fast traffic, no matter how engined, driving through places where people live work and play. The problem is the through traffic.
This must be stopped. The Greens are part of the problem here. First because they have an agenda which they falsely pretend has scientific justification, which can only be realised by stopping it. The fact that their reason for the action is false damages the case.
Second, because fallacious though their agenda is, they will not admit that one of its consequences is removing cars from streets.
Third, because they refuse to address the real environmental problem – mixing fast through traffic with people walking, shopping, working and playing.
This results in the most awful confusion of what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do it. What we should be doing is removing fast through traffic from residential and shoppping areas. But we should not be doing this to ‘tackle climate change’, though the Greens should be admitting that this is one of the things their emission reduction demands requires. And we should not be substituting electric for gasoline cars while keeping the through traffic going – partly because it cannot be done, and partly because it is this traffic that is undesirable in itself.
Take back the streets. But do it for its own sake, not in the name of climate change.
“There is a real need and justification for reclaiming our streets and our use of them from the car.”
If there was, people would stop driving. But, oddly enough, they don’t.
You’re just another authoritarian who HATES seeing people live the way you want rather than they way they want. Few people want to live in ‘dense housing’ when they can have a house of their own. Few people want to be forced to work near where they live or spend an hour on a bus each way to get there. But people like you keep trying to push them into it anyway.
The number of accidents caused by cars is small, especially compared to other risks in life.
Dreamers dream of a world in which all hazards have been removed by government diktat, but in reality no such world exists or can exist.
The pollution in cities isn’t caused by cars.
Fast traffic in cities. Now that thar is funny.
“Take back the streets..” The streets exist to provide the transportation needs of the public. Paid for by the public that uses them. They are used for the transportation of goods, and for the public use. The modern ICE engine is very clean. The idea that streets should exist devoid of our ability to use them, other than walking or riding a bike is ludicrous. Our modern world is far more efficient because we can travel, as needed, distances much farther than is practical using public transportation or riding a bike. Most of us don’t live in climates where the weather is benign. When the thunderstorm, blizzard, ice storm, hurricane, tornado, or deep freeze hits, cars save lives.
Michel, i understand what you are saying, and in a few things you say you seem very sensible.
But it is also obvious you do not live in a place where not being able to drive would make life very much less manageable.
Me, i like where I live.
I do not like a ton of people all around me, so I moved to a place that has few people but good roads. This means I have to drive a ways for everything I need, but there are few cars driving by. Some days zero cars go down my street per hour.
We can swim and sunbathe nude in my pool area, pick fruit in my yard to eat, and yet go to the store in ten or fifteen minutes. A major airport is 20 minutes away…the planes fly low over my house and it has never bothered me, although I have heard of people claiming that an occasional plane overhead has ruined their life.
If you do not like where you are…move.
Do not tell other how to live.
Because right there you go from sensible to insufferable.
I think Genesis’ get them out by Friday explains your goals:
18/9/2012 T.V. Flash on all Dial-A-Program Services
This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
“It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on humanoid height.”
[I always imagine Al Gores’ head looking like Max Headroom announcing this.]
“I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It’s said now that people will be shorter in height,
They can fit twice as many in the same building site. (they say it’s alright)
Man I am so glad I live 2 hours from the type of people that live with Michel. In fact, I am just fine watching all the people on bicycles in Amsterdam, down town Calgary, Vancouver and other places. When I lived in Vancouver, I used public transit. It is effective. But back in the country, I need my dually diesel and diesel tractor to haul my hay and my winter wood supply from my woodlot plus a “goin’ to town car.
?dl=0
Take back the streets is just another silly slogan. Properly designed city systems accommodate “PEOPLE”. Are drivers not also people? Bicyclists, pedestrians, drivers, and commuters are all just people using the system. No need to “take back the streets”. We already have them.
What kind of horse is that you are riding Michel? Are you a descendant of Don Quixote?
I don’t mean that to be an ad hominem. I take it you are anti-car. A choice you can make. But some of need a vehicle to survive. I mean, I could saddle up a horse to go to town, but we are then talking of travel time of days instead of 2 hours. Think about it.
Wayne Delbeke
Faraway, Alberta.
“But its necessary to admit that the way we are living now is not sensible or appropriate either.”
No it isn’t. Since the way we are living is entirely sensible and appropriate.
that elon musk fella is a CON artist stealing big time money from YOU if you pay taxes.
Without studying financials of his various ventures in any detail, it sure seems like Elon has created a huge ponzi or pyramid scheme. Startup subsidies for each new venture are used to bail out the previous projects, that have not yet become profitable on their own.
Rural communities in Mt., Id, Nd, Sd, etc. are already at the limits of their power grid. Examples of the damaged transmission lines due to overloading are on display. The grid (and the power plants) today are incapable of supporting massive numbers of totally electric cars.
Battery backup of the grid?
The stuff they’re cultivating must be a lot better than I thought, or they’re smoking a lot more than I thought possible.
