More problems with wet lithium ion batteries - Port of Miami fire

Heh? They are already all those things. Electric motors/battery systems are FAR more reliable than ICE, electric cars are inherently safer due to weight distribution and layout options and catch fire less frequently than ICE cars, electric cars are already cheap in china, range is far more dependent on aerodynamics than weight, if we double energy density weight will be almost equivalent to ice cars. There are a number of elec cars with greater range than normal ICE cars. We are nowhere near the limits of batteries. It's not the end of the story, as you will see in the very near future. You are actually seeing it right now, but choosing not to. Batteries are about to hit $50 a kwh at the pack level. CATL's new battery will almost double energy density. Where in the world are you getting your information?

 

Nice to read somebody who is pro electrical propulsion. Energy density is far from gasoline IMO.
I remember when we go hundreds km by the river and we throwing smokin cigarette butts into mix of gas and water on the bottom aft. Or my friends putting cigarette buts into gas tank of my bike
Or can you inagine PT boat powered by lithium cells ?

 

Yes, upgrading capacity is the easy part. It's centralized, regulated, well understood, and you can create the conditions to raise the necessary capital any time you want to. But the grid is another matter entirely. For many in the developed world, their service will get worse - a lot worse - and cost more, particularly in high density areas where all the substations have been built out and maxed out decades ago. There is no land or rights-of-way available for improved delivery. Instead of electric vehicles, I think a more probable future for many looks like people using their diesel trucks to carry batteries around for powering other stuff because the grid can't deliver even the basics. I got a glimpse of this after hurricane Helene wiped out the grid in western North Carolina for about a month. We had 70,000 additional linemen respond. Soon, those resources may not be available to deal with such emergencies. Critically, people who are mostly capable of independent living with the assistance of electric powered technology become instantly dependent on caregivers just to survive. We lost hundreds of diabetics and elderly people when their assistive devices failed. The practical solution is distributed power generation. It's gotten much cheaper and better and there's a lot more of it, but what it is not is efficient. Even with grid losses factored in, most distributed power options are still more costly to operate than peak grid rates - at least if they are capable of actually providing all essential needs with high reliability.

So no, it won't all be paid back unless you have a few huge consumers, and then the utility becomes dependent on those buyers (and they don't like not having monopoly power). Big consumers such as server farms are already building their own power stations and islanding because they need better quality now. The retail utility customer isn't going to pay more for worse service, they will move or generate their own. Nobody wants to deal with the hard problems.

 

Well, wrong on basically every point, but that's fine, because it doesn't matter anyway.

 

Police probing cybertruck explosion at Trump Las Vegas hotel https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7qd97eyp0o

 

No, I'm not. All my points are verifiable if you care to look. $50 pack level prices may take a bit longer than I indicated, but it's not far away.

 

I have worked on research and the numbers don't lie. There is a lot of hype and conspiracy theories, but the fact is that electric vehicles won't solve the problem. Covering the Earth with solar panels will only create an environmental disaster. The ugly truth that most people don't want to face is that we are at the start of another major change in social and personal behavior. Many years ago, people wanted land so they went to unpopulated areas and claimed them. Now, pretty much the whole planet is owned by someone. The next generation won't be able to drive a personal vehicle whenever they want. They probably won't be able to have large homes with enourmous laws. Land will be returned to food production.

 

I just did some math. Taking average US household energy use and miles driven; it would take just over 0.01% of the worlds land area covered in solar to account for this. To put in perspective, for the US population that is less than half of the average roof area covered in solar. This is a gross overestimation, because most of the world population uses WAY less energy per capita for household and personal transportation. Obviously this doesn't take into account industrial/commercial energy use, which outweighs the previously stated energy use by a large margin. But still, it demonstrates that you don't have to come close to "covering the Earth in solar panels" to provide the energy necessary to run human civilization. Given that much of the power will come from other sources(hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, geothermal, etc) the situation looks even better. In other words, energy production is not the problem. Energy storage and distribution is a much bigger challenge. But with more localized energy infrastructure distribution is less of an issue. With distributed energy storage peak grid loads can be greatly reduced. If energy storage density can be doubled and cost halved, which is very possible and likely in the near future, the problem is mostly solved. It then becomes just a matter of intelligent implementation. The way I see it, clinging to fossil fuels is just delaying a necessary transition.

Yep

 

If solar panels and wind turbines were made from unicorn farts they'd be a solution, but they aren't. They have a significant environmental cost to make, which frequently is not amortized before they reach end of life.

No one uses Lithium cobalt cells because they are safest, because they really aren't. No one uses them to help the environment because they are a horrifying environmental nightmare. They use them because they currently have the highest practical energy density. The identical criterion under which solid rocket fuel is selected. And they still have 1/40 the energy density of gasoline or diesel. So any claim that they can have comparable range, at a comparable weight, financial and environmental cost to an ICE equipped vehicle is a contemptable lie.

