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Ok. So you do not buy it. go to afdc.gov electrical map. Now, click on more options and change charger types to DC fast. No level 2 or others. Then go to connectors and select only dc fast, without Tesla ( chademo and sae combo). Then tell us how many routes you have for crossing the nation.
Now, go to https://supercharge.info./ tell us how many routes that cross the nation, and to make it fun, tell us where you can cross the nation ( only North Dakota ). Quite the difference.

Lies... https://www.afdc.energy.gov/da... This chart depicts the number of transit buses in use in the United States, categorized by fuel type, from 2007 to 2015. In all years shown, diesel buses represent the largest portion of total buses, with natural gas buses a distant second.

Compressing natural gas from essentially 0 bar gauge (1 bar absolute) to 170 bar takes ideally about 110 kWh/kg. Liquefying it from a the same starting point takes about 270 kWh/kg.

I'd call that considerably more than a "little bit" more expensive. It's considerably more than twice as much, and that's before accounting for increased plant cost which has to be amortized.

And liquefaction efficiency is poor at small scale. A 1 gal/d plant is about 10% efficient. A 100,000 gal/d plant is about 35% efficient. I doubt if compression efficiency is much dependent on scale.

Reference - warning: PDF
bar = psi / 14.7
kWh/kg = Wh/lb * 0.646

If you google "put yourself on time magazine cover" (no quotes) [lmgtfy.com] you get dozens of websites that allow you to do just that, for any number of magazines... this isn't some fringe thing Trump invented.

So what you're saying is, it's easy, so easy, yet nobody else is reported to be hanging them in their businesses to promote themselves?

I don't care to research them, but suffice to say Trump has been covered/reported on in Time magazine, and I'm not sure if the articles cited on the fake Time cover are real, and if real were from the issue with the fake cover photo.

You should care, he's managed to lie about it. That's kinda why it hurts him. Not only did he make a FALSE boast, he FAKED covers.

Finally, it's odd and embarrassing that the photos/fake covers were on the wall at some of his golf clubs, but does it, in any meaningful way, matter?

Yes, and so does your breathless defense of it. Not only are you unable to admit to the nature of this behavior, you rush to defend or excuse it, as you handle every malfeasance Trump does.

Really, you can't even stand up against this? That speaks volumes about yourself.

Also, since you asked:

Not quite sure how the government 'profits' from loan guarantees - please explain how that works. The loans weren't issued by the government and the interest wasn't paid to the government.

Well, it turns out that they do get paid, much like a reinsurer gets paid. Read about the loan program. You do realize, by being so obviously uninformed, you are also saying something about YOUR character, right? They don't just hand over money, they set requirements, and costs, which are lower than commercial interests, but that's because it is an investment program meant to stimulate things that the commercial banks aren't doing, but it isn't a lottery, like you seem to think.

Even Solyndra made a case, and again, you know what cost them? Chinese investments in their own solar factories, rendering our mediocre investments less effective. But still, we got a nice factory out of it, unlike say, the Bernie Madoff victims, who got hosed. They produced a product. Those robots worked. China? Dumped Solar Panels nonetheless. Oh well.

Trump, BTW, has the same problem. Serious misjudgments of how people react to him, from his "Who knew Healthcare was so complicated" to "Firing Comey was entirely within my authority" to "The President can't have a conflict of interest" to "The President's intentions don't matter when it comes to banning Muslims!" and the like.

You should really reflect on that.

If you google "put yourself on time magazine cover" (no quotes) [lmgtfy.com] you get dozens of websites that allow you to do just that, for any number of magazines... this isn't some fringe thing Trump invented.

So what you're saying is, it's easy, so easy, yet nobody else is reported to be hanging them in their businesses to promote themselves?

I don't care to research them, but suffice to say Trump has been covered/reported on in Time magazine, and I'm not sure if the articles cited on the fake Time cover are real, and if real were from the issue with the fake cover photo.

You should care, he's managed to lie about it. That's kinda why it hurts him. Not only did he make a FALSE boast, he FAKED covers.

Finally, it's odd and embarrassing that the photos/fake covers were on the wall at some of his golf clubs, but does it, in any meaningful way, matter?

Yes, and so does your breathless defense of it. Not only are you unable to admit to the nature of this behavior, you rush to defend or excuse it, as you handle every malfeasance Trump does.

Really, you can't even stand up against this? That speaks volumes about yourself.

Also, since you asked:

Not quite sure how the government 'profits' from loan guarantees - please explain how that works. The loans weren't issued by the government and the interest wasn't paid to the government.

Well, it turns out that they do get paid, much like a reinsurer gets paid. Read about the loan program. You do realize, by being so obviously uninformed, you are also saying something about YOUR character, right? They don't just hand over money, they set requirements, and costs, which are lower than commercial interests, but that's because it is an investment program meant to stimulate things that the commercial banks aren't doing, but it isn't a lottery, like you seem to think.

Even Solyndra made a case, and again, you know what cost them? Chinese investments in their own solar factories, rendering our mediocre investments less effective. But still, we got a nice factory out of it, unlike say, the Bernie Madoff victims, who got hosed. They produced a product. Those robots worked. China? Dumped Solar Panels nonetheless. Oh well.