Is 25,000 million kWh… or 25 billion kWh.
At $200/kWh… that works out to $5 trillion… just to backup current generation capacity if it was $100 solar. A 100% transition to EV’s would require an additional 25-30% increase in generation capacity… So tack on another $1.25 to $1.3 trillion to the Rayovac bill.
The funny thing is that greent@rds think using the EV batteries for night time solar PV back up makes sense.
I am not a greent@rd by any stretch, but to me about the only use case that can make sense for solar pv and battery storage is home rooftop solar with battery. At least in this use case you are not using up virgin land for solar pv, and you have essentially zero transmission losses (though of course you have the battery charge/discharge losses). EV vehicles to me make very little sense, and would never be more than a niche product without massive subsidies, that is maybe until we have inductive charging on the streets.
Just caught that you were talking about EV batteries, which is indeed silly since you would then be discharging the batteries at night when presumably you need to recharge the EV from the day’s use.
A totally un-greent@rded position… 🍻
WR, rooftop with battery only makes sense where it is too expensive to run power lines.
So, everyone has to work at night and recharge during the day so that the batteries in the EV can act as a “buffer” for the grid while charging? What happens when there is a week or tow of no/insufficient sun? Do you get a “Sunless” day off?
Or how about when that sunless week is a very cold stormy period and you have electric heat?
Or a humid rainy period in sweltering Florida Summer and your air conditioner has no power.
In Florida in Summer, no AC in the sorts of houses we have means mildew on the walls and furniture and no sleep at night and misery.
No thanks.
What makes sense to me is solar hot water where it is cost effective, some rooftop solar with net metering up to the point that it is manageable, which it still is here apparently…and if they are giving subsidies and it makes it a money saver for you and you have the cash to put up…well, you cannot live in the world you wish for, because we are stuck in the world we have.
I am against subsidies but since they are being larded out, I will keep running the numbers and get some the day it adds up…and in the meantime i will vote for people who will reverse idiotic policies.
After the 1970s energy scare caused a ton of money to be wasted on renewable research and such, it was a long time before that crap flew again.
Once this insanity has run it’s course…it is gonna be a really long time before this particular brand of jackassery takes root again.
Environmental imperialists are imperialists first, no matter how they dress up as greens. And the reality of enviro imperialism is corrupted academia, impoverished people, destroyed landscapes and environmental degradation. Stop the green imperialists now!
What’s rarely said is how much Oil and Natural Gas is needed to create the Plastics used to create these batteries from the wire coatings to containers themselves. Add the energy to create the plastics and mold them into the desired forms. Add that the molds requires energy to create them. Refining the desired chemical compounds from the raw minerals to remove the elements not wanted is energy consuming. Shipping parts from wherever to wherever to build the products and packaging of them and the shipping of the products to warehouse storages that distribution to consumer’s all consume energy and increases the cost. The materials that create a product is just a fraction of the cost of it. The personnel required at every stage uses energy to and from their homes to work their job’s.
Still waiting to see some battery powered mining, excavating, and hauling equipment.
This is the real nub of the issue…you cannot run a renewable economy on renewables.
Just like you cannot run a ethanol corn farm on ethanol.
Like locomotives the big equipment has gone to large Diesel Electric Generators that power electric motors and Hydrolic power with electronic control’s. They increased the size of the equipment and reduced fuel consumption.
Subsidizing ultra-expensive and exclusive club of Tesla never made sense. If anything, their pricing was in the range where a “luxury tax” could be applicable.
I don’t think the end of the subsidy would affect Tesla sales in the US like they did in Denmark and Hong Kong. They are a status symbol here, and there are a huge number of Tesla “fanboys.”
They could affect upcoming Model 3 sales, however, where it won’t be quite the status symbol, doesn’t have all of the perks of the Model S and Model X ownership, etc.
All-in-all, I doubt they’d affect consumer demand too much. It seems in the case of the hybrids that the price was inflated, and the tax credit just brought the net price back to normal pricing. When the subsidy went away, the price deflation went away, e.g., a $32.5k car would have a $7.5k tax credit so that it was a $25k net for the buyer, and when the credit went away, it became a $25k car.
The key component is”Stealing from the many to enrich the few”.
Kleptocracy naturally progresses this way.
We have a huge parasitic overload, the only way to fund it is to steal more .
Taxing air.. Yup.
Back in 1976 the NZ State Hydro seriously looked at Wind and Solar, their conclusion: Useless for base load.
40 years later, still useless for reliable on demand electricity, with an added twist.
The average Western citizen is much less technologically adept that 40 years ago, the stupid is strong, High capacity batteries are potential bombs.
What a wonderful urban re-developement plan.
Does an american home use 200 Amps in average? It is anyway 2.4kW and 57kWh each day.
But i agree that the wet dreams of storage to save the wind and solar is wishfull thinking.
You have to simultaneus build the capacity and the storage from the present 3 to 5% up to 100%.
