It was obvious that he really wanted to close that thing. Who knows exactly what he learned when he was office, but you could just see that combination of "frustration" and "defeat" in him when the topic came up afterwards.
Li-ion voltage degradation curves generally don't plunge off a cliff, the rate of degradation slows down significantly with time. For a lot of consumer goods this isn't of much use because the voltage drops below the threshold and it becomes usable. But if the Powerwalls have a good voltage conversion then they might be able to get quite a long lifespan out of them.
Still surprised at 10% loss of capacity in 10 years. I'd have thought that they'd have a low DoD and climate control paired with low discharge rates to prevent that. Now I'm wondering about their architecture. I imagine it's similar to how the Tesla packs work, where you have many cells in parallel comprising bricks (so a single-cell failure causes only a minor increased load on its neighbors), bricks in series to form sheets, and sheets in series to form the pack.
That would be lovely if you weren't misstating what I actually wrote. I wrote that California is conducting extensive agriculture in a desert. They are conducting extensive agriculture in a desert - the southern portion of the Central Valley is desert, and a large chunk of California's agriculture is conducted there. A large chunk of the rest of the central valley is arid (note: I wrote that hot Mediterranean climate is "arid", not "desert"; you're changing my words). That's most of the rest of California's agriculture.
And as for "approximately half" vs. "a little more than a third", when you're judging based on the rough measure of "looking at a map and estimating", that's not much practical difference. Again - key issue - the southern portion of the Central Valley is desert. The central portion of the Central Valley is arid. These are not places that have abundant water supplies.
If you conduct mass-scale agriculture in a place that has a shortage of water, and then complain about shortages of water, it's your own damned fault. And the agriculture is what needs to give.
Just look at consumer satisfaction numbers. Tesla's are staggeringly high.
That could be in good part to self-selection of consumers rather than "the cars are the best cars possible in the world". But at least at this point in time, I see no reason to think that "disappointment will kill interest". Those who've been buying these BEVs have been loving them.
What's corrupt about openly pitching to foreign diplomats to pitch down $20k a night to stay in the hotel that the president owns in DC? "No no, certainly no bribery going on here..."
If you don't like the situation where a president can own a network of hundreds of companies scattered around the world directly doing business with foreign governments and be directly under his family's control, call your rep and ask them to support H.R. 6340, which extends current federal conflict of interest law to the offices of the president and vice president, requiring that their assets be kept in a blind trust or potential conflicts of interest disclosed to the Office of Government Ethics when they make a decision that could affect their assets' worth. Hardly revolutionary, as that's what Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, etc all did. The bill has teeth, too - “(f) A violation of subsection (a) shall constitute a high crime and misdemeanor for the purposes of Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution."
It's something that anybody who's nervous about the current situation and lives in the US can do to make themselves feel better.
You didn't list the location in the Central Valley. There's big differences in rainfall, and thus native terrain, depending on how far south you are. The only location you listed is Shasta, which is the far north (aka, the not-arid portion).
Your third, and possibly second as well pictures are maintained terrain, including mowing and likely fertilization (second isn't clear, it may just be "fertilized" by livestock;) ). The tree rows in the third being kept free of grass leaves more water for the tree and the in-between strips. It's kind of funny, but even construction can cause that effect - I once read a study that had been commissioned out of concern that roads built around some of the largest sequoias might be harming them, but it turned out that they actually grew faster after the roads were built, because it meant that they had no competition for water where the road was;)
I didn't make up the "desert grassland" and "prairie savanna" terms for the Central Valley south of the Sacramento Valley - that's the classification of those biomes, the natural plantlife that grows there in the absence of human influence.
And I said nothing about the Owens Valley not being pretty:) Just that it's scrubland, except in the places where there's water. Scrubland can still be quite beautiful. I wrote a book once where a fair portion of it was set in the Owens Valley - I certainly have nothing against it! While I live in Iceland now, I was born in CA and have a number of relatives still there (parents had a house there until a couple years ago as well). If I didn't like grass and scrub, I wouldn't much care for Iceland either;)
Investors, however, aren't as much of morons as the general public and understand the concept of waiting on a profit while a company reinvests its revenue into expansion, in order that the future profit is much greater.
An integrated power pack/inverter/Tesla charger would be a brilliant marketing opportunity. Every time the person goes out into their garage they see that unused charger sitting there.