Trump, BTW, has the same problem. Serious misjudgments of how people react to him, from his "Who knew Healthcare was so complicated" to "Firing Comey was entirely within my authority" to "The President can't have a conflict of interest" to "The President's intentions don't matter when it comes to banning Muslims!" and the like.

You should really reflect on that.

Oh, and finally, the program under which the Federal government provided loan guarantees to Solyndra actually made a profit for the US government.

Without the underlying numbers, "made a profit" is a meaningless statement. If you take a look at the Dept. of Energy's own rosy projections, you see that even they are not predicting the program will turn an actual (inflation-adjusted) profit.

For a loan portfolio around $30 billion, they're predicting $5 billion in interest payments over the entire term of the program, with average loan terms around 25 years. That $5 billion apparently does not account for defaults (over half a billion already over the first several years of the program, with around 20 years to go even assuming they haven't issued new loans since this 2014 report), but let's be super-generous and say they ultimately net the entire $5 billion. That's an average annual return of about 1.25% on the program's capital at risk -- not even enough to keep pace with inflation.

That's a disastrous return on invested capital that no investor in their right mind would consider (1) a success or (2) something worth even thinking about repeating.

I think I can safely predict that even you wouldn't voluntarily put your retirement savings into a fund that couldn't even keep up with inflation over a 25-year period.

literally isn't enough electricity production on earth to do this.

Solar energy is practically unlimited. If you add battery storage, then it becomes a truly practical energy source. And car batteries count as battery storage.

I mean, I can sorta show you what I think the problem is, but I think people will come to different conclusions on it.

https://energy.gov/gc/articles...

Energy Star was around 20 years old in 2011 when they finally launched a pilot program to actually test the manufacturer's claims. Unsurprisingly, they found that some were lying. Since there was third party testing involved, we run into an odd issue: the federal government has essentially said "some set of third party testers get to verify energy star, and, if they are ok with it, we will take their word on it and let you use the energy star branding".

Inevitably, this means that the manufacturers will find some way, in some cases, to scam the results. After all, if word gets out that YOU actually test the products but *I* provide the advertising star, I get to eat your lunch. The system incentivizes cheating, and it wasn't until the Obama administration that anyone had the balls to go look for said cheating.

You could make the case that the system really does make stuff more efficient, even when some participants cheat. After all, they aren't ALL cheating, and removing the system would probably replace it with nothing, or a possibly more corrupt private industry rubber-stamper. You could also make the case that the incentivization to cheat or not cheat shouldn't be coming from the federal government anyway, and that encouraging a small side industry in testing drama is wasteful and unethical.

What we will probably see is this: the mainstream media will jump all over it, as it is something to smear Trump with. Internet Trump Team will respond by claiming it is wasteful swampy garbage. No one will be convinced of anything, the facts won't matter in the slightest, and nothing will change in a meaningful way for anyone, except maybe the divisiveness in the country will grow a bit.

The article writer is Dawn Levy

"Dawn Levy is a science writer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy's 17 National Laboratories. She covers physics, chemistry and materials science."

She is neither a physicist, a chemist, or a materials scientist. She is a writer responsible for communications. And she is definitely not in the computer field.
And while she is undoubtedly smart enough to write about science, her role doesn't require her to be smart enough to be able to _do_ science.

Good scientists and programmers tend to be precisionist in their writing about their fields. Science writers (IMHO) much less so.

No.

https://energy.gov/fe/how-gas-...

CA pays your bills, bitch. We hand over much more money than we receive from the feds. I hope we do succeed and pull the useless fucking bigoted morons in the middle of our country from our overflowing teats.

I'd like to see how you guys end up rationing your energy when you can no longer connect to the grid of neighboring states. You know your state only provides about 60% of its own energy demands, right? Let me guess, you'll just cut the power to all of the poor people's houses so that the industry there can remain intact? May as well because there are so many homeless people (and multiple families crowded into one single family home) there that you may as well just make everybody who isn't making at least $200,000 a year go the rest of the way to destitution.

They don't get that energy for free. They pay for it you fool. The United States has interconnects and significant energy trade with both Canada and Mexico. Integrating North American Energy Markets - Department of Energy

You'd probably be surprised just HOW vulnerable most of the world's critical infrastructure really is.

Concerning power grids, no I wouldn't and people in the US and Canada would actually be surprised how well protected the bulk electrical system is here when compared to what is reported. Even small operators like to follow the security requirements that the large ones have to even if they don't as it does allow them to say that they are following the industry best practices which is a good CYA from lawsuits. Other countries are a different story and vary greatly but even those who hadn't cared much before are coming around after the Dec. 23, 2015 hack of the Ukranian grid caused a lot of European companies to collectively shit themselves.