And the storage business is in a very infant stage if it at all is born.
Most modern homes in the US have a 200 amp service entrance. Some larger facilities have 400 amp service. My “country home” is wired for 200 amps, my “wilderness home”, which is a commercial facility, is wired fro 400.
It should be mentioned that having a 200 amp main breaker does not necessarily mean you are using anywhere near that. Even in a large all electric home like mine, in addition to the electric cookstove, washer and dryer, water heater, heat pump, and refrigerator, I would have to plug in and turn on every electrical gadget I own and I probably still couldn’t pop it.
200 amp services have definitely become the defacto standard in typical US new home construction. However, if you put an ammeter on your service, you would likely see your typical max draw as 60-70 amps. This is an artifact of the National Electrical Code and how electricians are required to calculate service size. The power company has a much better idea of what people actually use, and if you looked at the rating of a typical “pole pig” that serves multiple residential occupancies you’d see right away they don’t expect the nameplate draw for each house.
Let us work backwards.
If a person has a $200/ power bill, and they pay about 10 cents per kWh, that means they used about 2000kWh.
So, about 66.666… kWh per day. Lets call it 67 for the sake of the calc.
67,000 watts in one hour, or 2777 watts per hour. Amps times volts equals watts.
So watts divided by volts equals amps.
Assuming both legs are equally loaded (that 200 amps is at 240 volts), you are using an average of under 12 amps of continuous current draw…11.7 amps or so.
As others have pointed out, only a few devices in your home pull large amounts of power…electric heat or air conditioner, electric stove, electric water heater, and electric dryer (these guys use a lot of power). Plus things like toasters can draw more than you might suppose, and shop vacs, large vacuum cleaners…they draw a ton of current but are not used for long by most people, same for toasters.
If your AC is running, you are cooking on the stove and oven, the dryer is running, and the water heater is heating because someone just took a shower…you might be at 60-70 amps.
But, if you drew 60 amps for four hours…that is the whole days worth of power right there.
It is not hard to figure out.
Another thing is, certain devices like powerful motors, as are on well pumps and vacuum cleaners, have a huge startup power draw that is transient…they go from a standstill to 3450 RPMs in less than a second, and so this has to be accounted for in sizing service entrance wire sizes.
That is what the 200 amps is mainly referring too…the number of breakers in you panel, and the wire sizing entering your home.
It has nothing to do with how much people are using at any given time…more to do with rare peak loads and large margins of safety.
If this country was serious about saving money on energy, we would run gas lines to every home in the country, and everyone would use gas for everything that involved heat…hot water, clothes drying, cooking.
As has been pointed out, power generation takes about 1/3 of the energy in whatever is being burned and converts it into electrons in the wires. Some of this is lost on the way to your house.
But modern appliances employ very efficient combustion…almost all of the energy is converted to heat inside the device.
So it is far cheaper to cook and heat homes and make hot water with gas in the home than with gas generated electricity.
I have suggested this as a jobs plan…on the scale of the rural electrification act…run gas lines to every home in the country.
This plus LED replacements for every light bulb in the US, and we would likely not need to upgrade our grid for many decades.
We could slash overall energy usage and save money for every household in the country.
But NOOOOOOOOOOOOO, we have to waste all our money on fantasies that accomplish nothing.
With the positive reviews and loyal support of Tesla customers I doubt the lack of rebates will kill their sales. I think it’s much more likely that publicized ending of rebates Hong Kong and Denmark caused potential buyers to make their purchases before the rebates ended. Time will tell whether sales in those countries rebound.
I’m sure states like California will continue to reward customers making buying decisions that support the green agenda.
Bill J
Yes you are correct, the months prior, and particularly the last month before rebates ended folks purchased giving abnormally high sales, Sales may trickle back up after the price sticker shock normalizes.
Electric vehicle sales will not die, neither should they.
At some point they will get it right, and remember the last time oil was at $140 a barrel for no other reason than greed.
Ozone, I’d like to quibble with you a bit when you write: “At some point they will get it right, and remember the last time oil was at $140 a barrel for no other reason than greed.”
That’s certainly a succinct analysis, but it might be misleading.
The price of oil went up when the US started bombing the folks in the Middle East and killing them in large numbers for crimes they didn’t commit. That would be the Legacy of GWB, or “W” to his friends. It (the price of oil) went back down as a result of increased exploration efforts and the use of more advanced extraction technologies that resulted in that sharp price rise. So in some ways, the Iraq/Afghan incursion resulted in a lower oil price for US consumers by “incentivising” US oil explorers to do more exploring.
Lots and lots of folks died by the numbers in that effort. It’s my opinion there was a better way to accomplish those ends.
Sorry. “…resulted from that sharp price rise”
Bartleby, tying the price of oil to Iraq and Afghanistan may be popular opinion, but you may not realize how misleading it is.
