While the details of the arrest are still hazy, one thing is clear - they've had this guy in their sights since 2011. It's not surprising that they issued a sealed indictment for him, mind you, that's not particularly unusual for a case like this where the subject is unlikely to be extradited and would avoid your jurisdiction if the indictment was public (nor is the US in any way unique in this regard). And since I've seen others commenting about this: yes, the Secret Service is the correct body to have jurisdiction over this, as they (strangely) are in charge of enforcement against financial crimes. Back in the early days of commercially available inkjet printers, the nerdy high school/college program I went to (TAMS) once got a visit from the secret service when one of the students figured out that he could print good enough replica dollar bills on one to fool the scanner on the drink machine in the lounge. The total volume of the forgery had to be tiny, I'd be surprised if it was more than $100, but still, if you feel like getting involved in financial crime, expect the Secret Service to be looking out for you.;)
The scandal here would be if this was an extrajudicial "kidnapping" in the Maldives, with the US swooping up in a van, grabbing the guy, and jetting him off to Guam to use as a bargaining chip, as has been alleged by the guy's MP father. I seriously doubt all that, but we'll see where the truth lies.
TFA says he was arrested in Guam (a US territory). The "kidnapped in the Maldives" thing seems to be coming from the Russian media, which isn't exactly the most trustworthy source on the planet (but at least it's a lot better than North Korea!;) )
Russia (148th) might have been lower in the index had it not been for the stubbornness and resistance shown by its civil society. But the authorities keep on intensifying the crackdown begun when Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012 and are exporting their model throughout the former Soviet Union. From Ukraine (127th, unchanged) and Azerbaijan (160th, -3) to Central Asia, Russia’s repressive legislation and communications surveillance methods are happily copied. Moscow also uses UN bodies and regional alliances such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in its efforts to undermine international standards on freedom of information.
Criticism of the regime is common since the major demonstrations of 2011 and 2012 but media selfcensorship is far from disappearing. The federal TV stations continue to be controlled and, in response to the “return of politics in Russia,” the authorities have chose repression. Ever since Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012, more and more draconian laws have been adopted. Activists, news media and bloggers have all been targeted. Defamation has been criminalized again, websites are being blacklisted and the range of activities that can be construed as “high treason” is now much broader. “Traditional values” are used to justify new restrictions on freedom of information, including the criminalization of “homosexual propaganda” and “insulting the feelings of believers.”
Not like the US is a bed of roses - its #46 standing puts it below countries like Botswana and Papua New Guinea, only one place above Haiti. But compared to Russia....
??? I don't see that all. The links are just google image searches on "reykjavík fireworks", "brenna gamlárskvöldið", and "jóðhátíð í eyjum". Oh, hmm.... I'm betting that because I'm searching from Iceland I get differently biased results. I know that my regular google searches at least bias towards Icelandic sites. Okay, well, basically picture this for an hour while several dozen of these are ongoing, or summer festivals like this.
Hmm, interesting, they actually limit how many can be shot off?
Yes, your description of size, wind, etc are accurate. Also it's a rather moist climate, not much fire risk. And most buildings are concrete. And the city is half surrounded by ocean. And since the money goes to support the rescue services, the incentive is to encourage people to shoot off as many as possible, rather than the other way around.
Whoops, included the wrong link for the "The whole city looks like this" part - it was supposed to be this link. The first one is a link to just a small festival display.
I think a lot of people spend so much here because the profits go to the rescue services. Also, I guess since we have no military we've got to blow something up;)
Irrelevant. You're still limited by supply rates and feed wire heating.
LOL. No, you most certainly are not. Supply for the vehicle is from local storage, charged slowly over time, ready for fast discharge when needed
LOL yourself. You were crediting ultracapacitors with fast charging. Now your "counter" is saying that no, you're talking about slow charging. Well, make up your damned mind.
As for feed wire heating, that's absurd. At these lengths, and these voltages, it's simply not a problem.
At the *thousands of amps* needed to surpass the charge rate capacity of li-ions, yes, you bloody well are talking about wire heating problems.