I'll just leave a few things here for you. In the US and Canada those are either the regulations for cyber security of our power grid or specific requirements being written into contracts for new control systems for our power grid. All of them have to follow NERC CIP with the the other 2 being optional but widely used as a CYA. The Europeans do not have such requirements and it varies from country to country but those that do have regulations they are often very far behind even previous version of NERC CIP. That is not to say that those make you secure but they do offer a good start and following any one of those documents would provide more security than the preferred PCI DSS standard that everyone outside of power grid world thinks is great and the be all end all.

You obviously didn't read the study. Your assumptions are wrong and you have no numbers. Out here, each additional degree on the thermostat adds about ten per cent to the bill.

If your number is correct (which I doubt), that applies to keeping it low all the time. That's not what we're talking about.

From https://energy.gov/energysaver...:

You can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7-10F for 8 hours a day from its normal setting. The percentage of savings from setback is greater for buildings in milder climates than for those in more severe climates.

Like I said, in the single-digit range. (Changing the temperature setting even more wouldn't help because a house would barely drop 10F in 8 hours anyway.)

My average-sized house uses about 50 therms of gas per month for heating over an annual average, which is about the same as 50 gallons of gasoline. Throw in 50% extra for cooling in the summer, and you get the equivalent of 75 gallons per month for HVAC. So I can save about 7.5 gallons of gasoline per month with the setback thermostat.

If I have a fuel-efficient car, that would allow me to drive about 250 miles per month. So if I live more than about 6 miles from work, driving loses. That's not even considering offsetting the HVAC use of a corporate office which would not be needed.

http://www.energy.gov/science-...

The west coast is pretty much useless with an extremely short continental shelf.

About 58% of US wind resources off shore are in waters too deep to mount to the sea floor. Fortunately a lot of work is going into developing floating wind turbines so this should become a non-issue in due course.

According to the DOE the US has over 2,000 gigawatts of available wind power offshore which is more than enough in theory to supply the entire current electricity consumption of the US. Frankly we are being foolish to not take full advantage of offshore wind.

The east coast does not have reliable wind patterns for efficient wind generation.

That's evidently not true at least as a general proposition since they are installing wind farms on the east coast including the one discussed here near Rhode Island. I'm sure it's focally true for some areas but clearly not for the entire eastern seaboard.

We can wait for wind, solar, and battery technology to get cheaper but that does nothing for the carbon we'd be producing while we wait.

Every kilowatt generated by wind stops coal from producing almost twice that in thermal power. So yes, it does have an impact on reducing carbon as soon as it is implemented.

Reducing energy use, by personal choice or by imposing it on others with taxation, is a reduction of our standard of living.

Why? Technology has already adapted and it became viable to have LED lighting hit the market. This is an assumption that precludes adaptation by the market to fill a market niche.

This is not a political issue here, it's a question about if you have an open or closed mindset. Innovation happens all the time. Living standards will just change, and the idea of what a higher living standard is will change.

Nuclear power is both inexpensive and has a carbon footprint even lower than wind and solar.

Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the mining phase to extract the ore using traditional mining methods, if you are not pumping mega litres of sulfuric acid to do in-situ extraction (and destroying water tables in the process). 500tons of ore for 1 kilo of uranium, ~150 tons of uranium for the core of one reactor, 1/3 refuel every 18 months or so IIRC. It's roughly one third of the energy the reactor will produce over its lifetime.

Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the enrichment process as CFC114 is much more potent than methane as a greenhouse gas. IIRC, thousands of times more potent. You can't *not* enrich the fuel either.

Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the decommissioning and demolition phase, an energetic cost yet to be realized by the industry, because traditional methods of demolition cannot be used.

On the other hand the way wind scales is probably the biggest thing it has in it's favour, because existing sites can be retrofitted with upgraded technology, which lowers the energetic cost of maintain wind capacity.

We've been giving all kinds of money to the wind and solar industry for decades, through taxation and subsidies, in the hope it would be cheaper than coal someday. How much longer do we have to do this before it meets the definition of insanity?

Why not in parity with the Price-Anderson act, which has been extended repeatedly since the dawn of time for the nuclear industry which needs government assistance to cover its insurance liabilities. Or, why don't we just repeal the act and see how long the nuclear industry can remain?

One of Roosevelt's core 'New Deal' Act the PUCHA was repealed to benefit the nuclear industry with little fanfare from the press. Only for it to be subverted by the coal and oil industry who use proposals to build nuclear plants so they can get tax breaks for not building them. This is corporate welfare on a scale that makes social welfare looks like a kids pocket money. PUCHA was put in place to prevent a re-occurrence of the US depression from utilities doing *exactly* what they are doing now to raid the taxpayers wallets.

You can read it here in the 2005 US energy policy act SEC 600-635, and at the end of the document for the repeal of PUCHA.

assume assume

me thinks you assume too much.

Existing generators lobby against new technologies being implemented, whether it be through lobbying efforts to get laws passed or influencing RTO stakeholder processes to ensure those technologies are at a disadvantage in unregulated markets (making it harder for them to earn capacity revenue for instance). So your assertion that carrot and stick aren't needed is naïve.

