Yep, so often used like it makes the original problem go away.
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Thanks for posting this. The presentation just highlights the challenges ahead ( and the investment case for going long copper stocks) . I was hoping to buy an electric car in 3 yrs , but given the payoff is negligible vs fossil fuel powered,( over the life cycle ), I wonāt be too concerned if petrol cars are the cheaper alternative, and I stick with those.
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This discussion comes out of the Manhattan Institute which is a right wing āthink tankā which denies climate change and promotes hydraulic fracking. There are many errors in their logic.
I have done my sums on what I will save in running costs in my first year of Tesla 3 ownership. If I continue to drive at my current levels over a year then I will save nearly $8000, when you add in fuel, service, rego and insurance.
Obviously not sure how the resale value will stack up, but I paid about the same $80,000, for my previous Lexus car, which I traded after 4 years for $32,000. Even if I get only $20,000 after 4 years, I will still be ahead by about $20,000.
There are pros and cons in owning EV over ICE. Tesla 3 is very much fun to drive, but my Lexus was a fine car. I do have to plan trips much better, and Mrs Fox and I are driving to Lismore in a few weeks and taking the EV is just a bit hard with a lack of rapid supercharging options at present, so we will take her Lexus. This will improve over time.
But I love driving the EV past Servos and laughing.
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If you can set yourself up with a decent size home solar setup, in the 5-10kW range, you can become pretty self sufficient. Challenge is that this really requires charging at home during the day, which doesnāt work for the daily commuters.
People are really going to need to model their usage to work out whatās the best way to recharge their EV over the long term.
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Yeah, itāll depend on lifestyle a lot. I work from home most days, and only have a short drive to the railway station on the office days. Plus, i have access to power where i park my car at home, and a pretty solid (if old and not-up-to-current-efficiency) solar setup. It makes a lot of sense for me. The only issue is recharging if Iām on long roadtrip or something.
Maybe less useful if you work in a trade and have to park your truck outside a different clientās place every day, and have drive all over the city, often at peak hour, to get there. Or if you work in deliveries, couriering, etc etc which means you literally end up driving all day. But thatād be a minority of vehicles on the road.
My current car is 2008 and an absolute gas guzzler (i got dadās v8 Calais when he treated himself to an upgrade as a 70th present), but I drive it so little that its emissions donāt weigh on my conscience too much, and itās easily got another 5-10 years in it. I reckon the next one I buy will be an EV of some sort though, once the charging network starts getting some sort of critical mass.
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Thereās a lot of development going into replacable battery packs for courier vehicles. The freight depot would have a charge station and hot swap out the battery packs when each van came back for a new load of deliveries. Doesnāt work for all courier and freight requirements, but it would make a pretty big dent in that industries hydrocarbon need.
Recently the 3 year long La Nina ended and there was no better illustration of the linkage between the US West Coast and the Australian East coast .
As soon stopped raining in temperate Australia, it started to bucket down (and snow) in California and on the sierra nevada.
Just as well for the USA as the drought was dire.
The El Nino period we are about to get might be dire for us in temperate Australia.
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Winter drought in France and other parts Europe.
Yesterday snowing in the Netherlands in Spring.
Victoria will get good surf again thank goodness
Personally Iād prefer the surf to be flat and calm while Iām trying to hide from the bushfires in the seaā¦
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Please, resources will be scarce. I need the ocean to whittle down the competition.
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Oopsie, nice big leak of Shellās internal climate change strategy documents for the last couple of decades. Short summary - they knew exactly what the stakes were, they nonetheless deliberately chose to spread denialist propaganda in the interests of making more money, and the world is now pretty much on the trajectory of the worst-case climate scenario that Shell themselves forecast in 1989.
Thread:
Original documents:
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Thought Iād share some interesting hydrogen stuff. This doesnāt appear to be in the public realm, so Iāll talk in generalities until I see this in the news.
Australia has an absolutely enormous amount of gas delivery infrastructure. Long distance transmission will have a lot of problems in transporting hydrogen, but the lower pressure residential stuff is perfectly suited for a 10-30% methane/hydrogen blend without modification.
Thereās currently a big push to electrify everything, strip out all gas appliances and run with pure electricity. The problem with that is it shifts an absolutely incredible extra load onto the electricity grid in a time where we are trying to replace coal. The build out for solar and wind would need to be doubled or tripled to eliminate both coal and gas at the same time. Cutting gas too early could result in coal plants staying on longer and far more transmission lines built. Itās one of those awkward non-PC real world engineering problems that we are about to face.
So what we hopefully see in the coming years is a bunch of entrepreneurial hydrogen generation, thatās tapped into the gas network. Small electrolyser plants that use cheap daytime solar to split hydrogen, then drip feed it into the gas grid overnight for heating. It would stop the daytime solar electricity price crash and provide night time lower carbon energy. Think a small hydrogen plant at the pipeline feed into each town and suburb, using the local rooftop solar.
Longer term 100% hydrogen can be piped into houses, but the safety measures would need to be increased. Hydrogen / methane blend can be safely used with existing appliances, but pure hydrogen will need gas monitoring to avoid explosions.
I find that idea really interesting. We could roll it out really quickly and it would reduce the problems we face with the renewable electricity storage headache. Hopefully this gets the a decent amount of government support. My concern is the government will fear greenie push back and it will be labelled a con to protect the gas industry.
Anyway, itās a different tool for solving the problem and one that I havenāt seen in the public space.
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Legitimate question, as I donāt know but can see this problem: do we have enough water in the driest continent and at times of prolonged drought to support that much hydrogen harvesting?
My legit answer isā¦ I donāt know. But I donāt think itāll be a big problem. Most of our population is along the coast, so sea water could be used. I donāt think youād need drinking quality water either.
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I donāt know how much water would be needed to crack into enough hydrogen to use as methane replacement but someone should be able to calculate that. In times of drought we donāt have enough water for our water needs.
OK, I see you have added using sea water. Good point. But raises another issueā¦With desalination as well that icould drive seas to be hypersaline in the long term.
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My understanding is hypersalinity would be a localised problem. Water isnāt permanently taken out of the ocean, long term it would flow or rain back in. But if the saline rich return line is dumped into a low current area, the salinity could grow quite high. That can be engineered out with a well designed bit of pipe work.
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People said that once about carbon dioxide not causing a problem in the atmosphere. How has that worked out?
And look at this:
left = volume of oceans; right = volume of atmosphere if air was at sea level density.
Sure more countries pump out carbon than will pump out salt but letās not sleepwalk into another global disaster