I know that with multiple high energy motors, motor peak current demands can be very high, particularly in the case of high power motors that batteries aren't good for, and that semiconductors can be arranged for very high parallelism.
Oh, please, get real. The supercar-performance Tesla Roadster uses a 215kW motor peak, max 100kW sustained. To drain the whole pack with the pedal to the floor constantly (which, as noted, the car doesn't support) would take over 15 minutes. The fastest you can actually drain it without overheating the car is about 45 minutes. And this is for a car that does 0-100 in 3,7 seconds.
Learn to admit when you make a mistake and move on. The concept that there's sort of car performance limitation from not being able to instantly discharge the whole pack is utterly absurd.
Oh heck no, not even close.
Then follow the instructions in the very next sentence that you ignored. But given that few car parts last longer than 10 years, and most ultracapacitors don't last that long, I think that's an unreasonable demand.
Montana's not a great environment for batteries at times. I'd have to rig a cover for it all, probably lose 6 inches of depth in the bed. Hmmm.:)
Montana? You did see that one of the supercap info sheets linked showed that they're only rated down to -25C, right? Why would you choose that over good li-ions which go down to -40C (some varieties go even lower)? Are you fond of getting stuck out in the cold?
It's only when they are unused for long periods of times that they don't.
In fantasyland, perhaps. Check the specsheets for actual real-world ultracaps, like the ones I linked. They explicitly state that capacity declines from having energy stored in them. So unless your plan is to fully discharge your car after every use, yeah, good luck with that.
The idea that their lifespan in use is ten years is a complete myth.
Yeah, what do those stupid nuthead supercap manufacturers know about their own products? fyngyrz, you tell them what's what!
Yes, yes, of course you can break them if you misuse them
You can break them by precisely the same method you said that you can't, as per the spec sheets of the manufacturers.
UC won't overcharge if a continuous supply is applied to them that is under their rated voltage.
The spec sheets explicitly contradict that.
Show me one in continuous, low cycle rate use that needs to be.
The spec sheets all explicitly describe the exact same internal resistance rise with time. There's tons and tons of peer-reviewed research on it. But no, no, we have fyngyrz here to correct all those stupid boffins!
According to all manufacturer information out there, the primary loss mechanism is not cycling but energy storage. You can cycle them tons without problem, but each second you leave them charged raises their internal resistance. The higher you charge them and th
I don't get why American fireworks displays are so small. I'd love to see this copter fly through fireworks in Reykjavík on New Years Eve. The Macy's 4th of july fireworks display in New York shoots off about 10 tons of fireworks. Iceland (most of the population being in Reykjavík and its adjacent municipalities, about 250k people) shoots off about 600 tons of fireworks on New Years, the weight of about 5 adult blue whales. The whole city looks like this for literally about an hour. It's not organized, it's just everyone shooting off an average of about 9 kilograms / 20 pounds per family - some more, some less. You see fireworks like the stuff that copter flew through in little towns of 1-2 thousand people. Even if you only count organized displays, it just seems to be so disproportionately little in the US. Pretty much every festival that does fireworks here shoots off several tons. Or otherwise just burns pretty much everything that's not nailed down. Or as more often is the case, both at the same time.
I've never seen any studies of aluminum or titanium rebar. That'd be pretty darned costly, though, especially titanium.
Carbon fiber rebar seems to outperform bassalt rebar, though it's a lot more expensive. They're both very similar in form and how you work with them.
More common than either of them is fiberglass rebar. But the performance benefit of basalt rebar is a lot better than glass rebar, and it's not that much more expensive. Also, fiberglass can suffer slow degradation from moisture - not as fast as steel-rebar concrete degrades, but it's a known issue. Both carbon and basalt fiber are very resistant to this, and experience little to no degradation with time.
Two attempts to deal with rebar rust have been plastic coated rebar and stainless steel rebar. By and large, plastic coated rebar has proven to be a failure - in some places it's even shortened the concrete's lifespan. Stainless rebar usually offers some increased lifespan, but not as much as you might expect, and it's really expensive.