Continuing, incremental improvements in renewables and battery technology, along with an increased focus on energy efficiency will be enough to reduce a countries emissions significantly (whether it is quick enough depends in large part on the will of the people to embrace the changes rather than forestall them). Here are some sources showing the progress we have been seeing in the US already. As you can see from some of those graphs, we are hitting the knee of the curve on wind and solar, and those technologies are new enough that the curve should have a while before it tapers off into an S-curve.

To be fair not all SCADA systems are as unprotected as you would imply but they are not the fortress for security one would hope. In North America there is the NERC CIP standards that need to be followed for grid operators which are a good start and should be approachable for most /. readers. The nice thing is that NERC has teeth and fines can be huge (I believe up to $1,000,000 per violation per day of non compliance) The NERC CIP standards go a whole lot farther than the other major standard that is mentioned often in these discussion which is PCI DSS which seems to be written more for managers who like check boxes. Another consideration is the Cybersecurity Procurement Language for Energy Delivery Systems which is being picked up by a number of organizations as a set of requirements. Then there is always the reasonable and prudent CIS Benchmarks for the OSes and software you are running. I do think that a lot of SWIFT operators think that something like PCI DSS is good enough but it isn't.

So, if I get this right, those Google cars cause about 0.5 accidents per 1M miles? If so, that equates to about 1.5M traffic accidents per year in the US if you replaced every car with a driverless model (assuming all rates are constant, of course). If that seems like a big number, Americans currently drive about 3 trillion miles per year and get into about 5.5 million traffic accidents. If I did the math right, driverless cars will result in about 2/3 fewer accidents per year than we experience now. Should we all welcome our autonomous vehicle overlords now?

http://www.usacoverage.com/aut...

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/dat...

Sure if you want to drive in circles around Mountain View at half the posted speed limit.

So, if I get this right, those Google cars cause about 0.5 accidents per 1M miles? If so, that equates to about 1.5M traffic accidents per year in the US if you replaced every car with a driverless model (assuming all rates are constant, of course). If that seems like a big number, Americans currently drive about 3 trillion miles per year and get into about 5.5 million traffic accidents. If I did the math right, driverless cars will result in about 2/3 fewer accidents per year than we experience now. Should we all welcome our autonomous vehicle overlords now?

http://www.usacoverage.com/aut...

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/dat...

95% of hydrogen gas currently produced in the United States is made using natural gas reforming: stripping the hydrogen atoms off methane (CH4) in the presence of a catalyst and water steam. As a waste product, you get mostly CO. CO can be further reacted with steam to liberate hydrogen from the water, resulting in more CO2.

some hydrogen is created via electrolysis of water, but the electricity used for that mostly comes from burning fossil fuels. Can you point to a large scale hydrogen production facility that is run entirely on wind and solar?

With nuclear, there is no such justification. Nuclear is not getting more cost effective. It is getting worse. Building and running a nuclear plant today is way more expensive than it was 50 years ago.

Indeed! The Price Anderson Act was a temporary measure for the Nuclear Industry. It was originally set to expire in 1967 once the industry had proved itself safe. Evidently it hasn't.

When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission she proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be the greatest non-problem in history and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2016, thirty years past that date and still there is no high level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even their project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.

However, this is the problem with the highly polarized dichotomy of this debate, it allows both "sides" loose sight of the other factions involved, that 'certain issues' exist in the debate. The first rudimentary core debate over nuclear power is storage of spent fuel. Why would oil and coal want that? It would promote more nuclear power. From their perspective such a facility is bad because it enables nuclear to eat into coal's market. It works for them that this is still an issue for nuclear.

You can see that played out in the document modified today. The Act they are talking about is the 2005 Energy Policy Act[warn:pdf]. It's a pretty interesting read. You can skip to SEC 600 for the stuff about the Nuclear Industry. I expect around SEC 613-625 of the Act will be the sections modified and there you will find funding for the owners of nuclear power plant, who are oil and coal interests building these reactors in the US.

Which, pro or anti nuclear aside, shows that a lot of these funds are simply going to Oil and Coal interests. With lobbying you can change the meaning of 'incentive' to 'welfare' for a lot less than building a nuclear reactor. I think it makes sense to be mindful of this additional dimension of the debate from the perspective of the taxpayer, that corporate welfare and political gain exists. Why is it the taxpayers responsibility that the operators can't meet the regulatory requirements and meet legal requirements in time?

I wonder how much 'spent fuel' infrastructure it would buy. How much spending on building railways from the many reactor sites to the repository. What about developing accelerator technology that transmutes non fuel waste products, how many STEM jobs there? That's a lot of jobs in a lot of places if science instead of politics is used to actually site the repository. Just some food for thought.

I see this is a loss for pro and anti nuclear folk, for different reasons. AP-1000 and EPR are the two approved reactor technology for the US. Nukkers aren't going to get their AP-1000s or EPRs any sooner because of this and everyone else is going to have their tax dollars sent to the oil and coal companies when it could be spent on solving nuclear infrastructure problems.

The rough translation is the Oil and Coal industry would like you to know, they're still in charge.