The prices of oil was in the $40’s when W became President, and it was in the $40’s when Obama took over as President. It didn’t go past $80 until 2006, years after invading Afghanistan and the restarting of the war in Iraq, and stayed above $80 for about two years under Bush. Prices stayed below $80 until US troops pulled out of Iraq in 2010, but then spent five years over $80 during Obama’s tenure. The price of oil just did not correlate with US military action.
Regardless of the fact that you don’t understand the the effective declaration of war by Afghanistan or for ending the cease-fire in Iraq, it is a fact that the number of civilians that died per year in Iraq since 2003 has been far less than the numbers that were dying while Saddam was in power. That would be the legacy of George W Bush.
Ted, you don’t understand. People killed by brown people don’t count.
It’s only evil when a westerner kills a brown person.
The sharp increase in oil prices in 2008 that lead to $140 / barrel oil was due to the increase in construction for the Summer Olympics held in China. I know it is fashionable to blame greedy oil producers, or speculators, but the Chinese will able and willing to buy oil at a price that most of the world would not pay. There is really no doubt about what caused that spike, and also no doubt about what caused the price to crash as soon as the Chinese had finished the large projects that were on a tight schedule.
The price of oil went up for a number of reasons.
On the whole, it was because total demand exceeded supply by a few million barrels per day.
There was the housing boom, and the consequent boom in all support activities, from mining and materials processing, ship building, etc… on down the supply chains.
On top of that, production was limited by a pullback in exploration following the collapse in prices during the 1990s that extended into the beginning of the 2000s.
Once the price was high, exploration exploded, substitutions began to be made, etc.
But production was held down artificially by such things as Obama banning offshore drilling and new explorations in the gulf, and by refusal to open up exploration on public lands. All of the increases in production that led to the eventual oversupply that caused prices to collapse…all of it was on private lands, which is a fraction of the land available in the US for exploration.
But eventually supply exceeded demand, and price once again collapsed.
The peak oil BS caused a lot of traders to bid up the prices long past the time that supply was once again equal to or greater than demand…total production was more than was being used, and oil was being stored everywhere it could be stashed.
Price was high because of demand, not because of greed.
Greed caused the supply to once again increase to match demand
The Chinese Olympics was one factor, but the exploding economy in China had many reasons…the Three Gorges dam project, feeding the worldwide and esp US building booms and associated wealth effects, etc.
Also, a series of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico caused shutdown of offshore platforms which caused some huge price spikes in a short period of time.
There was never any one cause, as there was not one cause for prices to collapse.
Among the factors in the collapse was OPEC pushing production to the limit in spite of oversupply in an effort to bankrupt the US shale producers and shut down exploration here.
Anyone who was an energy trader ought to remember each of these very well.
I was back then, before moving on to biotech and big pharma.
Cannot wait for the next commodity super cycle…I will not make the same mistakes twice.
Thanks, Griff. So your response to “it’s physically impossible” is, “well, the Chinese gov’t commanded it be so.” Whose d#nying basic physics now? And another bad comparison from RelativistSkeptical, once again struggling to tell apples from oranges.
So far it seems no one has mentioned the temperature problem. Batteries just don’t work in sub-zero (F) temperatures, and they don’t work very well in sub-freezing (F) either. It’s not like high latitudes aren’t inhabited; I doubt very much you’ll find many EVs rolling around Montana in the winter. I used to ranch NW Wyoming, south of Jackson and I can assure you there’s a reason snow machines have pull starters.
Batteries will never solve that problem, but capacitors can. The reality is that EVs won’t ever replace IC motors until our capacitor technology advances. The major problems with EVs are cold climate operation and charge time, both of which are solved by capacitors.
There’s a promising technology I just stumbled on in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering titled “Rapid synthesis of transition metal dichalcogenide–carbon
aerogel composites for supercapacitor electrodes”. This is the sort of research that’s needed to make EVs possible. Needless to say, this isn’t a technology that’s ready for prime time.
It’s pure stupidity for Brown to write checks to Musk using working Californians as his bank. Venal? You bet. Brown needs to have his butt handed to him on a plate for this sort of nonsense. If he and his friends wan to fund Tesla, they can buy stock in the company just like anyone else.
When the time comes that the technology needed to make EVs work is really here, government might get involved in improving public infrastructure. Until then it needs to sit down and shut up. Hope you’re listening Jerry because right now you’re looking like a buffoon.
I forgot the link:
https://www.nature.com/articles/micronano201732
And just “By The Way”, when government and private industry hold hands like this, it’s called Fascism. I’m well aware of Godwin’s Law, but I’m still going to point out that Brown and his political cronies are nothing less than Nazis. National Socialists.
Some of us have been down that road before and it doesn’t end well.
Well, Norway has a huge number of EVs, thanks to local incentives…
And they don’t seem to have any problems, though that’s a cold and snowy place…
Griff,
nice shiny new Tesla’s, bought by the well heeled at £64K or so a time (whatever that is in Norwegian currency) with a nice fat taxpayer subsidy to help pay for it.