I mentioned earlier that how you work with composites versus metals is different. With metals, they're very heavy; the composites are light and easy to transport. Metals need tools to bend; the composites you can bend by hand. However, composites can't do sharp corners like metals can; you have to cut them and then bind the cut pieces together, or purchase premade corner pieces. But thankfully composites are much easier to cut than metals. The metals handle much higher temperatures than composites, due to the plastic binding. However in practice it doesn't affect fire resistance much, the huge thermal mass of the concrete and the fact that it outgasses generally prevents excessive fiber delamination. The biggest problem is experience. Few construction crews have experience working with non-ferrous rebar. Fiberglass has been researched the longest, nearly half a century, and while it's proven itself, the construction industry is generally very slow to take up new technology. Basalt fiber rebar has only been in pilot projects for a 20-30 years. While by all standards it appears to be more long-term durable than fiberglass (in addition to being stronger to begin with), it'll probably be even longer before you start seeing it in widespread use.
Not only do I like the stats it presents, especially versus its price point, but I also like helping promote new technology that I like. Also, there just seems to be something fitting about a home built in Iceland being with basalt rebar, basalt dust pozzolan, with basalt sand and gravel, and built on basalt bedrock;)
Irrelevant. You're still limited by supply rates and feed wire heating. Top end li-ion cells can charge in a matter of minutes on the small scale. In practice it's supply rate and cooling that limits you.
Much higher discharge rates
Irrelevant. What, you think cars have multi-megawatt inverters and motors? And again, top-end li-ions can have couple minut discharges.
and that without developing significant heat, because their series resistance is negligible
Slow charge and discharge of li-ions (normal usage) is usually over 99% efficiency. Fast charge is usually 94-97%. Fast discharge is irrelevant because the rest of the car can't handle using multiple megawatts at once (what, you think the car's going to get 0-100 times measured in milliseconds?) Older supercaps are less efficient than older li-ions due to an increase in the internal resistance (more in this in a minute)
Enormously more charge/discharge cycles than anything in battery tech
10 years-ish isn't good enough for you? Fine, reduce the depth of discharge to get 15-20 years. You'll still be an order of magnitude higher energy density than ultracaps.
you could will ultracaps used in a vehicle context to your children
You've been way overstating (and repeating a common mythology) about ultracaps. They don't actually last that long. Here's an info sheet from an ultracap manufacturer. Scroll down to "Life Expectancy".
The life expectancy of supercapacitors is identical to aluminum electrolytic capacitors... Supercapacitors operated at room temperature can have life expectancies of several years
It's pure nonsense that they last forever. Some are rated for longer. For example Ioxus rates theirs at 10 years. But 10 years is pretty common for higher end EV battery packs, too.
Much wider range of usable performance over temperature; much colder, much hotter.
As per the above, operating out of the ideal temperature range cuts your ultracap lifespan. Commercial ultracaps aren't generally rated for wider temperature operating ranges than high-end li-ions, as you'll see from the various linked caps in this post, which are just a random sampling (for example, the Cooper Bussmann aerogel caps are only rated down to -25C, which is not impressive at all). And there's only a rather small range that's necessary for human-operated vehicles on the surface of the Earth. The ambient temperature outside isn't going to reach cold enough to liquify oxygen or melt zinc.
Much less need for recycling
Show me a single type of ultracap which can be recycled at all.
It varies, but I think I figured out that on my land it's going to work out to about 6-7 cents per incremental kilowatt hour. Power in my area is primarily geo, though in Iceland as a whole hydro makes a lot more. I think the conversion for gasoline prices is about $7.50 per US gallon.
Surely you know that today's ithium ion technology is half an order of magnitude better energy density than when the tech was introduced, and it keeps improving every year. Yes the trend of battery energy density doubling every 8-ish years has continued under li-ion. Li-ion isn't a single chemistry, it's a family.
It's not simply electronics improvements that let the batteries in these devices keep getting smaller and smaller with each generation while battery life improves.
I don't get the obsession with ultracaps. Yes, they're advancing, but not faster than batteries. And they're 1 1/2 orders of magnitude behind on energy density, and even more on price. So why do people always seem to think they're the solution to everything?