It contained the leak, yes, and the public is in no danger, but for workers in that facility it's a real problem, hence the cleanup expense

The amount of radioactivity released was estimated at 2 to 10 plutonium-equivalent Curies - not a small amount. While you could walk through the room and receive an insignificant dose from a meter away, if even a tiny fraction of that got into your body (e.g. via the contaminated ventilation system), that's an entirely different matter - close-range exposure for days or months is far more serious.

Did you read at least this wikipedia page you quote? I.e.:
"AEE points out that the average power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind power was already at $24/MWh in 2013.".
How can it come to 6.6-8.2 cnt/kWh when it was 2.4 cnt/kWh in 2013? This "projected for 2020" report is hopelessly out of date.
Check energy.gov for more current data:
http://energy.gov/eere/article...
In particular this report lists 2.35 cnt/kWh average PPA in 2014 (page 56):
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...

Did you read at least this wikipedia page you quote? I.e.:
"AEE points out that the average power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind power was already at $24/MWh in 2013.".
How can it come to 6.6-8.2 cnt/kWh when it was 2.4 cnt/kWh in 2013? This "projected for 2020" report is hopelessly out of date.
Check energy.gov for more current data:
http://energy.gov/eere/article...
In particular this report lists 2.35 cnt/kWh average PPA in 2014 (page 56):
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...

Good luck using your "spacious" car anywhere reasonably populated.

...my Yukon XL is an $80K truck...

So the price of a new EV comes between $20k for a Leaf (after incentives, etc) to $35k for the Model 3. Your truck is between 2 & 4(!!!) times the price of these vehicles - $45k to $65k more!

According to this site, your truck ranges between 12 & 16 miles to the gallon, so lets take the middle range & say you pay ($2.13/14) $0.15/mile. Engine maintenance seems to hover around $0.10/mile & depreciation reportedly averages 20% per year, or 60% of its total value after 5 years.

EV's maintenance costs are so low that manufacturers are basically giving them guarantees that are so long term I'm not going to even bother trying to calculate their per mile maintenance costs.
An EV typically consumes 20kWh per 100 miles, which with an average US price of $0.12/kWh, runs at $0.02/mile - if you even pay!

You sound like a big driver, so you probably do more, however let's use energy.gov's annual average of 11,244miles/car.

Your Yukon XL costs (11,244*0.25)+(80k*.2) = $18,811 per year, or $62,055 over 5 years - plus the additional $45k-$65k you paid up front. I'll let you do the sums for your real mileage.
The EVs cost $4k-$7k/year in depreciation, plus $225 if you recharge at home.

At 56k miles over 5 years, you're totalling...
Yukon: $107,055-$127,055
EVs: $12,000-$21,000 + up to $1,125 'leccy

And that's the point. You might be prepared to pay half the price of the median US home to finance your car, but I highly doubt you align with that quoted 90% of your fellow Americans.

£90/day is not "cheap", rent that for a week vacation and you've made a monthly car payment...

*sigh*

Nobody disputes that offshore wind is more expensive than onshore when you ignore price of land.
But it should be obvious that densely populated areas don't have free land, and don't have many cheaper alternatives.
Look at the map on page 36:
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...
Onshore wind resources are good in interior US. They are not as good in East and West.
 

Sometimes, its use is even legally mandated.

Shut your pie hole NERC and the DOE would never recommend or mandate such terrorist supporting activities.

Yes that was sarcasm and it is sad that without this someone would misinterpret it.

South Australia is very progressive on a lot of issues. In terms of a addressing baseload power issues SA has very high reserves of geo-thermal power in the form of Hot Dry Rock however the issue of funding the cable infrastructure to make that energy available as electricity has been something they have been trying to solve for a long time. From my understanding they want to establish alluminium smelters powered by geothermal energy to make it feasible.

You're probably right about them asking for problems by taking those risks however I think this is something they are aware of and endure as one of the issues they encounter in taking a leadership role.

Sounds like I have been doing shit wrong and could have gotten things done quicker and slacked off. I do start with the lists of best practices and regulations. Then I go and check their layout, settings, firewall rules, configuration, physical security, etc. seeing how they are running things. After that I go and do a proper vulnerability scan and system scan (outside looking in and inside looking out) to see if what they say their system is setup as is what is actually is. If the customer allows it I do some pen testing on links coming in, physical penetration testing with a little bit of social engineering, or pen testing from machine to machine in their environment. Finally after all that I spend a whole pile of time going over the collected results and create a nice report where I organize the threats and risks into actual threat levels and provide mitigation or remediation steps. Typically I spend 2 weeks on site gathering data, and then about another month going over it. I have never been a big fan of checkbox security as it leads to lots of stupid crap but there is something to be said for going through them because I have found a lot of low hanging fruit that was simply overlooked by others.

I think this is The Hanford website I think you are refering to.

This National Geographic article may also be interesting. It calculates that a train full of the waste materials would fill a train that would go around the entire equator, and then some. It's a great read if you are interested as even if it is shut down tommorrow our generation is still left with this stuff that was created before many of us were even born.

