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Get over yourself, and talk about the truck, not how star spangled awesome you are for driving 8 cylinders towing your doublewide down the interstate.
By the way, I am star spangled awesome driving with 8 cylinders towing my doublewide down the interstate....with my legally licensed side-arm appendix carried against my rock-hard abs! AMERICA RULES!
(Actually it is 6 cylinders with EB........but your sentence sounded better!)
What I said was hydro development is essentially capped in the US for environmental reasons and offers no potential for expansion to power EVs or existing demands. The fact is renewables in the US account for only 20% of electric power production, including hydro, to serve EXISTING power demands not including the added power demands of expanding the EV fleet. The consequence of this FACT is every time an EV is plugged in it consumes fossil fuels. You can allocate the limited renewable power sources to EVs but then you must SUBTRACT the allocation from existing demand. It’s a zero sum analysis the EV fanboys refuse to acknowledge. Further, EVs are a relatively inefficient use of electric power. If you care about carbon reduction better to apply the very limited renewable power supplies to higher efficiency existing demand. None of this fits your narrative but these are the inconvenient FACTS!
Actually, nuclear energy would be an answer to this, but folks are so nuclear afraid they never talk about its potential.
If people want to get more educated about power generation and the challenges ahead that we face, Bill Gates' latest book explains it in clear language. You don't have to agree with the conclusions, but it may make our challenges more understandable. Hydro is of course mentioned, and how there is basically zero ability to add any more due to environmental concerns. Nuclear has the issue that there are no new designs for something like 50 years, and there needs to be. He's invested some of his money in companies trying to find the next things to be doing (his motives don't matter, read to understand the challenges). How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.
Thank you! That is the obvious solution yet remains politically incorrect. Its coming though, because significant renewable power expansion isn’t environmentally or technically feasible. EVs must wait until non fossil fuel power is real and that is going to take a long time.
Can't wait. New nuclear is too far off. If you read Gates' book, he explains the effort to get more of things like wind power, solar power, nuclear power, cleaner fossil fuel power, etc. and how long. He also shows the cost per energy unit, and the SPACE per energy unit, required for each type of power. As you would expect, nuclear is the most efficient in space, but he notes that with the current design that's not going to happen, and that the approval process for a new design coupled with building is decades of time.
Agreed, rapid expansion of nuclear is a decade away. So are other renewables. In fact, renewable expansion will become harder and costlier because the easy applications are done. Expansion of wind turbines off shore is a good example of the future of wind: high cost to develop, high cost to maintain and short life span. These realities form my basis for pessimism of EVs. We simply don’t have the means to power them and they are an inefficient use of electricity. I don’t argue on the quirks of EVs. I argue against EVs on the basis of the false representation that EVs are an environmental improvement.
This is also why I've always thought hybrids were the perfect compromise. But the climate change folks refuse to consider anything that still uses fossil fuels, even if at a reduced rate.
Agreed, rapid expansion of nuclear is a decade away. So are other renewables. In fact, renewable expansion will become harder and costlier because the easy applications are done. Expansion of wind turbines off shore is a good example of the future of wind: high cost to develop, high cost to maintain and short life span. These realities form my basis for pessimism of EVs. We simply don’t have the means to power them and they are an inefficient use of electricity. I don’t argue on the quirks of EVs. I argue against EVs on the basis of the false representation that EVs are an environmental improvement.
Almost. Rapid expansion of nuclear is several decades away.
The real focus needs to be on the biggest power users we have. Gates explains them very clearly, and you go duh. Cement production and steel production produce more emissions every year than all the passenger vehicles in the entire world. We have to develop ways to produce these products in a way that causes no emissions (currently impossible, has to be discovered / invented).
06-01-2021, 08:52 AM