Generally not, at least not with today's solar technology. Back when Aptera was looking at this it was much discussed. You add weight, cost, and potential problems (e.x.: Aptera bailed on the concept after preventing moisture ingress turned out to be easier in theory than in the real world) that's just not proportional to the power generated. It just makes a lot more sense to put the panels in fixed locations than to carry them around.
If the state of the art was a highly durable thin-film that could be "wrapped" onto a car and then clear coated, yielding triple junction efficiencies for low cost, then solar car roofs would make a lot of sense. But that's not today's tech.
Indeed, Musk recently argued that even if the ZEV program gets gutted, it'll probably have little effect on them, because everything is skewed to the big manufacturers. Tesla gets "pennies on the dollar" for every ZEV credit they sell because by design the market is flooded with them, while the big manufacturers get their full value because they have non-ZEV cars to apply the credits to. So something that is supposed to benefit clean car makers does little to actually help them, but by making a small number of ZEVs an established manufacturer gets to make a lot of dirty vehicles, and additional credits cost little to buy
Indeed. As a whole, ICEs are lighter. But the difference isn't anywhere near what a "battery pack vs. gas tank" comparison would suggest, because neither a battery pack nor a gas tank are an entire drivetrain. And EVs are advancing a lot faster than ICEs.
The Sacramento Valley is the one part of the Central Valley which isn't arid if not outright desert. Most of the Central Valley used to be scrub - more specifically, "desert grassland" on the south end, "prairie savanna" in the middle and extending up to the Sacramento Valley, where it became lusher. South of the Sacramento Valley, the Central Valley's precipitation level is similar to that of the Owens Valley which, having had its water diverted coastward, has little irrigation. So if you want to see what most of the Central Valley used to look like, take a look at the Owens Valley today: scrub, interrupted with broader life where water intrudes.
Certainly not as stupid as if, say, the guy had run a news aggregator and intended to post a link to information about Erasmus of Rotterdam, but instead just put "ErasmusofRotterdam" inside the HREF, as if browsers would magically know what they meant.
Approximately half of California is a desert (an area of 10 inches of precipitation or less per year): map
An additional large portion is arid (~10-20 inches per year) - more specifically "hot mediterranean climate".
The majority of the crops are grown in the central valley
Which as you can see from the above map mostly ranges from desert (Bakersfield) to arid (Fresno, upwards to around Sacramento). The far north end (Sacramento Valley) isn't very arid, but it's also not as major of an agricultural area as the south.
Growing crops in the desert and arid regions gets good yields because of the abundant sunlight and warm days, but it requires water that you have less and less of every year. And you've already destroyed parts of your state (like, for example, the Owens Valley) to get the water that you do have.
likely would be deciduous forest except most of the rain happens in the winter
1) This article has nothing to do with the other states in the Colorado River compact.
2) This has nothing to do with diverted water in aqueducts period, it has to do with insufficient rainfall for forests to survive.
3) And the energy for desalination is to come from where, exactly? That's always been the big issue with desalination: it's extremely energy-intensive.
4) California wouldn't have water problems if not for their decisions to be an agricultural state in the middle of a desert. And even grow water-intensive crops... in a desert. Agriculture makes up 2% of California's economy but consumes 80% of its water. The solution is obvious (revoking / reducing the water rights for farmers), but politically unpalatable.
I think these is a very interesting field for consumer needs, but I have to agree, that's disturbing if they're allowing what... let's face it... is data made up by an AI that "looks right", to convict people.
All I can say is, I did a direct side-by-side comparison. You say LCD looks washed out to you, I found LED to be dim, oversaturated and unbalanced - and the older the phone, the worse all of that becomes. I guess if you're watching Pixar movies where it's all about cartoony colors then I guess that's not a problem for you. I prefer realism.
Then let's use the correct terms, shall we? If you mean energy density, don't say power density - they're not the same thing.:)
but I'd still prefer to see the battery pack be no bigger than a conventional gas tank
This is unfair. A battery pack may be a lot heavier than a gas tank, but an electric drivetrain is a lot lighter than a gas drivetrain. You need to compare total system mass, not just specific components.
In several frontal crashes, the pack caught fire
Sigh, this old canard? The rates of Teslas catching fire in accidents is much lower per mile than in gasoline cars. Gasoline car fires are far more common than most people realize, with 152k per year. Four people die in a a gasoline car fire per week. 90 gasoline cars catch fire per billion miles driven. Model S's hit a billion miles driven last year, and are probably double that by now. There's nowhere near the rate of fires per mile in the Model S as in gasoline cars. Not even close.
