but I doubt that they have the 40,000 watts (Wikipedia implies that NEMA maxes out at 60A x 600 Volts) that they would need to serve a paltry 10 cars per day (and those watts are in addition to whatever they are using now).
I said a handful of EVs and assumed current ranges, if you want it from a NEMA 5-15. In particular, a NEMA 5-15 wired for outdoor configuration can safely provide about 80kWh per day. That's about four "mass market" EVs or 1-2 "high end" EVs on today's tech.
As for supporting ten vehicles per day each with nearly double the capacity of a Roadster, obviously a single NEMA 5-15 isn't going to cut it. However, the amount of power needed isn't exceptional -- a standard 240V, 200A breaker box could handle that with plenty of capacity to spare. You don't even need three phase for something like that.
As for how much power commercial and industrial facilities have? It varies tremendously -- are you talking a gas station, a strip mall, or an aluminum smelter?. A large industrial facility can have pretty much a whole power plant feeding into it. It's not rare for manufacturing facilities or large businesses to have feeds into them that are essentially nonstop rapid charging power amounts (hundreds or even thousands of kilowatts). Just to pick the first random example from a quick google search -- this auction of an old "cement/fiber roofing products" facility's hardware includes not one but two 1.2 megawatt breaker boxes. 2.4MW is 57,600kWh, or 576 of your hypothetical on-empty super-range electric cars per day.
Note also that you don't need as much "gas station" capacity for EVs as you do for gasoline cars, as the overwhelming majority of people's charging *won't* be rapid charging. Rapid charging stations are only needed to meet the needs of people driving cross country.
(I'll note that I use the term "near carbon free" because there is some carbon released in the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, etc -- just not anywhere close to as much as is saved by using them. I'll also note in all fairness that while our grid is moving toward a carbon free future, it will take a long time.)
What the heck kind of reasoning is, "Using A is bad, so because you're trying to use less of A, screw you!"?
Our grid is moving towards being near carbon free. Gasoline is moving in the other direction. Isn't that the end of the story right there? You can go near carbon free with your transportation just by adding solar panels or a wind turbine to your home. It doesn't even take all that much. If you drive the average 35 miles a day at 200Wh/mi, that's 7kWh/day. At a 20% solar capacity factor, that's an installed capacity of about 1.5kW, which is about $6k in panels, plus installation.
Just from a quick search on "diesel" and "maintenance", here's the first hit I find, comparing diesel maintenance costs on diesel buses with buses powered by other fuels, based on real-world data from several cities:
At least compared to CNG and ethanol, the diesel maintenance costs appear to be notably *higher*. In fact, on the diesel buses, maintenance seems to cost almost as much as the fuel does.
But hey, go ahead and queue up any excuses you want about why anecdotes are better than case studies or how buses don't count or whatnot.
A good part of the cost of setting up a charging station will be bringing in sufficient electrical supply.
The supply feed on rapid charging is about throughput, not charging rate. Most designs for rapid charging stations call for battery buffers that are trickle charged from the grid. If you're out in the middle of nowhere and only get a couple cars per day, you could rapid charge vehicles with your only power supply being a good 'ol NEMA 5-15.
But yes, rapid charging is not something for home. Rapid chargers cost $40-150k each, depending on power output. And there's not really any point to rapid charging at home; who shows up and home after driving hundreds of miles and then needs to drive another couple hundred in 10-20 minutes? And even if you did, well, you could always just go to the local rapid charging station. Rapid charging is for trips, not at home.
Ah, the "long tail" argument -- that old zombie of electric vehicles. No matter how many times you knock it down, it comes coming at you.
Power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines. While the engine itself can *peak* at a fairly high effiency number (percentage-wise, as much as the upper 30s for gasoline and mid 40s for diesel), that's not what you get in practice, as that's only for a narrow torque/rpm range. In practice, you also have parasitic and braking losses. Total well-to-wheel consumption is about 14% for gasoline and 17% for diesel. Engines are slowly getting more efficient, but at the same time fuel production is getting *less* efficient as we have to move more to syncrude and deepwater (think tar sands and outer continental shelf). Power plants, however, are only getting more efficient, and fairly rapidly. Well-to-AC power for an average coal plant in the US is 32%, and natural gas is 42%. Those numbers are higher in Europe. Next gen coal plants are over 40% and next-gen natural gas 60%-ish. Coal, the dirty fuel, is only half our generation. After that is natural gas (a very low carbon fuel per unit energy) and nuclear (a near zero carbon fuel). After that is hydro and then wind (both near zero carbon). There's also a smattering of other generation methods such as diesel, solar, geothermal, and biomass that combined make up a couple percent of our grid.