What map did you use? Also note that Tesla rarely puts their SCs in cities. Most of them are BETWEEN cities. After all, you are expected to charge most of the time, at home, at night.

do you have a garage or a plug outside of your home? Then you have a charging station. We plug our tesla into a regular 120V outlet and it charges nightly.

Now, as to your location, are you in America? And are you in a city, or a town? If town, not surprised. If outside of America and Europe, also not surprised.

I am also guessing that you pulled up one of the maps for proprietary chargers.If you are in America, here is the federal map. As you can see, there are 13,000 STATIONS, with an average of around 2.5 outlets. These stations are growing at the rate of 1000 / year and accelerating.
If you drive a tesla, then here is a map of what exists, what is being built, and what is undergoing approval.

Now, what is missing is the large number of RV parks. Most every town has some form of an RV park. Nearly all will allow you to charge there.

If I'm reading it right, https://www.hydrogen.energy.go... indicates (about page 18) that a system to hold 5.6kg of hydrogen would be about 3k each with mass production. According to http://hypertextbook.com/facts... the energy density of hydrogen is 33.3 kWh/kg, so that 3k tank would hold about 186 kWh worth, but I don't think that takes fuel cell efficiency into account. According to https://www.hydrogen.energy.go... a PEM cell (the only one listed as "portable" is 50-60% efficient, so it would be more like 112 kWh, which (okay, at this point the "if"s are really stretching) ought to push a Tesla Model S 300ish miles. Not bad.

But yeah, as you note, transportation and transfer is extra. I don't know enough to give figures for that, between having to have a large pressurized tank, a bunch of pumps with (probably) individual compressors, and periodic replacement of parts from embrittlement...

If I'm reading it right, https://www.hydrogen.energy.go... indicates (about page 18) that a system to hold 5.6kg of hydrogen would be about 3k each with mass production. According to http://hypertextbook.com/facts... the energy density of hydrogen is 33.3 kWh/kg, so that 3k tank would hold about 186 kWh worth, but I don't think that takes fuel cell efficiency into account. According to https://www.hydrogen.energy.go... a PEM cell (the only one listed as "portable" is 50-60% efficient, so it would be more like 112 kWh, which (okay, at this point the "if"s are really stretching) ought to push a Tesla Model S 300ish miles. Not bad.

But yeah, as you note, transportation and transfer is extra. I don't know enough to give figures for that, between having to have a large pressurized tank, a bunch of pumps with (probably) individual compressors, and periodic replacement of parts from embrittlement...

Okay... that car is highly optimized. Anyway, I just checked and the assumption of 40 Kw/h was correct, it's actually 43 Kw/h in 1.1 Kg of compressed hydrogen.

It takes about 3 Kwh/Kg to compress it, and 10 Kwh/Kg to liquefy it according to https://www.hydrogen.energy.go...

So either I'm missing something here, or this is a mad new energy source: for just 13 Kwh we can fill up the fuel cell with 40 Kwh of energy. In other words, I haven't a clue but the figures can't be right, or we'd have free energy.

Uh every tesla ever sold costing more then the original stated price? All their partners all went to fuel cell, all of them. The grid in socal for example cant even handle normal hot day without rolling brown outs. How many BEV cars can the grid handle? HONDA has a system that powers you house and charges your car and uses the car as an extra power source if needed. Japan IS going fuel cell. Not even a question. Fuelcell is advancing at a crazy rate. Batteries have made almost no advances is 20 years. Just cheaper. Boeing and lockeed are working to be allowed to umm discover amazing things that dont exist officially. You think i have a actual problem with Tesla. I dont i think they hype shit to keep the stock up so they can move forward. Fine, but the FC bullshit slamming based on where the tech was vs say where it is is just so lacking in forsight. http://energy.gov/eere/fuelcel... http://www.roadandtrack.com/ne...

So, where do you recharge your H2 vehicle on long trips?

At a hydrogen fueling station:
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fue...
http://cafcp.org/stationmap
Right now, you're out of luck if you're not on the east or west coast. But, if you had an electric car ten years ago you're be equally out of luck.

The nice thing with my Tesla is I can charge virtually anywhere there's electricity. Granted, the superchargers take some time, but it's not a huge amount of time. Now, take the amount of time saved by charging every night. It takes only a few seconds to plug in and unplug vs the amount of time spent driving to one of a limited number of hydrogen refueling stations, waiting in line (if they're popular) and filling up. On top of that, the electricity is far cheaper than the hydrogen. Currently virtually all hydrogen is heavily subsidized since the actual price would not be cheap. Currently EVs are over twice as efficient compared to a hydrogen fuel cell car when once considers well to wheel. HFC vehicles aren't much better than hybrid vehicles when it comes to efficiency but they're still a lot more expensive to build. They have a very long way to go. Durability of the fuel cell stacks is currently about half that of a gasoline engine. A fuel cell stack as of the end of 2015 will need to be replaced at 75K miles. I did the math and the batteries in my Tesla will be good for at least double this. See this.