Gasoline fires also expand to engulf vehicles far faster than most people think. There's been little difference in the rate of fire spread in Model S crashes vs. gasoline crashes.
and in one incident 2 people were trapped & burned to death.
You must be talking about the Indiana crash. There's been no statement as to whether they were killed in the fire or the crash, which occurred at very high speeds into a tree and then flipped. The impact was so powerful that the car disintigrated, leaving what as described as "a debris field over 150 feet". As of last week the statement was that the coroner was still awaiting toxicology reports before giving a cause of death. The statements we've seen so far was that the girl "died in the crash", and the guy was extracted from the wreckage (took 20 minutes) and brought to the hospital alive, but died there.
Yeah, it consumes less power, but it looks terrible. Starts out dimmer than LCD, gets dimmer with age, color balance starts feeling off subpar, gets terrible with age, always looks bad outdoors, burn-in prone, etc. It also feels like the colors "bleed" more in LED, although that could just be my perception. I know that blacks are supposed to be better with LED than LCD (and thus they get higher nominal contrast ratios), but in most viewing conditions the black difference is not something you notice, unless it's very dark. I once went around to my coworkers and compared my Z2 (LCD) to their cell phones of roughly the same age and resolution and there was no comparison, the Z2 looked way better.
Maybe the technology has advanced significantly since then... but otherwise, no thank you.
It is cleaner than old coal plants, yes. But the key point is, you need peaking with renewables. So when the renewables get built and connected to the grid, it automatically scales back to being a peaking plant; you don't have to build new peakers.
You don't cut tempered glass, period; you would have to remove individual tiles whole. I don't know how hard that would be. I assume that they're some sort of snap-together affair. But definitely no cutting. It's very hard to make a hole in a piece of tempered glass, but if you do, the whole thing shatters.
They do seem frequently compared to terracotta roofs in the literature.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama and Guantanamo, for example.
It was obvious that he really wanted to close that thing. Who knows exactly what he learned when he was office, but you could just see that combination of "frustration" and "defeat" in him when the topic came up afterwards.
Li-ion voltage degradation curves generally don't plunge off a cliff, the rate of degradation slows down significantly with time. For a lot of consumer goods this isn't of much use because the voltage drops below the threshold and it becomes usable. But if the Powerwalls have a good voltage conversion then they might be able to get quite a long lifespan out of them.
Still surprised at 10% loss of capacity in 10 years. I'd have thought that they'd have a low DoD and climate control paired with low discharge rates to prevent that. Now I'm wondering about their architecture. I imagine it's similar to how the Tesla packs work, where you have many cells in parallel comprising bricks (so a single-cell failure causes only a minor increased load on its neighbors), bricks in series to form sheets, and sheets in series to form the pack.
That would be lovely if you weren't misstating what I actually wrote. I wrote that California is conducting extensive agriculture in a desert. They are conducting extensive agriculture in a desert - the southern portion of the Central Valley is desert, and a large chunk of California's agriculture is conducted there. A large chunk of the rest of the central valley is arid (note: I wrote that hot Mediterranean climate is "arid", not "desert"; you're changing my words). That's most of the rest of California's agriculture.
And as for "approximately half" vs. "a little more than a third", when you're judging based on the rough measure of "looking at a map and estimating", that's not much practical difference. Again - key issue - the southern portion of the Central Valley is desert. The central portion of the Central Valley is arid. These are not places that have abundant water supplies.
If you conduct mass-scale agriculture in a place that has a shortage of water, and then complain about shortages of water, it's your own damned fault. And the agriculture is what needs to give.
Just look at consumer satisfaction numbers. Tesla's are staggeringly high.
That could be in good part to self-selection of consumers rather than "the cars are the best cars possible in the world". But at least at this point in time, I see no reason to think that "disappointment will kill interest". Those who've been buying these BEVs have been loving them.
What's corrupt about openly pitching to foreign diplomats to pitch down $20k a night to stay in the hotel that the president owns in DC? "No no, certainly no bribery going on here..."