Bottom line, though, is that battery tech isn't likely to continue to hold its ground for much longer
Citation needed. I follow battery tech pretty closely, and I see absolutely no signs of it slowing down; if anything, it seems to be speeding up, at each step, from theoretical concepts all the way own to commercialization of new technologies (for example, silicon anodes used to be only a lab tech, now they're starting to increasingly be used in commercial cells). There's many dozens to hundreds of majority improved li-ion anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and membranes in the lab, in various stages of commercialization, from brand new to company-with-funding-is-setting-up-production-lines. And then there's a couple dozen different next-generation non-li-ion technologies. Li-air is usually the most heralded of these, offering the potential for greater range per kilogram than gasoline (even ignoring how dramatically smaller and lighter electric drivetrains are than gasoline drivetrains - not sure why people always ignore this when comparing "range"). However, li-air isn't my favorite; at least in the shorter-term, I'd say my favorite is probably lithium-sulfur. There's actually been a couple prototype devices powered by them, such as a solar airplane; they have superb energy density already but they need to get the lifespan up - which is precisely what's been happening in the lab.
Companies have been pumping water (usually wastewater or seawater) down wells since the start of the latter half of the 20th century, to restore pressure in oil reservoirs. So how is this anything new and anything connected with fracking?
Also, I don't unerstand why people make such a big deal out of these minor earthquakes which are general to small too feel even if you're paying attention for them. The amount of energy they're dealing with is only in the ballpark of these tiny quakes; compared to a large earthquake, it'd be like a mouse trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Either the boulder is ready to go or it's not, the mouse makes essentially no difference.
Normally I'd disagree with you, because most manufacturers these days buy so many of their parts from 3rd party manufacturers, they're the ones that profit from replacements. But given how much Tesla manufactures in-house, and how with each generation they keep putting more emphasis on keeping it all in-house, there may be some truth to that.
None of those things apply to the design. There's no drywall; the plans for the home are of a "steampunk" style, with conduits for wiring/piping visible but done decoratively. Hence replacing them doesn't involve ripping out drywall. It's a highly open floor plan; anyone in the future can put up additional walls if they want smaller rooms, but otherwise it's wide open.
As for why? If I'm building something, I want it to outlive me. I want future generations to see it. When most everything else from our current era is long gone, I want that which I did to still be standing. Is that so strange? It's like planting a sequoia. You'll never live to see it be a giant. But if you plant it in a place where it can thrive, it'll endure for people to enjoy for hundreds of generations.
No problem:) I first did my own research, then met up with the president of the Icelandic Concrete Association, who's pretty excited about the project, to discuss it further. The project is going to be unusual in quite a few ways, for example, it's going to be what's called an "umbrella earth home", and we're going for a natural cave/steampunk look to it (based on an idea that the concrete guy had, we're going to use high pressure water on the interior after the concrete sets to remove the outer layers of cement from the gravel, leaving it looking like rough rock on the inside). It may not be a first in the world, but it'll be a first for Iceland.:)
I've been thinking about the long term on everything with the project. For example, instead of drilling a well to pump from, I'm having the cold water come from a persistent natural spring up on the mountainside about half a kilometer away, naturally filtered through gravel and sand (my excavator operator is working on it as we speak, actually), so it takes no power to run and should last very well. Wells are standard where I am but I found I could get water from the spring for about the same price, maybe even less.
I'm not an expert, but the steel is protected from corrosion in most forms of concrete due to the mildly alkaline chemistry of the concrete.
Gee, I wish I'd written something like:
The cement carbonates at a relatively constant rate (give or take somewhat depending on various factors like moisture), a given depth per year, which brings it down to a more neutral pH, which then when it gets to the steel allows the steel to rust
;)
And if you throw on sacrificial metal [wikipedia.org], you can keep that steel corrosion-free indefinitely.