AC power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. Your typical EV charger is 92-93% efficient (rapid chargers, closer to 90%). Li-ion batteries are generally 96% (rapid charge) to 99% (trickle charge) efficient. Electric drivetrains average 85-90% efficient (they can peak at over 95% on a really good one). And regen braking is pretty much standard. So your net well-to-wheels efficiency is very high, and your carbon is low. And while petroleum gets dirtier, the grid gets cleaner. Last year, for example, over 2/5ths of our new power that went online was wind, and most of the rest was natural gas.
But wait, it gets better. Most EV charging is done at night, on a timer to take advantage of low off-peak rates. Coal power plants take a while to ramp down. In the process, you can sometimes get what's called "spinning standby" -- power generation capacity that's literally wasted because there's nothing to consume it. This mainly occurs in the evenings. Charging off of it is literally free of environmental consequences. Furthermore, most power plants run more efficiently at higher capacity. Evening out the day/night peaks makes the grid as a whole more efficient.
Perhaps having a DOE study conducted at PNL explain it to you will help. Here's a graph comparing the efficiencies of different drivetrain options, and here's one for emissions.
Can this zombie of a notion please accept its headshot and stay down?
Manual? Are you serious? What are we, weightlifters?
A lot of battery pack swapping proponents have no clue how big and heavy EV batteries are. Let me be specific: picture an internal combustion engine. Now double its dimensions and mass. Give it high voltage connections that must be firm to prevent arcing, and keep it securely in place so it doesn't shift around. Now go manually swap that.
And no, a battery is not a battery is not a battery. Go try to shove a laptop battery pack in your flashlight or a AA in your car's engine or a lead-acid battery in your laptop. Different vehicle size, shape, weight distribution, price, performance, and technology profiles have different requirements of size, shape, chemistry, wiring, fuses, and series/parallel cell arrangements in an EV's battery pack.
Batteries degrade and can at times do so in strange ways. Say, for example, that someone has let a spare battery sit idle for some months, charges it up at home and, knowing it's rubbish now
Morbo voice: "EV battery packs do not work that way!"
Ever heard of the RAV4EV? They've been running on their original battery packs (there are no replacements) since the 90s. Most of them are still at above 80% capacity.
EV battery packs are accelerated aging tested to ensure reliability under a wide range of conditions for long periods of time. No, just cobbling a bunch of batteries together won't give you that sort of reliability; it's all about tradeoffs. The two main types of tradeoff used to ensure longevity are A) using less energy dense, but more stable chemistries; and B) using only part of the pack's theoretical capacity (the "Depth of Discharge", or DoD). Hybrid batteries, for example, are put through much harsher conditions than EV batteries (they go through many cycles in a typical drive, while an EV pack will only go through a fraction of a cycle -- and they do so at a higher charge/discharge rate per amount of capacity). Hence, they give them very narrow DoD ranges -- often only about 20-40% of the pack's rated capacity. PHEVs can generally get away with 50-70%, and BEVs 70-90%.
And of course, as others have been pointing out, in the "battery swapping" systems proposed (which I'm not a fan of, BTW), they test all batteries before they hand them out, and you don't own them to begin with.
You do realize how large battery packs are, right? And how heavy? And how different vehicle designs have radically different profiles, thus necessitating different battery profiles (traditional sedan like the Volt = center tunnel T; kei car = under the floor or seats; RWD large pack, trunk-shaped; etc) And weight distribution needs? (FWD, RWD, etc) And how different motors/inverters have different voltage requirements? And not just different target voltages, but specific ranges? And how different packs need to provide different capacities depending on the person's budget and needs, and the vehicle's capability? And different charge/discharge rates, depending on the person's budget and needs, and the vehicle's capability? And that battery tech is one of the fastest "moving targets" out there?