And if you’re not well heeled, and can’t afford a £64K car, your tax money goes to help the rich buy a nice shiny new Tesla and you get stuck with a normal ICE car.
So much for wealth distribution and shrinking the gap between the rich and poor. It’s socialist green policies that make the wealth gap bigger by actively taking money from the poor and handing it to the rich.
And when subsidies for EV’s are withdrawn, sales drop like a stone, as in Hong Kong and Denmark. When states impose change on their voters, it invariably fails, better to leave these things to market forces.
there IS a battery with the desired performance: it is called FOSSIL FUEL
the original solar power!
‘We can also expect a battle royale over extending the federal EV subsidy beyond 200,000 vehicles – demonstrating once again that lobbyists are now far more important to bottom lines than engineers, especially when lobbyists can channel enormous contributions to politicians’ reelection campaigns.’
Lobbyists are a symptom, not a cause. Reign in government power, and the lobbyists will disappear.
I’m watching my copy of Woodstock for the first time in years and I watch a young man ask, during the torrential downpour, ” why are they seeding the clouds. I’ve seen the planes passing over ” trailing white clouds.
The bastards have been trying to harm us for over half a century and this young man was probably one of the first on record to acknowledge it.
john in cheshire
Not seeding but vapour trails from the combustion of hydrocarbons in the engines. The hydro of the hydrocarbon is Hydrogen which when burned produces water vapour that forms a cloud behind the engine. The trails will appear and disappear depending if condensation nuclei are present where the plane is flying. Not scary just physics.
White clouds have been trailing airplanes since the advent of airplanes.
It was a major problem during WWII as German fighters would use the contrails to sneak up on fighter formations.
I told you not to eat the brown acid!
The Amount of ignorence in this article is out of this world. A classic example of writing out of your ass to push an agenda. Everything this guy says sounds right to someone who doesn’t know much about the subjects at hand. Do your research about what everything this guy says and you will see through the lies. A couple of hundred years ago this was the guy crying witch and you morons would have burned a woman alive because you believed all the bull [snip] he spews.
Reply: Nothing like misspelling ignorance to make a point~ctm
As someone who has done research and I can proclaim that the one spouting bull[snip] is you.
Didi
fantastic, logical, scientific dismantling of the article in question from the mind of a genius.
Do you have any other blunt instruments you can utilise?
I’ll add the sarc\ tag for your benefit alone, because everyone else, even Griff, will have got the gist of my comment, even if you don’t.
Could you explain this world manufacturing capacity of lithium? Over what time period do they produce this much battery? Because if it is daily then in 3 months they will have enough storage to handle the entire electric grid.
Guess again, Einstein.
This article was obviously financed by the Koch brothers and Paul unashamedly spews long ago debunked claims about electric vehicles with the intention of slowing their adoption to benefit the financial interests of the oil and gas lobby. For the truth if you can handle it Google Union of Concerned Scientists State of Charge.
Reply: My Koch funded lavish lifestyle is calling. Get off of me scantily clad women. I have science to do!~ctm
What’s funny is that this tool actually thinks the “union of concerned scientists” does science.
JimGord,
You display the typical — divorced from reality — viewpoint of those who think that there is only the truth and propaganda from corporate interests. It speaks volumes about your mindset that you can’t imagine that there are legitimate, honest objections to the world view of zealots.
JimGord, is there no pipelines you need to be out protesting against?
Didi has it nailed. As I read these breathtakingly ignorant-of-facts comments. I bet all the real denier websites like “skeptical of science” are having a ball out of your dumb uninformed comments.
#1. When anyone sends their car in for trash, its not buried. They recycle it. You don’t think for one minute that expensive boron steel chassis is a use once feature? No, you rent it up front for a decade. Same for Lithium. Its a waste product from sea salt. Unlike crude, its reused.
#2 Even the hugely rapid and weighty Tesla consumes at a highway 248Wh/mile. Smaller cars average 220Wh/mile. (The 100KWh battery version has a highway speed range exceeding 300+ miles.). So ignore the trash about litre = 10KWh because heat engines as they do, throw most energy out as heat.
Besides, over 10% of liquid fuel is electricity bill, to mine, extract, crack, process and deliver the stuff.
#3 Battery fires. Like fuel fires are always caused through a reason. Easy to replicate. Force one into a reverse charge then recharge it up. It gets hot and burns. The oxides and cobalt makes it easier.
MinH being safer? No, deadly poison, far over half to quarter the capacity per volume/mass and expensive (inefficient) to recharge. Toyota’s folly.
No Nissan Leafs have ever had a battery fire to date. This is down to good engineering.
As goes subsidies. More fool you for not taking our tax money back that’s offered out like candy. I’m not all for it but have to say my Leaf through free street charging in the UK plus far reduced rates for costs (and servicing, nothing to go wrong) has already paid for itself in four years over an equivalent vehicle – which cannot come anywhere near the pleasure to drive as this has.
I get the usual. Disdain, curiosity then, “Oh damn this is something else”.