Galvanic protection of concrete is rather tricky versus something like a ship's hull, the electric potential depends a lot on its environment, even where it is in the structure, and if there's too little it doesn't protect and if there's too much you cause electrolysis of the water in the cement (it's a hydrate), which leads to hydrogen embrittlement of the steel. And it's usually not some single electrode, it's generally a lot of separate cast electrodes or are applied to the concrete as a coating, so it's a big issue to replace/redo. And if you don't, it rusts and falls apart.
I strongly prefer passively stable structures.:) Something that could be completely forgotten and still be there after a thousand years.
The question is not whether you "can", it's what it costs and what constraints it imposes. It's possible to make an EV that goes a good chunk of a thousand miles, it'd just be a totally impractical absurdly-expensive monstrosity.
No question that batteries are advancing - usually a gravimetric energy density doubling every 8 years or so. But the trend for volumetric isn't as impressive, and the price changes per watt hour are far less predictable. Sometimes the next generation which improves your battery stats is more expensive than the previous one. Sometimes it's cheaper. Overall the trend is negative, but it's very bumpy and not as fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article on the details of what he's charged with here, with screenshots of the operation he stands accused of running.
While the details of the arrest are still hazy, one thing is clear - they've had this guy in their sights since 2011. It's not surprising that they issued a sealed indictment for him, mind you, that's not particularly unusual for a case like this where the subject is unlikely to be extradited and would avoid your jurisdiction if the indictment was public (nor is the US in any way unique in this regard). And since I've seen others commenting about this: yes, the Secret Service is the correct body to have jurisdiction over this, as they (strangely) are in charge of enforcement against financial crimes. Back in the early days of commercially available inkjet printers, the nerdy high school/college program I went to (TAMS) once got a visit from the secret service when one of the students figured out that he could print good enough replica dollar bills on one to fool the scanner on the drink machine in the lounge. The total volume of the forgery had to be tiny, I'd be surprised if it was more than $100, but still, if you feel like getting involved in financial crime, expect the Secret Service to be looking out for you. ;)
The scandal here would be if this was an extrajudicial "kidnapping" in the Maldives, with the US swooping up in a van, grabbing the guy, and jetting him off to Guam to use as a bargaining chip, as has been alleged by the guy's MP father. I seriously doubt all that, but we'll see where the truth lies.
TFA says he was arrested in Guam (a US territory). The "kidnapped in the Maldives" thing seems to be coming from the Russian media, which isn't exactly the most trustworthy source on the planet (but at least it's a lot better than North Korea! ;) )
Not like the US is a bed of roses - its #46 standing puts it below countries like Botswana and Papua New Guinea, only one place above Haiti. But compared to Russia....
There wouldn't be so many injuries if such a large chunk of the people setting them off weren't drunk ;)
If there's was any country with that special combination of whale-hunting and pyromania to do it, it'd be Iceland ;)
??? I don't see that all. The links are just google image searches on "reykjavík fireworks", "brenna gamlárskvöldið", and "jóðhátíð í eyjum". Oh, hmm.... I'm betting that because I'm searching from Iceland I get differently biased results. I know that my regular google searches at least bias towards Icelandic sites. Okay, well, basically picture this for an hour while several dozen of these are ongoing, or summer festivals like this.
We kinda like fire.
Hmm, interesting, they actually limit how many can be shot off?
Yes, your description of size, wind, etc are accurate. Also it's a rather moist climate, not much fire risk. And most buildings are concrete. And the city is half surrounded by ocean. And since the money goes to support the rescue services, the incentive is to encourage people to shoot off as many as possible, rather than the other way around.
Whoops, included the wrong link for the "The whole city looks like this" part - it was supposed to be this link. The first one is a link to just a small festival display.
What's the actual price there?
I think a lot of people spend so much here because the profits go to the rescue services. Also, I guess since we have no military we've got to blow something up ;)
LOL yourself. You were crediting ultracapacitors with fast charging. Now your "counter" is saying that no, you're talking about slow charging. Well, make up your damned mind.
At the *thousands of amps* needed to surpass the charge rate capacity of li-ions, yes, you bloody well are talking about wire heating problems.