This makes a nice demo when you have one or two companies making nearly identical mid-sized sedans with a single generation of battery technology. Beyond that, you'd pretty much need a warehouse, not a gas station.
It's just not a sustainable business model. Fast charge is the only realistic way to go.
Not only is the "battery life problem" a complete myth (as was pointed out to you below), but so is the replacement price. It is not "a significant cost of the vehicle". Battery prices for *new* batteries on the Prius are $2,299 for the 2000-2003 model years and $2,588 for the 2004-2008 model years. You can get used ones for under $1k.
The eyes get damaged enough by the frostbite that you can't see for hours. The tongue, damaged enough that you can't taste for days. You lose so much water from your blood that it thickens and becomes acidic -- which, combined with bubbles forming in the blood, cuts off your circulation at about t+100 seconds (death is at about 3-4 minutes).
Water boils out of your body very fast when there's no pressure. Literally, liquid water will go to an instant rolling boil when placed in a vacuum.
As for the extreme cold, it's misleading. You're in a vacuum, which is nominally very cold but has incredibly low thermal mass. It's not going to instantly freeze you, and in fact I'm not sure if it could even drain enough heat to stop a human from overheating.
There are three primary methods through which living things lose heat: conduction (you touch something cold, including a cold atmosphere); evaporation (losing moisture to evaporation cools the body down); and radiation (objects around the temperature of living things radiate primarily in the infrared range). In space, conduction disappears, of course, as you note. Radiation is tricky; you're not only radiating, but so is everything around you; you're exchanging radiation. If you're exchanging radiation with the sun, you're going to be heating up fast. If you're exchanging radiation with the cosmic microwave background, you're going to be cooling down fast. On earth, we primarily exchange radiation with objects of similar temperatures to ourselves, but in space, the differences in temperature can be pretty radical, and hence the need for significant thermal control.
The real issue in this case, though, is evaporation. In a vacuum, evaporation rates *radically* increases. Dogs undergoing decompression experiments were found to have frost on their tongues in 90 seconds. A NASA technician who underwent accidental decompression could literally feel water boiling in his mouth right before he blacked out.
Anyways, the GP's point is wrong: you don't bleed in space, so you're not going to taste blood. In fact, you end up pretty numb, and some of your senses don't come back for a while even if you recover.
If you don't exhale, your lungs burst and rather than blood rushing *out* of your circulatory system, air rushes *in*. Which kills you, of course. If you do exhale, you get to die through a combination of dehydration, freezing, and asphyxiation. Water sublimates in a vacuum. Moisture in your skin, eyes, and mouth goes straight to vapor. The capillaries are permeable, so moisture leaves them too (especially in your lungs), thickening your blood and causing severe acidosis. It also pools under your skin and in the muscles, severely bloating you. Evaporation of water rapidly reduces body temperature (especially on the skin). Nitrogen bubbles up in your bloodstream, a painful condition known as The Bends. Your stomach, bowel, and bladder contents can empty. Seizures occur. At the same time, your lungs work in reverse concerning oxygen -- it leaves your bloodstream. So not only are you not getting new oxygen, but you're losing your existing oxygen. Your brain shuts down in 15-30 seconds. The thickening blood and gas bubbles stop blood flow. You die after a couple minutes.
And... back to the original topic... the freezing of your senses and loss of blood shuts them down.
Half inch high strength steel plate with internal reinforcements.
hoist the coil into a waiting boat/truck
After removing the four-ton coil from the steel casing that it's firmly embedded in. From the bottom of the ocean, if it's offshore. Probably deep in a pile of debris if on land. They'd need a crane either way. Who is this turbine looting team, Ocean's Eleven?
Look, crooks lost control trying to loot a 30 foot turbine, and you're expecting them to loot 300+ foot turbines? (that's the only case I can find of attempted turbine copper theft). It's just not realistic. 80 tons (in tower alone) falling from hundreds of feet isn't exactly silent. That's the impact force of a bomb going off. There's going to be pieces of blades and tower flying everywhere. It's just a stupid notion. It's like saying people are going to loot skyscrapers by toppling them for the copper wiring. These things literally are the size of skyscrapers.