And @gonzo is correct about the grid. The overwhelming majority of urban grids worldwide do not have the extra capacity to go electric anyway. Nonsense to the contrary, mining the copper and aluminum to double earth's grid capacity also can't be fueled by angel dust and unicorn fartz. That is in fact a colossal amount of energy. In a world where well meaning people still obstruct nuclear power, that nightmare energy expenditure will be mostly coal powered. And it's not even as good as that. We've already mined the easy metals. Doing it again with poor quality ores is so much worse.

But we will continue to spend a river of money to continue to increase our percapita output instead of reducing it, all in the name of greenwashing. The imbeciles in Germany actually turned off their nuclear power plants in favour wind and solar, despite the fact that Germany doesn't get much wind, and almost no sun. So after vast capital costs, and dreadful environmental damage in making the stuff, their per capita greenhouse gas emissions went waaaay up, not down. Imbeciles!

I believe climate change is real. I believe it is caused by human activity. That doesn't mean we should make it worse

 

Argh. Typical energy payback is 4 years, assuming a 30 year life cycle, which is more than realistic. There are many studies on this. I worked in solar for over 4 years, I kinda know what I'm talking about. Even after that point old panels are still producing quite a bit of energy relative to their original output. Of course there are other system components that may need replacement(Inverters), but even then energy payback is less than 5 years. Typical financial payback is 7-10 years. This should be lower, but many solar companies are ripping people off. Still good though, you are basically printing money after that.

If you read my response to Gonzo, you will see how grid demand could potentially be reduced in the future. Before too long, in many places, it may not even make financial sense to be tied to the grid in the first place. Grid energy cost continues to rise, while solar and battery cost is declining rapidly. I would posit that this may already be the case in less developed nations. The problem is that these people don't have the capital to invest.

The grid power cost trend may reverse however, due to increased deployment of solar and other "renewable" energy sources meeting more and more of the grid energy demand, since it has become cheaper than fossil fuel energy production.

You are failing to consider several factors. The main one is efficiency; electric cars are 3 to 4 times more energy efficient. The propulsion is quite heavy in ice cars, you have the engine, transmission and other drive components, mounts, fuel tank, exhaust, shielding, etc. Most of these components are eliminated in an electric car, which offsets much of the weight. And as I mentioned before, weight makes little difference in overall efficiency, actually very little considering regenerative braking recovers much of that energy in city driving. Many electric cars are actually more efficient in the city than on the highway. Additionally, the flexibility in design with electric cars allows weight savings in many areas of the car, along with more flexibility in overall design, allowing for better aerodynamics, by far the largest factor in efficiency of electric cars, especially on the highway. Anyways, for all those reasons along with ever increasing energy density of batteries, it is very realistic that electric cars could be comparable in weight to ice cars. The Tesla Model S only weighs 500 lbs more than the 95 Impala SS i used to own, a comparable vehicle, though the model s is immensely more capable. If you look at the curb weights of modern comparable SUVs to the model X, they are similar. Same is true comparing many tesla models to their ice counterparts. Interesting... Does that mean that electric cars will end up weighing less?

All that said, I get pissed about the greenwashing lies related to electric and hybrid vehicles, but the ice industry spews just as many lies. Electric vehicles are good enough now to stand on their own merits. And if you are in to performance they blow the doors off any ice car. Lying just gives the fossil fuel industry ammunition.

Here is an energy density graph:

But based on CATL's recent announcement, the projection on the graph may be bunk. CATL has a way of following through.

Anyways, the capital financial and resource cost will be relatively quickly compensated, especially considering technological trends in energy storage and production. This is to say nothing of potential improvements in energy efficiency of devices(heat pumps as a recent example).

No matter how you slice it, we CANNOT continue to use fossil fuels as a primary energy source into the future.

 

The battery didn't catch fire in this explosion, amazingly enough.

 

You're definitely right. And even Cybertruck done good job protecting something .
My attention was focus once when stock Rivian makes Hells Gate . It's impressive.

 

That may be correct in a limited temperature range. At low temperatures like we get for a large part of the year, the batteries drop up to half the energy output. In really hot weather, the power managements cuts the power to prevent overheating. I worked on research focusing on electrolytes for while. They work well at a limited temperature range. At low temperature, the belief was that is was freezing. What happens is that the temperature is too low for the energy required for the chemical reactions needed. It behaves like if you mix epoxy and put it in the freezer.

 

This may be true, but it doesn't take that much energy to keep a battery warm enough to operate within the acceptable temperature range, at least outside of the most extreme climates.

Weather hot enough to be a problem is rare almost anywhere in the world. Power limiting in an electric car wouldn't be a big deal. I haven't heard of any problems here in the sonoran desert, where it gets pretty darn hot for months out of the year. I can see it being a problem where you need sustained high charge/discharge rates for long periods of time.

The electric bike I built still has most of it's capacity after 7 years with no thermal management.

Tesla and others have already done a good job of engineering their way around thermal issues.

 

Since we are on a boat forum there should be no problem with cell operating temperature. Unless you are a high latitude sailor. I mean access to coolant is unlimited.