If you don't like the situation where a president can own a network of hundreds of companies scattered around the world directly doing business with foreign governments and be directly under his family's control, call your rep and ask them to support H.R. 6340, which extends current federal conflict of interest law to the offices of the president and vice president, requiring that their assets be kept in a blind trust or potential conflicts of interest disclosed to the Office of Government Ethics when they make a decision that could affect their assets' worth. Hardly revolutionary, as that's what Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, etc all did. The bill has teeth, too - “(f) A violation of subsection (a) shall constitute a high crime and misdemeanor for the purposes of Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution."
It's something that anybody who's nervous about the current situation and lives in the US can do to make themselves feel better.
You didn't list the location in the Central Valley. There's big differences in rainfall, and thus native terrain, depending on how far south you are. The only location you listed is Shasta, which is the far north (aka, the not-arid portion).
Your third, and possibly second as well pictures are maintained terrain, including mowing and likely fertilization (second isn't clear, it may just be "fertilized" by livestock ;) ). The tree rows in the third being kept free of grass leaves more water for the tree and the in-between strips. It's kind of funny, but even construction can cause that effect - I once read a study that had been commissioned out of concern that roads built around some of the largest sequoias might be harming them, but it turned out that they actually grew faster after the roads were built, because it meant that they had no competition for water where the road was ;)
I didn't make up the "desert grassland" and "prairie savanna" terms for the Central Valley south of the Sacramento Valley - that's the classification of those biomes, the natural plantlife that grows there in the absence of human influence.
And I said nothing about the Owens Valley not being pretty :) Just that it's scrubland, except in the places where there's water. Scrubland can still be quite beautiful. I wrote a book once where a fair portion of it was set in the Owens Valley - I certainly have nothing against it! While I live in Iceland now, I was born in CA and have a number of relatives still there (parents had a house there until a couple years ago as well). If I didn't like grass and scrub, I wouldn't much care for Iceland either ;)
Amazon's continuous losses were such a running joke that even Futurama made fun of it.
Investors, however, aren't as much of morons as the general public and understand the concept of waiting on a profit while a company reinvests its revenue into expansion, in order that the future profit is much greater.
An integrated power pack/inverter/Tesla charger would be a brilliant marketing opportunity. Every time the person goes out into their garage they see that unused charger sitting there.
Generally not, at least not with today's solar technology. Back when Aptera was looking at this it was much discussed. You add weight, cost, and potential problems (e.x.: Aptera bailed on the concept after preventing moisture ingress turned out to be easier in theory than in the real world) that's just not proportional to the power generated. It just makes a lot more sense to put the panels in fixed locations than to carry them around.
If the state of the art was a highly durable thin-film that could be "wrapped" onto a car and then clear coated, yielding triple junction efficiencies for low cost, then solar car roofs would make a lot of sense. But that's not today's tech.
Yes, the classic gambit: tie up all of your assets in a couple companies, then bail on said companies. A great way to make a mint!
Indeed, Musk recently argued that even if the ZEV program gets gutted, it'll probably have little effect on them, because everything is skewed to the big manufacturers. Tesla gets "pennies on the dollar" for every ZEV credit they sell because by design the market is flooded with them, while the big manufacturers get their full value because they have non-ZEV cars to apply the credits to. So something that is supposed to benefit clean car makers does little to actually help them, but by making a small number of ZEVs an established manufacturer gets to make a lot of dirty vehicles, and additional credits cost little to buy
Indeed. As a whole, ICEs are lighter. But the difference isn't anywhere near what a "battery pack vs. gas tank" comparison would suggest, because neither a battery pack nor a gas tank are an entire drivetrain. And EVs are advancing a lot faster than ICEs.
The Sacramento Valley is the one part of the Central Valley which isn't arid if not outright desert. Most of the Central Valley used to be scrub - more specifically, "desert grassland" on the south end, "prairie savanna" in the middle and extending up to the Sacramento Valley, where it became lusher. South of the Sacramento Valley, the Central Valley's precipitation level is similar to that of the Owens Valley which, having had its water diverted coastward, has little irrigation. So if you want to see what most of the Central Valley used to look like, take a look at the Owens Valley today: scrub, interrupted with broader life where water intrudes.
Certainly not as stupid as if, say, the guy had run a news aggregator and intended to post a link to information about Erasmus of Rotterdam, but instead just put "ErasmusofRotterdam" inside the HREF, as if browsers would magically know what they meant.
Yes, if you drained your rivers dry you could have more water. Since that's not going to happen...