Now your looters are going to be using bombs as big as the one that was used in Oklahoma City (that's what it would take to take down an 80 ton, smooth, round tubular tower with an concrete anchor base) and then organizing freaking underwater salvage operations, all for $30k of copper? And all before anyone notices?
Yes- I believe in a world where people strip houses of wiring and pirates attack ships, that the large commercial windmills that contain very large copper cores
But what sort of idiot puts a windmill on a roof? There are so many things wrong with that.
1) A roof is way too low. The optimum height, in terms of tower cost versus power value, for a turbine of scale sufficient to power a household is generally at least a hundred feet, and preferably notably more. Wind roughly follows a so-called "1/7ths power law", so those first hundred or two feet up make a huge difference. After that, it's a case of diminishing returns.
2) A roof is high turbulence. Turbulence is very bad for wind turbines -- robs them of powers and stresses their hardware. You want to be well above sources of turbulence.
3) A roof is generally not nearly strong enough, and would have to be reinforced anyway.
4) They weren't even bothering to test on a roof in their study.
One thing this article left out was the tower. That may seem like a trivial thing to most people here, but it's not in the least. I made a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers when I was looking into wind power. I found that it actually can be approximately breakeven where I live (in Iowa) if you're out in the countryside so that you can build a very tall tower, and you use a guyed tower**, and you can get a good deal on the tower, and you're grid connected so you don't have to deal with power storage, and you're not an idiot when it comes to turbine selection. Yeah, a lot of "Ifs". But regardless, the tower generally makes up 50-75% of your total costs in a properly designed home-scale system (20-25%-ish on a commercial-scale system).
On February 18, we reported that the F15 sensor malfunction started out having a negligible impact on computed ice extent, which gradually increased as the sensor degraded further. At the end of January, the F15 sensor underestimated ice extent by 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) compared to F13. That is still within the margin of error for daily data. By mid-February, the difference had grown to 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), which is outside of expected error. However, that amount represents less than 4% of Arctic sea ice extent at this time of year. When the computed daily extent dropped sharply on February 16, the sensor failure became obvious.
NSIDC stopped displaying the problematic data, and recalculated sea ice extent using data from the DMSP F13 satellite, an older sensor in the same series of satellites. The recalculation changed the January monthly average ice extent by less than the margin of error for the sensor. As we reported in our February 3 post, growth of Arctic sea ice did indeed slow in January because of unusual atmospheric conditions. Using F13 data instead of F15, the September daily minimum that we reported on September 16, 2008, changed from 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles) to 4.54 million square kilometers (1.75 million square miles), within the margin of error for daily data.
The F15 sensor drift does not change any of our conclusions regarding the long-term decline in Arctic sea ice extent. Such scientific conclusions, published in peer-reviewed journals, are based on quality-controlled monthly to annually averaged data. We have quality-controlled the final data through 2007; a thorough audit of the more recent data from 2008 shows that any discrepancies fall within the margin of error.
It's one thing to be a denier, but at least don't be so obvious about your attempts to distort the data. It was one, brief problem which was immediately recognized and only caused an approximately 4% error at its peak.
You're going to have to deal with the *fact* that not only is Arctic ice extent far less than it has been at any point in recorded history, but that it's far thinner to boot. If you hate what peer-reviewed science says, that's your problem. Build your *own* network of sensors and satellites and monitor the Arctic for decades if you don't like the results the current hardware is giving.
And as for the Slashdot article in question? Let me sum up: "Ice is growing at a single Antarctic station. Therefore, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers which never predicted that ice would shrink at every station are still wrong (because it's "global climate change", not "local weather change"), and global warming is a scientific conspiracy to destroy capitalism."
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, heck, I just noticed -- that facility I pulled up not only has those two 1.2MW breaker boxes, but *also* a 1.44MW panel.
Just a random industrial building, like countless others across this country.
but I doubt that they have the 40,000 watts (Wikipedia implies that NEMA maxes out at 60A x 600 Volts) that they would need to serve a paltry 10 cars per day (and those watts are in addition to whatever they are using now).