The 2016 Toyota Mirai, a subcompact, is only rated at 66MPG. A Prius is 58 city, 53 highway and costs less than half the price of the Mirai. BEVs are typically over 100 for a similarly sized car. For example, a 2013 Leaf is the equivalent of 115MPG, almost twice as efficient. My 3-year old Tesla, a much larger vehicle with a lot more passenger and storage room, is 89MPGe. The newer ones are even higher. The Model 3 should be considerably higher than that. Long term, I don't see HFC vehicles competing much against pure electric cars. The complexity alone means that they will always be more expensive, especially as the cost of batteries drops. The cost today of a Toyota Mirai is $58,335. This is for a car with 0-60 of 9.4 seconds and a top speed of 108MPH, not much better than a Prius. The Mirai will suffer the same problems as a Prius as well. The Mirai depends on a battery pack for acceleration and regenerative braking, just like a Prius. My last car was a Prius. It does poorly going up mountain grades and the Mirai will suffer the same problem. Unlike a Prius, the power output of the PEM stack will be considerably lower by 75K miles. A BEV car can put out considerably more power for a longer time since it isn't restricted to the limited output of the PEM stack. I've taken my Tesla up a number of steep mountain grades where my Prius would struggle without breaking a sweat. The Tesla Model 3 and other long range BEVs will cost considerably less than the Mirai. The Model 3 will also have considerably more room inside and storage space. The ONLY advantage the Mirai has is that it can be filled relatively quickly. In just about every other metric it falls short. Today I can take my Tesla most places in the country with the number of places I can't drive to without superchargers rapidly diminishing. By the time the model 3 rolls out the entire country will be pretty much covered. As it is, in California where most of them are sold, even out of the way places are getting covered. There's a charging station going in right near the entrance to Yosemite, for example and even highway 395 along the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains is covered.

Let's compare:

Hydrogen filling stations

vs

Plugshare chargers
Tesla Superchargers
Tesla Superchargers by the end of 2016 (click on 2016). This number should double by 2017.

The closest hydrogen fueling station to my house is 15 miles away from my house. My EV charging station is in my garage. This covers over 90% of my driving needs. I pay $50/month for the electricity and drive around 1000 miles/month. According to this article, the Mirai

(because unlike conventional power sources, it all peaks at the same time)

This isn't true if you have a geographically-large grid.

The Eastern-US grid stretches from eastern Montana to the Texas panhandle to Louisiana (bypassing most of Texas) to Florida to Maine.

Yes, sometimes it is sunny or cloudy across the entire area, but most of the time it's not.

The Western-US grid stretches basically from El Paso, Texas, north to Canada and west to the Pacific coast. Thanks to the mountains, there are large variations in weather across this region on any given day.

On the other hand, the "Texas grid" which consists of most of Texas and maybe small parts of surrounding states is small enough that "it's sunny across almost the whole grid" will be true much of the time in the summer.

I have no idea what the grid in India looks like.

Reference: Info on the electrical grid for the continental United States

The size of the country doesn't matter. You can have fiber internet access everywhere you have power lines.

The size of the country scales (more than linearly) with the amount of infrastructure. France has the largest power grid in Europe at 100K km of residential/low voltage lines, the US has 10x that in high voltage lines, and maybe around 400-500x that in low voltage lines. (No one really knows, but scaling with # of miles of paved roads is probably a decent approximation.)

The existing infrastructure proves the feasibility. The rest is just haggling over the price and who's going to pay for it.

The existing infrastructure was built over the last century.

Who's going to pay for it is the big thing. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded if the Trillion-dollar stimulus package in 2009 had gone to infrastructure like this. Upgrading our power, wire line (POTS), and cable system infrastructure is a massive capital undertaking but also has US national security purposes and civil defense applications. If you have money in your pocket you simply *have* to spend, you should always spend it on capital, not Op-Ex. Unfortunately, the teachers' unions and politically empowered Democrats complained and a lot of that money ended up going to state budget operations for education to prevent public sector cut-backs and to fund left-wing green initiatives. (Also, "construction projects primarily employ men and are therefore sexist".) Your tax dollars at work, poorly.

If you *don't* happen to have a dozen or two billion dollars in your back pocket, then justifying the expenditure is more difficult. Most locations have adequate broadband speed to the internet.

Having 8 Netflix streams in HD is not a civil right.

Here's one. http://www.energy.gov/articles... That project is over budget a late. And, it will be suplanted by Oklahoma wind energy as transmission is built faster than the plant can come on line. Expect loan defaults.

You do realize that there are systems that are not connected to the internet as a whole that exist in secure buildings and while they rely on external data that data is brought in on direct connections that do not go over the public internet. Modern society depends on such systems and some operators of such systems are better at resisting the temptation to just connect everything to the internet directly or indirectly. If following a proper defense in depth strategy these isolated systems still have lots of security on top of them even though they are not connected to the public internet. If you are interested in what the going state of the art in security for these types of systems is you can read the Cybersecurity Procurement Language for Energy Delivery Systems document and go read the NERC CIP v5 standard. These set the minimum level of security that exist on the systems.

Next time, instead of making a bitter tantrum post as you stomp away, say nothing.

It'll look less bad.

