The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
I think people forget that if we build enough solar, we’ll have such an energy surplus that it’ll be essentially free to electrify stuff and use that energy.
Losses from transformation and transmission go away as soon as the resource is unlimited.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are “counted” different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it’s needed?
Indeed, this would be a key metric, and probably someone has already done this work. If my hedging guy (who also covers our EUA/ETS biz) in London has this data, I’ll post it.
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn’t even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
I think if we just tax vehicles at the rate they destroy the road, we’d quickly see folks stop having giant vehicles. Set the standard as a bicycle (and be unreasonable about the weight, so 25kg), and then use the lovely X^4 function to determine how much to tax.
A bicycle (and let’s just say the average person is 100kg, and added to the bicycle’s weight, to be unreasonable again) costs $0.50 to register… while the f350 (found a weight for the lightest around 6000 lbs, or 2721.5kg) should be about $0.50 * (2721.5kg/125kg)^4 = $112347.47. I think that would do just fine. Maybe we could adjust down a little, so the bike could be $0.05, and the truck $11234.75.
I know… and I also know that we currently depend on truck rigs for shipping in everything, so the taxes would ultimately focus on them MUCH MORE than even the assholes in their coal rollers. That would mean the ‘punishing’ factor of the taxation would be diluted for them, even if we used GCWR of a vehicle as the standard for taxing.
For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
All it takes is political willpower and courage to change stuff for the better, we (humanity) are smart enough to find solutions, we just don’t have the courage, right now and do stupid things out of fear (like voting for people who claim to give security but do only more fear mongering only to sell more security measures that don’t solve any problems long term)
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Yup, which I’ve been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
We have variable pricing available here, the problem is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.
😂 i can relate, but I imagined that you can program it to sell if higher than x and buy when lower than y, and you tell it that at tt:mm you need z kwh ready 😄
“very long time” here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it’ll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we’re putting biofuel on a truck, it’s worth considering. I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we’re making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there’s no incentive to switch.
We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used.
Residential and Commercial & Industrial (C&I) Solar + Storage (SS) disproves this.
For transportation, I agree it’s tough. Germany trialed a highway designed with overhead catenary power lines like electrified trains use but for trucks. Can’t remember if it was successful or not. Shouldn’t be hard to build out catenaries across national highways. The circuits can be aluminum to save on costs, and you incentivize adding generation along highways, further giving reason to build EV charging stations.
Electrification can’t fix everything, sure, but I think we should be ramping it up more than we already have.
I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse.
Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
Oh yeah, it’s inefficient as hell. But energy from the sun is coming to us whether we harvest it or not. It’s unlimited. The limitation is solar cells.
We’re at the point where we’ve basically run out of easy oil to access, and we’re coming up with bigger and deeper drilling methods. We spend billions on a single offshore rig that will function for 10-20 years at most.
Batteries carry a lot less energy per kilogram, so transporting them uses more energy than transporting biofuels. You also have to carry empty batteries back to the source rather than it being a one way trip. It could be feasible on rails, but those are two major limitations compared to just running some big cables over land. The weight problem also means that some amount of combustible fuel will always be necessary, since batteries and aviation are not compatible.
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
I think people forget that if we build enough solar, we’ll have such an energy surplus that it’ll be essentially free to electrify stuff and use that energy.
Losses from transformation and transmission go away as soon as the resource is unlimited.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are “counted” different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it’s needed?
Indeed, this would be a key metric, and probably someone has already done this work. If my hedging guy (who also covers our EUA/ETS biz) in London has this data, I’ll post it.
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn’t even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
I think if we just tax vehicles at the rate they destroy the road, we’d quickly see folks stop having giant vehicles. Set the standard as a bicycle (and be unreasonable about the weight, so 25kg), and then use the lovely X^4 function to determine how much to tax.
A bicycle (and let’s just say the average person is 100kg, and added to the bicycle’s weight, to be unreasonable again) costs $0.50 to register… while the f350 (found a weight for the lightest around 6000 lbs, or 2721.5kg) should be about $0.50 * (2721.5kg/125kg)^4 = $112347.47. I think that would do just fine. Maybe we could adjust down a little, so the bike could be $0.05, and the truck $11234.75.
Yes, but that makes sense. Don’t you know that’s not allowed?! /s
I know… and I also know that we currently depend on truck rigs for shipping in everything, so the taxes would ultimately focus on them MUCH MORE than even the assholes in their coal rollers. That would mean the ‘punishing’ factor of the taxation would be diluted for them, even if we used GCWR of a vehicle as the standard for taxing.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
We really should be looking more into reducing car dependency as well.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
All it takes is political willpower and courage to change stuff for the better, we (humanity) are smart enough to find solutions, we just don’t have the courage, right now and do stupid things out of fear (like voting for people who claim to give security but do only more fear mongering only to sell more security measures that don’t solve any problems long term)
Just like mayor fisk
No thanks, we prefer to vote for people who blame immigrants for all problems we are told we have.
Yup, which I’ve been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.
We have variable pricing available here, the problem is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.
😂 i can relate, but I imagined that you can program it to sell if higher than x and buy when lower than y, and you tell it that at tt:mm you need z kwh ready 😄
If you’re driving a car every day, you’re the problem
Good strategy, blame individuals for systemic problems lol
“very long time” here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it’ll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we’re putting biofuel on a truck, it’s worth considering. I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we’re making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there’s no incentive to switch.
Residential and Commercial & Industrial (C&I) Solar + Storage (SS) disproves this.
For transportation, I agree it’s tough. Germany trialed a highway designed with overhead catenary power lines like electrified trains use but for trucks. Can’t remember if it was successful or not. Shouldn’t be hard to build out catenaries across national highways. The circuits can be aluminum to save on costs, and you incentivize adding generation along highways, further giving reason to build EV charging stations.
Electrification can’t fix everything, sure, but I think we should be ramping it up more than we already have.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
Oh yeah, it’s inefficient as hell. But energy from the sun is coming to us whether we harvest it or not. It’s unlimited. The limitation is solar cells.
We’re at the point where we’ve basically run out of easy oil to access, and we’re coming up with bigger and deeper drilling methods. We spend billions on a single offshore rig that will function for 10-20 years at most.
The issue isn’t efficiency, it’s profit motive.
We have fuel tanker trucks and rail cars already. Could we not run a similar arrangement with batteries on a truck or train car?
Batteries carry a lot less energy per kilogram, so transporting them uses more energy than transporting biofuels. You also have to carry empty batteries back to the source rather than it being a one way trip. It could be feasible on rails, but those are two major limitations compared to just running some big cables over land. The weight problem also means that some amount of combustible fuel will always be necessary, since batteries and aviation are not compatible.
Hence why we should work towards vehicles like The Cyclops with power outlets