I said a handful of EVs and assumed current ranges, if you want it from a NEMA 5-15. In particular, a NEMA 5-15 wired for outdoor configuration can safely provide about 80kWh per day. That's about four "mass market" EVs or 1-2 "high end" EVs on today's tech.
As for supporting ten vehicles per day each with nearly double the capacity of a Roadster, obviously a single NEMA 5-15 isn't going to cut it. However, the amount of power needed isn't exceptional -- a standard 240V, 200A breaker box could handle that with plenty of capacity to spare. You don't even need three phase for something like that.
As for how much power commercial and industrial facilities have? It varies tremendously -- are you talking a gas station, a strip mall, or an aluminum smelter?. A large industrial facility can have pretty much a whole power plant feeding into it. It's not rare for manufacturing facilities or large businesses to have feeds into them that are essentially nonstop rapid charging power amounts (hundreds or even thousands of kilowatts). Just to pick the first random example from a quick google search -- this auction of an old "cement/fiber roofing products" facility's hardware includes not one but two 1.2 megawatt breaker boxes. 2.4MW is 57,600kWh, or 576 of your hypothetical on-empty super-range electric cars per day.
Note also that you don't need as much "gas station" capacity for EVs as you do for gasoline cars, as the overwhelming majority of people's charging *won't* be rapid charging. Rapid charging stations are only needed to meet the needs of people driving cross country.
(I'll note that I use the term "near carbon free" because there is some carbon released in the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, etc -- just not anywhere close to as much as is saved by using them. I'll also note in all fairness that while our grid is moving toward a carbon free future, it will take a long time.)
What the heck kind of reasoning is, "Using A is bad, so because you're trying to use less of A, screw you!"?
Our grid is moving towards being near carbon free. Gasoline is moving in the other direction. Isn't that the end of the story right there? You can go near carbon free with your transportation just by adding solar panels or a wind turbine to your home. It doesn't even take all that much. If you drive the average 35 miles a day at 200Wh/mi, that's 7kWh/day. At a 20% solar capacity factor, that's an installed capacity of about 1.5kW, which is about $6k in panels, plus installation.
Just from a quick search on "diesel" and "maintenance", here's the first hit I find, comparing diesel maintenance costs on diesel buses with buses powered by other fuels, based on real-world data from several cities:
http://www.tpub.com/content/altfuels10/emission/emission0004.htm
At least compared to CNG and ethanol, the diesel maintenance costs appear to be notably *higher*. In fact, on the diesel buses, maintenance seems to cost almost as much as the fuel does.
But hey, go ahead and queue up any excuses you want about why anecdotes are better than case studies or how buses don't count or whatnot.
Oooh, ooh, is it anecdote time already!? :)
A good part of the cost of setting up a charging station will be bringing in sufficient electrical supply.
The supply feed on rapid charging is about throughput, not charging rate. Most designs for rapid charging stations call for battery buffers that are trickle charged from the grid. If you're out in the middle of nowhere and only get a couple cars per day, you could rapid charge vehicles with your only power supply being a good 'ol NEMA 5-15.
But yes, rapid charging is not something for home. Rapid chargers cost $40-150k each, depending on power output. And there's not really any point to rapid charging at home; who shows up and home after driving hundreds of miles and then needs to drive another couple hundred in 10-20 minutes? And even if you did, well, you could always just go to the local rapid charging station. Rapid charging is for trips, not at home.
Ah, the "long tail" argument -- that old zombie of electric vehicles. No matter how many times you knock it down, it comes coming at you.
Power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines. While the engine itself can *peak* at a fairly high effiency number (percentage-wise, as much as the upper 30s for gasoline and mid 40s for diesel), that's not what you get in practice, as that's only for a narrow torque/rpm range. In practice, you also have parasitic and braking losses. Total well-to-wheel consumption is about 14% for gasoline and 17% for diesel. Engines are slowly getting more efficient, but at the same time fuel production is getting *less* efficient as we have to move more to syncrude and deepwater (think tar sands and outer continental shelf). Power plants, however, are only getting more efficient, and fairly rapidly. Well-to-AC power for an average coal plant in the US is 32%, and natural gas is 42%. Those numbers are higher in Europe. Next gen coal plants are over 40% and next-gen natural gas 60%-ish. Coal, the dirty fuel, is only half our generation. After that is natural gas (a very low carbon fuel per unit energy) and nuclear (a near zero carbon fuel). After that is hydro and then wind (both near zero carbon). There's also a smattering of other generation methods such as diesel, solar, geothermal, and biomass that combined make up a couple percent of our grid.