DRIVE ONE!
Andyj July 23, 2017 at 7:40 pm
“Same for Lithium. Its a waste product from sea salt.”
Could you please advise just what % of the world’s lithium comes as a waste product from this source…I suspect it’s a drop in the ocean/sea! But I am more than happy to be educated by you on this.
“…my Leaf through free street charging in the UK…”
OK, you may think it’s free but some other poor fellow is having to pay for your car charging. Why should you expect someone else to pay for your fuel whether it’s gasoline or electricity?
Right there with his comment about free charging, Andyj indicates that he has no connection to economic reality.
Alastair Brickell
“OK, you may think it’s free but some other poor fellow is having to pay for your car charging. Why should you expect someone else to pay for your fuel whether it’s gasoline or electricity?”
He’s a green socialist, so of course he’s going to take every subsidy going and claim it as his right, no matter who else suffers for it.
Finally someone putting the facts out. Fantasy and feelings will not keep the lights on. These big dreams are just that, yet we will all be forced to go along and pay for it or face the wrath of those who think they are going to save the planet.
Are they saving the planet or just enjoying the free ride on someone else’s nickel ?
‘Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day’
Not really. It is more like 19 hrs per day, with solar panels giving the equivalent of 5 hrs of full power per day. Sometimes six. The rest of the time the battery will be putting something out, assuming the load is continuous.
As loads are not continuous, and because peak consumption does not occur during the middle of the day, a detailed look at when the batteries have to be putting out power and when they can receive it. All things considered, especially materials, recycling and cost, we are far better off using ceramic super capacitors which have virtually an indefinite number of charge cycles and in the end, can be ground up to make concrete.
It is also possible to capture lightning using super capacitors. Now there’s a thought.
I think the phrase is “lunch time power”, on a good day.
peak consumption sometimes occurs during the day – it depends on the country and on the season.
In the UK there is always a high demand on any week day around mid day…
In the winter the highest demand is in the early evening, though otherwise it is highest at mid day.
Notice how little Griff changes the argument in order to hide the fact that he has no argument.
To him, it’s sufficient that power is generated in the same day that it is needed.
Mark, are you proposing power only get generated in advance? Not following your argument…
Where can we go buy ceramic super capacitors?
Change always brings naysayers. Always has, always will. We have an ever expanding population, we will need alternative transportation. God forbid we start developing it now….we wouldn’t want to be prepared now would we.
Nobody is saying dont develop it, but for god sake do something useful. Many people confuse action with effectiveness
Sometimes the naysayers are right.
If you want to develop an alternative, feel free. Just don’t rob me to pay for it.
One thousand billion is one trillion.
Golly!
For real?
This article is so full of falsities and lies and twisted facts that it is worthless to even comment. One thing I can say with assurance, you don’t know a single thing about electric vehicles.
because?
What, is it lunch hour at Skeptical Science and DeSmog Blog?
Doug, you are right about one thing…your comment is worthless.
I agree Douglas. The ignorance, blind prejudice and false scare stories just leave you speechless.
Another content-free comment.
John Hardy demonstrates the near 100% ability of warmistas to psychologically project their character defects onto others.
I know you can’t drive from Melbourne to Sydney in 10 hours in an EV.
You can’t do that in a ICE driven car, unless you break the speed limit 😉
Google lists it as 878 km (550 miles). How low are the speed limits?
Translation: I can’t refute a single thing the author said, but I have to defend my religious beliefs.
As someone who never refutes anything Mark, I think you are on thin ice there!
Which ice is that?
I thought it was all gone.
Content-free comment.
“Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day ”
Maybe so in California, but in the UK winter you’d need about two months’ worth of storage.
This interesting new UK initiative was announced today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986
“Consumers in the UK could save billions of pounds thanks to major changes in the way electricity is made, used and stored, the government has said.
New rules will make it easier for people to generate their own power with solar panels, store it in batteries and sell it to the National Grid.
If they work, consumers will save £17bn to £40bn by 2050, according to the government and energy regulator Ofgem.
The rules are due to come into effect over the next year.
They will reduce costs for someone who allows their washing machine to be turned on by the internet to maximise use of cheap solar power on a sunny afternoon.
And they will even support people who agree to have their freezers switched off for a few minutes to smooth demand at peak times.
They’ll also benefit a business that allows its air-conditioning to be turned down briefly to help balance a spell of peak energy demand on the National Grid.
Among the first to gain from the rule changes will be people with solar panels and battery storage. At the moment they are charged tariffs when they import electricity into their home or export it back to the grid.
The government has realised that this rule must change because it deters people from using power more flexibly in a way that will benefit everyone.”
In Griff’s world, if the government pays for something, it really is free.
There are several levels of discussion to be had here…
does it work? (yes)
are they really going to do that? (yes)
and what it costs is another separate discussion
Here’s an analogy to this “smart grid” thinking. We find round tires are bad for the environment so we’ll compensate for our square tires with really big shock absorbers.