Oh, please, get real. The supercar-performance Tesla Roadster uses a 215kW motor peak, max 100kW sustained. To drain the whole pack with the pedal to the floor constantly (which, as noted, the car doesn't support) would take over 15 minutes. The fastest you can actually drain it without overheating the car is about 45 minutes. And this is for a car that does 0-100 in 3,7 seconds.
Learn to admit when you make a mistake and move on. The concept that there's sort of car performance limitation from not being able to instantly discharge the whole pack is utterly absurd.
Then follow the instructions in the very next sentence that you ignored. But given that few car parts last longer than 10 years, and most ultracapacitors don't last that long, I think that's an unreasonable demand.
Montana? You did see that one of the supercap info sheets linked showed that they're only rated down to -25C, right? Why would you choose that over good li-ions which go down to -40C (some varieties go even lower)? Are you fond of getting stuck out in the cold?
In fantasyland, perhaps. Check the specsheets for actual real-world ultracaps, like the ones I linked. They explicitly state that capacity declines from having energy stored in them. So unless your plan is to fully discharge your car after every use, yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, what do those stupid nuthead supercap manufacturers know about their own products? fyngyrz, you tell them what's what!
You can break them by precisely the same method you said that you can't, as per the spec sheets of the manufacturers.
The spec sheets explicitly contradict that.
The spec sheets all explicitly describe the exact same internal resistance rise with time. There's tons and tons of peer-reviewed research on it. But no, no, we have fyngyrz here to correct all those stupid boffins!
According to all manufacturer information out there, the primary loss mechanism is not cycling but energy storage. You can cycle them tons without problem, but each second you leave them charged raises their internal resistance. The higher you charge them and th
I don't get why American fireworks displays are so small. I'd love to see this copter fly through fireworks in Reykjavík on New Years Eve. The Macy's 4th of july fireworks display in New York shoots off about 10 tons of fireworks. Iceland (most of the population being in Reykjavík and its adjacent municipalities, about 250k people) shoots off about 600 tons of fireworks on New Years, the weight of about 5 adult blue whales. The whole city looks like this for literally about an hour. It's not organized, it's just everyone shooting off an average of about 9 kilograms / 20 pounds per family - some more, some less. You see fireworks like the stuff that copter flew through in little towns of 1-2 thousand people. Even if you only count organized displays, it just seems to be so disproportionately little in the US. Pretty much every festival that does fireworks here shoots off several tons. Or otherwise just burns pretty much everything that's not nailed down. Or as more often is the case, both at the same time.
How about peer-reviewed data with a peer-reviewed statistical correlation?
Is that really that unfair of a requirement?
I've never seen any studies of aluminum or titanium rebar. That'd be pretty darned costly, though, especially titanium.
Carbon fiber rebar seems to outperform bassalt rebar, though it's a lot more expensive. They're both very similar in form and how you work with them.
More common than either of them is fiberglass rebar. But the performance benefit of basalt rebar is a lot better than glass rebar, and it's not that much more expensive. Also, fiberglass can suffer slow degradation from moisture - not as fast as steel-rebar concrete degrades, but it's a known issue. Both carbon and basalt fiber are very resistant to this, and experience little to no degradation with time.
Two attempts to deal with rebar rust have been plastic coated rebar and stainless steel rebar. By and large, plastic coated rebar has proven to be a failure - in some places it's even shortened the concrete's lifespan. Stainless rebar usually offers some increased lifespan, but not as much as you might expect, and it's really expensive.
I mentioned earlier that how you work with composites versus metals is different. With metals, they're very heavy; the composites are light and easy to transport. Metals need tools to bend; the composites you can bend by hand. However, composites can't do sharp corners like metals can; you have to cut them and then bind the cut pieces together, or purchase premade corner pieces. But thankfully composites are much easier to cut than metals. The metals handle much higher temperatures than composites, due to the plastic binding. However in practice it doesn't affect fire resistance much, the huge thermal mass of the concrete and the fact that it outgasses generally prevents excessive fiber delamination. The biggest problem is experience. Few construction crews have experience working with non-ferrous rebar. Fiberglass has been researched the longest, nearly half a century, and while it's proven itself, the construction industry is generally very slow to take up new technology. Basalt fiber rebar has only been in pilot projects for a 20-30 years. While by all standards it appears to be more long-term durable than fiberglass (in addition to being stronger to begin with), it'll probably be even longer before you start seeing it in widespread use.