AC power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. Your typical EV charger is 92-93% efficient (rapid chargers, closer to 90%). Li-ion batteries are generally 96% (rapid charge) to 99% (trickle charge) efficient. Electric drivetrains average 85-90% efficient (they can peak at over 95% on a really good one). And regen braking is pretty much standard. So your net well-to-wheels efficiency is very high, and your carbon is low. And while petroleum gets dirtier, the grid gets cleaner. Last year, for example, over 2/5ths of our new power that went online was wind, and most of the rest was natural gas.
But wait, it gets better. Most EV charging is done at night, on a timer to take advantage of low off-peak rates. Coal power plants take a while to ramp down. In the process, you can sometimes get what's called "spinning standby" -- power generation capacity that's literally wasted because there's nothing to consume it. This mainly occurs in the evenings. Charging off of it is literally free of environmental consequences. Furthermore, most power plants run more efficiently at higher capacity. Evening out the day/night peaks makes the grid as a whole more efficient.
Perhaps having a DOE study conducted at PNL explain it to you will help. Here's a graph comparing the efficiencies of different drivetrain options, and here's one for emissions.
Can this zombie of a notion please accept its headshot and stay down?
Manual? Are you serious? What are we, weightlifters?
A lot of battery pack swapping proponents have no clue how big and heavy EV batteries are. Let me be specific: picture an internal combustion engine. Now double its dimensions and mass. Give it high voltage connections that must be firm to prevent arcing, and keep it securely in place so it doesn't shift around. Now go manually swap that.
And no, a battery is not a battery is not a battery. Go try to shove a laptop battery pack in your flashlight or a AA in your car's engine or a lead-acid battery in your laptop. Different vehicle size, shape, weight distribution, price, performance, and technology profiles have different requirements of size, shape, chemistry, wiring, fuses, and series/parallel cell arrangements in an EV's battery pack.
Batteries degrade and can at times do so in strange ways. Say, for example, that someone has let a spare battery sit idle for some months, charges it up at home and, knowing it's rubbish now
Morbo voice: "EV battery packs do not work that way!"
Ever heard of the RAV4EV? They've been running on their original battery packs (there are no replacements) since the 90s. Most of them are still at above 80% capacity.
EV battery packs are accelerated aging tested to ensure reliability under a wide range of conditions for long periods of time. No, just cobbling a bunch of batteries together won't give you that sort of reliability; it's all about tradeoffs. The two main types of tradeoff used to ensure longevity are A) using less energy dense, but more stable chemistries; and B) using only part of the pack's theoretical capacity (the "Depth of Discharge", or DoD). Hybrid batteries, for example, are put through much harsher conditions than EV batteries (they go through many cycles in a typical drive, while an EV pack will only go through a fraction of a cycle -- and they do so at a higher charge/discharge rate per amount of capacity). Hence, they give them very narrow DoD ranges -- often only about 20-40% of the pack's rated capacity. PHEVs can generally get away with 50-70%, and BEVs 70-90%.
And of course, as others have been pointing out, in the "battery swapping" systems proposed (which I'm not a fan of, BTW), they test all batteries before they hand them out, and you don't own them to begin with.
You do realize how large battery packs are, right? And how heavy?
And how different vehicle designs have radically different profiles, thus necessitating different battery profiles (traditional sedan like the Volt = center tunnel T; kei car = under the floor or seats; RWD large pack, trunk-shaped; etc)
And weight distribution needs? (FWD, RWD, etc)
And how different motors/inverters have different voltage requirements?
And not just different target voltages, but specific ranges?
And how different packs need to provide different capacities depending on the person's budget and needs, and the vehicle's capability?
And different charge/discharge rates, depending on the person's budget and needs, and the vehicle's capability?
And that battery tech is one of the fastest "moving targets" out there?