But once again, to assure you, everybody involved in renewable power is quite aware that the infrastructure of developed countries is based on reliable power, that's why demand response plans are intended to make it so that it's invisible to you and other consumers when they're activating.

Why? Because you'll be better off once a more robust and nimble grid is put into place, with the benefit of a more distributed power production system and reduced pollution.

Yes, you probably will never see the cleaner air, you will probably never even notice the substations changing their power profile, but it's going to happen.

And it will be better.

Except that doesn't happen anywhere in the USA.

Except, that it does, if you're a "utility". It just doesn't work for residential installations for personal consumption...

http://energy.gov/savings/ladw...

They pay a premium price for utility solar to make it work, raising the price of power for everyone. That is just one program, there are many more like it.

http://www.absolutelysolar.com...

I've looked at investing, the problem I personally run into is that their entire business model really depends on government money to work. The numbers just don't pencil out otherwise.

Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them.

Actually, most publicly funded research is now required to be published in publicly accessible ways:

• NIH public access policy
• NSF public access policy
• DOE public access plan

Granted, those came in to existence in the past decade or so, which leaves a lot of old papers not covered and subject to the whims of the publisher. Regardless, pretty well every existing research grant in the US from the federal government is now subject to those terms. The big for-profit publishers (think Nature and others) have made accommodations to allow for researchers to publish in their journals while still meeting the open access requirements.

Swartz died over this.

No, he didn't. He was over zealous, afraid, and likely fraught with unmanaged mental health problems. He was trying to make a name for himself and then didn't know what to do once he accomplished that. Regardless his goal was not to free all the data, if it had been he could have used other means that would not have landed him so quickly in so much trouble.

A few interesting points from the article:

1. Almost 40% of the distributed PV capacity in the U.S. is located in California. The next nine states after California account for another 44%, according to the EIA.

This is key because CA pays one of the highest kWh rates in the US (places like Hawaii are higher, but there aren't that many people there).

http://www.bls.gov/regions/wes...

San Francisco pays 40% higher energy prices on average than the rest of the US. So of COURSE solar makes more sense there. But it doesn't most other places.

California's leadership in distributed solar capacity is driven by a combination of factors, including high electricity prices, a large population, strong solar resources, and state policies and incentives that support solar PV, according to the EIA.

2. One of the factors spurring growth last year and this was the impending expiration of the U.S. government's solar investment tax credit (ITC). That measure, passed in 2008, offered a 30% tax credit for residential and business installations. It was due to expire this year, and the tax credit was supposed to drop to a more permanent 10%. In December, however, Congress passed a three-year extension on the 30% ITC.

So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.

http://energy.gov/public-servi...
Just a sample of some of the various programs to pay for solar and wind.

3. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. Last year, solar installations broke all previous records, but the amount was only 16% more than in 2014 with 7,260 GW of new DC solar power.

That sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, consider this:
In 2014, the United States generated about 4,093 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

So the new DC solar power being installed is 7.2 billion out of 4,093 billion total. It is nice, but we could install that much every year for the next 20 years and it wouldn't make a real dent in the total.

Last year I called SolarCity, they are offering to install panels for "free" to your home, then sell you the power for less than you're paying now.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No up front cost, no maintenance, guaranteed power for less than you're paying now.

Why NOT say yes?

Except, they won't install in my area. They WILL install 2 miles away, because that is a different electric energy provider that gives bigger rebates than mine does (I live in a co-op that doesn't provide huge rebates and tax incentives).

---

So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.

Even utility scale solar, which I've looked at investing in purely from an investment point of view, requires tax dollars to make work.

http://www.absolutelysolar.com...
FIT Program Areas
FIT â" LADWP: The Department of Water and Powerâ(TM)s new solar Feed-In Tariff program. Buildings and land in the city of Los Angeles and parts of the Owens Valley are eligible.
Look at the very bottom of that page:

http://energy.gov/savings/ladw...
And there is the program, promising to pay FAR above the "going rate" of power.

So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.

I doubt that the insolation is the same. How should it?

Yes, it is. It is a pretty cloudy place however. Germany? Certainly not. You might mix it up with England or the UK in general.

Here's a link to a decent comparison.

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...

The irradiance graphics are on Page 2.

Amazingly enough, there are PV installations in service in Alaska. I was surprised, because I've only been there once, but yeah, those winter nights are long. But then again, so are the summer days.

But the Alaskan's I met were as likely to install a pv system just to prove a person wrong. Regardless, they tend to integrate with diesel generators.

I'm a complete solar slut, but I'm surprised at this.

Zero chance.
The reason why I say that, is that even without Superchargers, there were still many ways to fill up. All of the tesla owners simply charged at home and remained with 100 miles of home.
OTOH, with H2, there are roughly 3 areas in America that have H2. And you can not fill up at home.
And there are a whopping 644 stations throughout the world.
Finally, the real problem is that it costs to replace the fuel cells every 50K miles or so, AND the H2 is like buying $5/gal of gas. IOW, it is actually more expensive than either gas or nat gas powered cars. This is esp. true since I just paid .89 / gal for gas today.