And not charging for grid connection services is a subsidy.
California would consider electing a Governor that wanted to give $40,000 to every smug, already-overcompensated, virtue signaling person for buying an expensive Tesla? From the Department of Other People’s Money Can Make Water Run Up Hill Which is Necessary to Save The World Because Some Rich Virtue Signaling Vanity Monger Said So..
Denying climate change won’t make it go away.
We are in a dangerous feedback loop and must take action.
Please provide references for this “dangerous feedback loop” since I think you are merely parroting something you have no understanding of.
Crying wolf won’t make wolfs appear either.
I’ll believe in catastrophic climate change when you can point out some.
PS: You can tell you are dealing with someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about when they declare that feedback loops are dangerous.
Name one person that denies that the climate changes.
Dangerous feedback loop, huh?
Where?
Everyplace I have seen has green grass and trees, lush farm fields, blue sky, white clouds, wet rain, and no problems that are not regular weather.
Winters are cold and snowy, Summers are warm and crops grow in bountiful profusion, birds are chirping in the trees, and everything is fine and beautiful.
Where the heck do you live, Heikki?
Have you been outside recently?
Seems like you need some air.
I would strongly like to point out that all vehicle and current home infrastructure hasn’t been around until now, when he claims it will take 125 years of Li Ion production to meet our current demand, he is grasping at straws, with up to 10 Gigafactories expected to be built, economies of scales & scope, and extremely high productivity negates his highly unqualified and biased opinion. Write an article that uses basic common sense and doesn’t pander this unintelligent bias. Plus, the guy cannot add using basic adding, not even at an algebra level. I hate that writing articles requires no actual skill or knowledge, I’m so glad idiots can smear their way into the spotlight with no real understanding of what they are talking about. Not one source was actually cited or valid.
You would sound a little less whinny if you actually brought up some examples of where the author is wrong and proved it mathematically.
As to your mantra chanting about how economies of scale are going to drastically cut the cost of batteries, that’s just more evidence of your ignorance.
Super capacitors using nano technology might be the answer in the future.
“Super capacitors using nano technology might be the answer in the future.” And they might not! To make a substantive contribution, can you provide any reliable estimates of probability? If not, then your remark is, at best, inane.
So might fusion power.
But so far…um, no.
No such thing yet…not one product on the market.
Since we are discussing things that might happen, it might get colder over the next ten years, and this whole alarmist crybaby bedwetting mass delusion will evaporate.
In the meantime, people who are not deluded have the responsibility to explain reality to the miseducated dopes running around with their panties in a twist.
Bolt with discount and tax rebates $20,000. Solar to recharge it 50-75 miles a day $5000 after incentives. Annual gas saved $2500. Return on investment 12%. Energy independent. Yes I am, now. Taxpayers thanks for the help. Join me.
I drive 200 miles a day and need a truck to carry all of my equipment and haul my trailer around.
Leech, screw you for putting your hand in my pocket and stealing my hard earned money to fund your silly toy.
To the Green statists, the answer is obvious. We must reduce human usage of energy to the point where renewables and batteries are enough.
No, we must produce all the energy we need renewably…
for example, one scenario proposed by the UK’s National Grid envisages doubling UK electricity generation (but all renewable)
Griff,
While your personal Holy Grail may provide you with a sense of divinity, focusing on renewability is very narrow in its scope. You are conveniently ignoring all the probable unintended consequences and turning your back on valuable alternatives. That is the behavior of a zealot, not a realist.
BTW, did you ever publicly apologize for your remarks about Susan Crockford? If not, then you need to realize that further establishes your credentials as a zealot who doesn’t feel a need to admit to and atone for mistakes because the end justifies the means.
Take that cigarette out of your month and wake up to the true about burning fossil fuels.
Reply: Now now, if you want to convince us of the true, you need to be nicer~ctm
You mean the truth of humans living longer than ever, common folk being healthier and better fed than kings were a few hundred years ago, not having to spend the bulk of our time trying to get enough food to eat, enough shelter to survive, and not having to work our bodies into twisted lumps on mundane tasks?
Do you mean the truth of plants and trees growing faster than at anytime for the past twenty million years, or of deserts becoming green, or of no major famines in this entire millennium, anywhere on Earth?
The truth is life before fossil fuels made us all prosperous was filthy, brutal, dangerous, and short.
And now it is not, for the first time in all of human history, for hundreds of millions of people.
The truth is, life has never been better on Earth, and we are all of us alive among the luckiest humans to have ever existed on the planet.
Start acting like it, take that joint out of your mouth, and do something productive.
Awesomely said.
The answer for a world without oil is simple but no one wants to face reality.
Nuclear + Hydrogen
Nuclear to generate electricity, and using electricity to generate hydrogen via cheap electrolysis of water which can be used whenever a portable energy source is needed.
That is the only way to power vehicles etc after the oil is gone.