Not only do I like the stats it presents, especially versus its price point, but I also like helping promote new technology that I like. Also, there just seems to be something fitting about a home built in Iceland being with basalt rebar, basalt dust pozzolan, with basalt sand and gravel, and built on basalt bedrock ;)
Irrelevant. You're still limited by supply rates and feed wire heating. Top end li-ion cells can charge in a matter of minutes on the small scale. In practice it's supply rate and cooling that limits you.
Irrelevant. What, you think cars have multi-megawatt inverters and motors? And again, top-end li-ions can have couple minut discharges.
Slow charge and discharge of li-ions (normal usage) is usually over 99% efficiency. Fast charge is usually 94-97%. Fast discharge is irrelevant because the rest of the car can't handle using multiple megawatts at once (what, you think the car's going to get 0-100 times measured in milliseconds?) Older supercaps are less efficient than older li-ions due to an increase in the internal resistance (more in this in a minute)
10 years-ish isn't good enough for you? Fine, reduce the depth of discharge to get 15-20 years. You'll still be an order of magnitude higher energy density than ultracaps.
You've been way overstating (and repeating a common mythology) about ultracaps. They don't actually last that long. Here's an info sheet from an ultracap manufacturer. Scroll down to "Life Expectancy".
It's pure nonsense that they last forever. Some are rated for longer. For example Ioxus rates theirs at 10 years. But 10 years is pretty common for higher end EV battery packs, too.
This concept that ultracapacitors are something that you can "gift to your children" is just bull. They degrade, too. Following an exponential degradation curve dominated by increasing internal resistance.. So please stop with this nonsense.
As per the above, operating out of the ideal temperature range cuts your ultracap lifespan. Commercial ultracaps aren't generally rated for wider temperature operating ranges than high-end li-ions, as you'll see from the various linked caps in this post, which are just a random sampling (for example, the Cooper Bussmann aerogel caps are only rated down to -25C, which is not impressive at all). And there's only a rather small range that's necessary for human-operated vehicles on the surface of the Earth. The ambient temperature outside isn't going to reach cold enough to liquify oxygen or melt zinc.
Show me a single type of ultracap which can be recycled at all.
Overheating of the supercapacitor can occur from continuous overcurrent or overvoltage charging. Overheating can lead to increased ESR, gas generation, decreased lifetime, leakage, venting or rupture. .... General Safety Considerations: Supercapacitors may vent or rupture if overcharged, reverse charged, incinerated or heated above 150C
It varies, but I think I figured out that on my land it's going to work out to about 6-7 cents per incremental kilowatt hour. Power in my area is primarily geo, though in Iceland as a whole hydro makes a lot more. I think the conversion for gasoline prices is about $7.50 per US gallon.
Sounds like metal fatigue. You have to design to prevent that.
Surely you know that today's ithium ion technology is half an order of magnitude better energy density than when the tech was introduced, and it keeps improving every year. Yes the trend of battery energy density doubling every 8-ish years has continued under li-ion. Li-ion isn't a single chemistry, it's a family.
It's not simply electronics improvements that let the batteries in these devices keep getting smaller and smaller with each generation while battery life improves.
I don't get the obsession with ultracaps. Yes, they're advancing, but not faster than batteries. And they're 1 1/2 orders of magnitude behind on energy density, and even more on price. So why do people always seem to think they're the solution to everything?
Citation needed. I follow battery tech pretty closely, and I see absolutely no signs of it slowing down; if anything, it seems to be speeding up, at each step, from theoretical concepts all the way own to commercialization of new technologies (for example, silicon anodes used to be only a lab tech, now they're starting to increasingly be used in commercial cells). There's many dozens to hundreds of majority improved li-ion anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and membranes in the lab, in various stages of commercialization, from brand new to company-with-funding-is-setting-up-production-lines. And then there's a couple dozen different next-generation non-li-ion technologies. Li-air is usually the most heralded of these, offering the potential for greater range per kilogram than gasoline (even ignoring how dramatically smaller and lighter electric drivetrains are than gasoline drivetrains - not sure why people always ignore this when comparing "range"). However, li-air isn't my favorite; at least in the shorter-term, I'd say my favorite is probably lithium-sulfur. There's actually been a couple prototype devices powered by them, such as a solar airplane; they have superb energy density already but they need to get the lifespan up - which is precisely what's been happening in the lab.