Of water that you actually use, 80% goes to agriculture.
Approximately half of California is a desert (an area of 10 inches of precipitation or less per year): map
An additional large portion is arid (~10-20 inches per year) - more specifically "hot mediterranean climate".
Which as you can see from the above map mostly ranges from desert (Bakersfield) to arid (Fresno, upwards to around Sacramento). The far north end (Sacramento Valley) isn't very arid, but it's also not as major of an agricultural area as the south.
Growing crops in the desert and arid regions gets good yields because of the abundant sunlight and warm days, but it requires water that you have less and less of every year. And you've already destroyed parts of your state (like, for example, the Owens Valley) to get the water that you do have.
It would be what it was before irrigation: scrub.
1) This article has nothing to do with the other states in the Colorado River compact.
2) This has nothing to do with diverted water in aqueducts period, it has to do with insufficient rainfall for forests to survive.
3) And the energy for desalination is to come from where, exactly? That's always been the big issue with desalination: it's extremely energy-intensive.
4) California wouldn't have water problems if not for their decisions to be an agricultural state in the middle of a desert. And even grow water-intensive crops... in a desert. Agriculture makes up 2% of California's economy but consumes 80% of its water. The solution is obvious (revoking / reducing the water rights for farmers), but politically unpalatable.
Next up: lung cancer causes smoking!
Indeed. It's the digital equivalent to an artist looking at a vague picture and painting in details onto it.
People are using this sort of thing in court?
I think these is a very interesting field for consumer needs, but I have to agree, that's disturbing if they're allowing what... let's face it... is data made up by an AI that "looks right", to convict people.
All I can say is, I did a direct side-by-side comparison. You say LCD looks washed out to you, I found LED to be dim, oversaturated and unbalanced - and the older the phone, the worse all of that becomes. I guess if you're watching Pixar movies where it's all about cartoony colors then I guess that's not a problem for you. I prefer realism.
Then let's use the correct terms, shall we? If you mean energy density, don't say power density - they're not the same thing. :)
This is unfair. A battery pack may be a lot heavier than a gas tank, but an electric drivetrain is a lot lighter than a gas drivetrain. You need to compare total system mass, not just specific components.
Sigh, this old canard? The rates of Teslas catching fire in accidents is much lower per mile than in gasoline cars. Gasoline car fires are far more common than most people realize, with 152k per year. Four people die in a a gasoline car fire per week. 90 gasoline cars catch fire per billion miles driven. Model S's hit a billion miles driven last year, and are probably double that by now. There's nowhere near the rate of fires per mile in the Model S as in gasoline cars. Not even close.
Gasoline fires also expand to engulf vehicles far faster than most people think. There's been little difference in the rate of fire spread in Model S crashes vs. gasoline crashes.
You must be talking about the Indiana crash. There's been no statement as to whether they were killed in the fire or the crash, which occurred at very high speeds into a tree and then flipped. The impact was so powerful that the car disintigrated, leaving what as described as "a debris field over 150 feet". As of last week the statement was that the coroner was still awaiting toxicology reports before giving a cause of death. The statements we've seen so far was that the girl "died in the crash", and the guy was extracted from the wreckage (took 20 minutes) and brought to the hospital alive, but died there.
Yeah, it consumes less power, but it looks terrible. Starts out dimmer than LCD, gets dimmer with age, color balance starts feeling off subpar, gets terrible with age, always looks bad outdoors, burn-in prone, etc. It also feels like the colors "bleed" more in LED, although that could just be my perception. I know that blacks are supposed to be better with LED than LCD (and thus they get higher nominal contrast ratios), but in most viewing conditions the black difference is not something you notice, unless it's very dark. I once went around to my coworkers and compared my Z2 (LCD) to their cell phones of roughly the same age and resolution and there was no comparison, the Z2 looked way better.
Maybe the technology has advanced significantly since then... but otherwise, no thank you.
It is cleaner than old coal plants, yes. But the key point is, you need peaking with renewables. So when the renewables get built and connected to the grid, it automatically scales back to being a peaking plant; you don't have to build new peakers.
You don't cut tempered glass, period; you would have to remove individual tiles whole. I don't know how hard that would be. I assume that they're some sort of snap-together affair. But definitely no cutting. It's very hard to make a hole in a piece of tempered glass, but if you do, the whole thing shatters.
They do seem frequently compared to terracotta roofs in the literature.