This makes a nice demo when you have one or two companies making nearly identical mid-sized sedans with a single generation of battery technology. Beyond that, you'd pretty much need a warehouse, not a gas station.
It's just not a sustainable business model. Fast charge is the only realistic way to go.
That's the problem with rumors, now isn't it?
Not only is the "battery life problem" a complete myth (as was pointed out to you below), but so is the replacement price. It is not "a significant cost of the vehicle". Battery prices for *new* batteries on the Prius are $2,299 for the 2000-2003 model years and $2,588 for the 2004-2008 model years. You can get used ones for under $1k.
The eyes get damaged enough by the frostbite that you can't see for hours. The tongue, damaged enough that you can't taste for days. You lose so much water from your blood that it thickens and becomes acidic -- which, combined with bubbles forming in the blood, cuts off your circulation at about t+100 seconds (death is at about 3-4 minutes).
Water boils out of your body very fast when there's no pressure. Literally, liquid water will go to an instant rolling boil when placed in a vacuum.
You do realize that you just linked the exact same article I did, right?
As for the extreme cold, it's misleading. You're in a vacuum, which is nominally very cold but has incredibly low thermal mass. It's not going to instantly freeze you, and in fact I'm not sure if it could even drain enough heat to stop a human from overheating.
There are three primary methods through which living things lose heat: conduction (you touch something cold, including a cold atmosphere); evaporation (losing moisture to evaporation cools the body down); and radiation (objects around the temperature of living things radiate primarily in the infrared range). In space, conduction disappears, of course, as you note. Radiation is tricky; you're not only radiating, but so is everything around you; you're exchanging radiation. If you're exchanging radiation with the sun, you're going to be heating up fast. If you're exchanging radiation with the cosmic microwave background, you're going to be cooling down fast. On earth, we primarily exchange radiation with objects of similar temperatures to ourselves, but in space, the differences in temperature can be pretty radical, and hence the need for significant thermal control.
The real issue in this case, though, is evaporation. In a vacuum, evaporation rates *radically* increases. Dogs undergoing decompression experiments were found to have frost on their tongues in 90 seconds. A NASA technician who underwent accidental decompression could literally feel water boiling in his mouth right before he blacked out.
Anyways, the GP's point is wrong: you don't bleed in space, so you're not going to taste blood. In fact, you end up pretty numb, and some of your senses don't come back for a while even if you recover.
Morbo voice: Decompression does not work that way!
If you don't exhale, your lungs burst and rather than blood rushing *out* of your circulatory system, air rushes *in*. Which kills you, of course. If you do exhale, you get to die through a combination of dehydration, freezing, and asphyxiation. Water sublimates in a vacuum. Moisture in your skin, eyes, and mouth goes straight to vapor. The capillaries are permeable, so moisture leaves them too (especially in your lungs), thickening your blood and causing severe acidosis. It also pools under your skin and in the muscles, severely bloating you. Evaporation of water rapidly reduces body temperature (especially on the skin). Nitrogen bubbles up in your bloodstream, a painful condition known as The Bends. Your stomach, bowel, and bladder contents can empty. Seizures occur. At the same time, your lungs work in reverse concerning oxygen -- it leaves your bloodstream. So not only are you not getting new oxygen, but you're losing your existing oxygen. Your brain shuts down in 15-30 seconds. The thickening blood and gas bubbles stop blood flow. You die after a couple minutes.
And... back to the original topic... the freezing of your senses and loss of blood shuts them down.
Why would you smell your blood in a vacuum?
Can vacuum have a smell?
I don't know... what does near-instant frostbite of your olfactory epithelium smell like?
And the moon smells like burnt gunpowder.
How thick are the tubes?
Half inch high strength steel plate with internal reinforcements.
hoist the coil into a waiting boat/truck
After removing the four-ton coil from the steel casing that it's firmly embedded in. From the bottom of the ocean, if it's offshore. Probably deep in a pile of debris if on land. They'd need a crane either way. Who is this turbine looting team, Ocean's Eleven?