Companies have been pumping water (usually wastewater or seawater) down wells since the start of the latter half of the 20th century, to restore pressure in oil reservoirs. So how is this anything new and anything connected with fracking?
Also, I don't unerstand why people make such a big deal out of these minor earthquakes which are general to small too feel even if you're paying attention for them. The amount of energy they're dealing with is only in the ballpark of these tiny quakes; compared to a large earthquake, it'd be like a mouse trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Either the boulder is ready to go or it's not, the mouse makes essentially no difference.
Normally I'd disagree with you, because most manufacturers these days buy so many of their parts from 3rd party manufacturers, they're the ones that profit from replacements. But given how much Tesla manufactures in-house, and how with each generation they keep putting more emphasis on keeping it all in-house, there may be some truth to that.
None of those things apply to the design. There's no drywall; the plans for the home are of a "steampunk" style, with conduits for wiring/piping visible but done decoratively. Hence replacing them doesn't involve ripping out drywall. It's a highly open floor plan; anyone in the future can put up additional walls if they want smaller rooms, but otherwise it's wide open.
As for why? If I'm building something, I want it to outlive me. I want future generations to see it. When most everything else from our current era is long gone, I want that which I did to still be standing. Is that so strange? It's like planting a sequoia. You'll never live to see it be a giant. But if you plant it in a place where it can thrive, it'll endure for people to enjoy for hundreds of generations.
Haha, brilliant! ;) It's a carbon offset program! ;)
No problem :) I first did my own research, then met up with the president of the Icelandic Concrete Association, who's pretty excited about the project, to discuss it further. The project is going to be unusual in quite a few ways, for example, it's going to be what's called an "umbrella earth home", and we're going for a natural cave/steampunk look to it (based on an idea that the concrete guy had, we're going to use high pressure water on the interior after the concrete sets to remove the outer layers of cement from the gravel, leaving it looking like rough rock on the inside). It may not be a first in the world, but it'll be a first for Iceland. :)
I've been thinking about the long term on everything with the project. For example, instead of drilling a well to pump from, I'm having the cold water come from a persistent natural spring up on the mountainside about half a kilometer away, naturally filtered through gravel and sand (my excavator operator is working on it as we speak, actually), so it takes no power to run and should last very well. Wells are standard where I am but I found I could get water from the spring for about the same price, maybe even less.
Gee, I wish I'd written something like:
Galvanic protection of concrete is rather tricky versus something like a ship's hull, the electric potential depends a lot on its environment, even where it is in the structure, and if there's too little it doesn't protect and if there's too much you cause electrolysis of the water in the cement (it's a hydrate), which leads to hydrogen embrittlement of the steel. And it's usually not some single electrode, it's generally a lot of separate cast electrodes or are applied to the concrete as a coating, so it's a big issue to replace/redo. And if you don't, it rusts and falls apart.
I strongly prefer passively stable structures. :) Something that could be completely forgotten and still be there after a thousand years.
The question is not whether you "can", it's what it costs and what constraints it imposes. It's possible to make an EV that goes a good chunk of a thousand miles, it'd just be a totally impractical absurdly-expensive monstrosity.
No question that batteries are advancing - usually a gravimetric energy density doubling every 8 years or so. But the trend for volumetric isn't as impressive, and the price changes per watt hour are far less predictable. Sometimes the next generation which improves your battery stats is more expensive than the previous one. Sometimes it's cheaper. Overall the trend is negative, but it's very bumpy and not as fast.
I saw a Tesla store in Reykjavík the other day. Haven't seen a Tesla on the roads, but still, neat to know that they're here. :)