“Cheap” electrolysis is only as cheap as nuclear power – which currently is expensive. Future nuclear from Gen IV designs using MOX or thorium fuel has the power density at competitive cost to meet future demand. Risk comparison with other sources is favorable.
To power land transport with hydrogen made from nuclear is feasible though murky. Infrastructure to liquify H2 (for fuel cells) and distribute/dispense globally for auto/bus/truck is a bigger challenge than battery storage for renewables.
Air transport is a candidate for H2 as the infrastructure can be limited to airports. Equip airports with modular nuke plants for power to make and compress H2 fuel and thus eliminate the entire fuel distribution infrastructure. The hurdle for H2 air transport is not the fuel but need for a H2 turbine with sufficient thrust, a total new air frame for fuel volume, and all new avionics to handle H2 pressure/temperature charactaristics.
Modular nuke plants also permit electric power ocean transport.
The argument from big numbers doesn’t make sense – remember when IBM’s Watson predicted the world wide demand for computers might reach as high as five units? People who thought we could never build or use a billion of the things were ridiculed..
Want a real argument? wait until Musk’s Australian battery park catches fire.
Mod,
can we get rid of the troll posting with different names please? I don’t think anyone on here minds debating anything, but not with an idiot who thinks it’s clever to play a very bad game of hide and seek.
Didi
JimGord
Andyj
Robert
Douglas B Kerr
Heikki Laukkanen
T Rives
Delnari
nixfu
All appear to be one and the same person.
Didi
JimGord
Andyj
Robert
Douglas B Kerr
Heikki Laukkanen
T Rives
Delnari
nixfu
All appear to be one and the same person.
Seems like you need some air.
IMO,the consumer should choose his or her vehicle without government telling them or providing subsides or direction given individual costs and benefits including gas, electric, convenience, repairs, safety,etc. Tesla is a government subsidy farmer only making Elon Musk rich. The marketed environmentalism of an EV is fake, Externalities are a farce if looking at upstream electricity generation at say a coal power plant or that CO2 is not warming the planet.
The electric car industry is saturated and only a small percentage of the market are EV buyers. I forecast in ten years that electric cars will become disposable throwaway vehicles when they become high mileage filling landfills. A consumer with 100,000 miles on an old model EV with a dead or slowly dying battery needing more frequent discharges may not blow the enormous $10,000 on a new battery and just toss it in a junk yard instead,melt it down for scrap aluminum. We have owners of most gas powered vehicles not willing to pay say a mere $2,000 to replace a blown engine with a brand new rebuilt engine with zero mileage which would last another 100,000 miles. This is normal. Why would EV owners behave differently? EVs will become disposable cars when the battery runs out. Manufacturers will eventually make cheaper body/chassis/interior/circuit boards/etc. parts etc compensate with that for cheaper front end sales prices.
As far as big car manufacturers, they normally plan on making substantial money by replacement costs through the life of the vehicle in addition to sales price. A BMW owner may expect $1,000 a year in replacement pats and maintenance for life of vehicle which may be more than gas used. It is part of profit equation. If fast charging EVs deplete the battery quicker, well that equates to more battery sales. The optional warranties are often designed to run out just before parts do like milk expiration dates. How many owners of old rechargeable battery powered lawn movers replace the battery at $100 or just toss them? EV manufacturers are for sure figuring in profits from future battery sales, some which may not materialize. For those with warranties, note that they die in bankruptcy or become unsecured creditors waiting years for a possibility of a partial payoff given if smart enough to file a legal a claim. If looking at Tesla’s books, more likely they will land in Chapter 11 voiding any warranty now worthless and a $10,000 owner cost to keep the old EV running. Because of the expensive batteries which need replacing EVs will become the disposable throw away cars of the future inasmuch as paper cups. Again, how many gas vehicle owners would shell out $10,000 for a new engine on an old car at say 100,000 miles? Why would EV owners be different?
Lord, Mr. Ford https://g.co/kgs/NjA9yt
Remember this?
Smog was Carbon Monoxide that Catalytic Converters made Carbon Dioxide and because the Anti-Knock Lead Tetrabromide plugged them up a new Unleaded tech had to be created… Creating the increase in Carbon Dioxide scare tactics… That led to the Clean Energy Standards of Fuel Efficient Vehicles and CAFE Standards… Then this Hybrid push for lower emissions and then EV cars. At some point I expect the Horse and Buggy to come back…
all buildings and cars will be the “new smart grid”
the utility companies will be the distributor, facilitator, broker, etc..etc..whatever you want to call it
yes, the rebates are “social engineering” and giving tax money to private industries, but in the long run and big picture it is needed.
the good news is that eventually the market will open and one will be able to sell their excess power at their own discretion, being able to hold onto it until the for sale price suits them.
Solar is only a part of it, the real growth/opportunity is in batteries, which are set to be the next big household must have, like a washing machine or dishwasher, and will be purchased by renters, apartment/condo/townhouse dwellers who can’t install solar, but can still get in on the new smart-grid and the market that will come with it.