Look, crooks lost control trying to loot a 30 foot turbine, and you're expecting them to loot 300+ foot turbines? (that's the only case I can find of attempted turbine copper theft). It's just not realistic. 80 tons (in tower alone) falling from hundreds of feet isn't exactly silent. That's the impact force of a bomb going off. There's going to be pieces of blades and tower flying everywhere. It's just a stupid notion. It's like saying people are going to loot skyscrapers by toppling them for the copper wiring. These things literally are the size of skyscrapers.
If they need extra power on certain days, they could just have the sun stop in the sky for a while.
Now your looters are going to be using bombs as big as the one that was used in Oklahoma City (that's what it would take to take down an 80 ton, smooth, round tubular tower with an concrete anchor base) and then organizing freaking underwater salvage operations, all for $30k of copper? And all before anyone notices?
Come on now...
Yes- I believe in a world where people strip houses of wiring and pirates attack ships, that the large commercial windmills that contain very large copper cores
Those would have to be some brave freaking looters who really know what the heck they're doing if they don't want to, you know, die.
But what sort of idiot puts a windmill on a roof? There are so many things wrong with that.
1) A roof is way too low. The optimum height, in terms of tower cost versus power value, for a turbine of scale sufficient to power a household is generally at least a hundred feet, and preferably notably more. Wind roughly follows a so-called "1/7ths power law", so those first hundred or two feet up make a huge difference. After that, it's a case of diminishing returns.
2) A roof is high turbulence. Turbulence is very bad for wind turbines -- robs them of powers and stresses their hardware. You want to be well above sources of turbulence.
3) A roof is generally not nearly strong enough, and would have to be reinforced anyway.
4) They weren't even bothering to test on a roof in their study.
One thing this article left out was the tower. That may seem like a trivial thing to most people here, but it's not in the least. I made a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers when I was looking into wind power. I found that it actually can be approximately breakeven where I live (in Iowa) if you're out in the countryside so that you can build a very tall tower, and you use a guyed tower**, and you can get a good deal on the tower, and you're grid connected so you don't have to deal with power storage, and you're not an idiot when it comes to turbine selection. Yeah, a lot of "Ifs". But regardless, the tower generally makes up 50-75% of your total costs in a properly designed home-scale system (20-25%-ish on a commercial-scale system).
Did you even read the source article?
On February 18, we reported that the F15 sensor malfunction started out having a negligible impact on computed ice extent, which gradually increased as the sensor degraded further. At the end of January, the F15 sensor underestimated ice extent by 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) compared to F13. That is still within the margin of error for daily data. By mid-February, the difference had grown to 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), which is outside of expected error. However, that amount represents less than 4% of Arctic sea ice extent at this time of year. When the computed daily extent dropped sharply on February 16, the sensor failure became obvious.
NSIDC stopped displaying the problematic data, and recalculated sea ice extent using data from the DMSP F13 satellite, an older sensor in the same series of satellites. The recalculation changed the January monthly average ice extent by less than the margin of error for the sensor. As we reported in our February 3 post, growth of Arctic sea ice did indeed slow in January because of unusual atmospheric conditions. Using F13 data instead of F15, the September daily minimum that we reported on September 16, 2008, changed from 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles) to 4.54 million square kilometers (1.75 million square miles), within the margin of error for daily data.
The F15 sensor drift does not change any of our conclusions regarding the long-term decline in Arctic sea ice extent. Such scientific conclusions, published in peer-reviewed journals, are based on quality-controlled monthly to annually averaged data. We have quality-controlled the final data through 2007; a thorough audit of the more recent data from 2008 shows that any discrepancies fall within the margin of error.
It's one thing to be a denier, but at least don't be so obvious about your attempts to distort the data. It was one, brief problem which was immediately recognized and only caused an approximately 4% error at its peak.
You're going to have to deal with the *fact* that not only is Arctic ice extent far less than it has been at any point in recorded history, but that it's far thinner to boot. If you hate what peer-reviewed science says, that's your problem. Build your *own* network of sensors and satellites and monitor the Arctic for decades if you don't like the results the current hardware is giving.
And as for the Slashdot article in question? Let me sum up: "Ice is growing at a single Antarctic station. Therefore, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers which never predicted that ice would shrink at every station are still wrong (because it's "global climate change", not "local weather change"), and global warming is a scientific conspiracy to destroy capitalism."