Heh, don't talk to me about cost of living, I live in Iceland. Petrol here is usually over $2,50 AUD per litre.;) But there's one thing we've got cheap, and that's electricity!
I imagine that a home solar install probably has a pretty reasonable payback period in Australia, given how high your power rates are.
A Prius is not a 5+2 seater supercar. You want to compare to the Model 3. And most of one's charging is at home, not at superchargers. Model 3 LR = 267Wh/mi (SR is less). With the average US residential power rate around 13 cents per kWH, that's $0,035/mi. For the LR. At your rates, it's $0,028/mi. 2/3rds of the cost of operating your Prius.
Please re-read: not peak hours. Peak kW. Power, not energy. Industrial and large commercial consumers everywhere (yes, including Washington) pay lower energy rates (kWh) than residential consumers, but offsetting this is the fact that they also have to pay "demand charges", which are based on their peak power (again, not energy) consumption. For a supercharger station - particularly a low utilization station - it's the demand charges that are killer, as just a single vehicle charging will give you thousands of dollars in demand charges for that month; you have to charge hundreds of paying customers to earn enough just to make up for the demand charges alone of the first vehicle that charges there that month. Power companies charge demand charges in order to pay for the cost of your connection and managing the instability that you add to the grid. It has nothing to do with the power source.
Demand charges are the reason that superchargers are starting to install powerpack battery buffers alongside them. With a buffer, your peak consumption reduces to your average consumption, thus significantly cutting demand charges.
Okay, San Francisco, I can actually believe that! Tesla's going big on their SF buildout right now for a reason; 4 just isn't enough for a place with so many Teslas.;) But you've got 5 in construction, and another 5 in permitting, so the situation should be better soon.
The big costs on operating an unbuffered supercharger station aren't per kWh. They're per-peak-kW in each billing period.
You also have to amortize capital costs, which historically have come in (taking Tesla's total investment in supercharging by the number of stations) at around $250k per station. Now, that sort of estimate tends to overestimate the unit cost significantly, but they're by no measure something that you can just ignore capital costs on.
1) For cars in Model S's performance bracket, 25 mpg isn't bad at all. 2) Model S uses a lot more power than Model 3. Model 3 LR is 126 MPGe, or 26,7kWh/100mi, or $0,064 at your stated rates. Equivalent to 47 mpg. Model 3 SR should be a bit better.
Now, as for home charging (most charging), the last I looked it up, US average residential rates were something like $0,13/kWh. Which is equivalent to 86 mpg as far as operating costs go.
And 0,25s is the stated maximum time to full power. The powerpacks (which are basically giant powerwalls) in Australia have been reacting to power fluctuations starting a couple dozenms after power drops out, reaching full power output in a bit over 100ms.
That said, it'd be nice if they could get those times down to under 10ms.
Even that's going to be extremely difficult. They're taking a huge gamble on carbon fibre tanks here; cryogenics don't play well with composites, and liquid oxygen doesn't play well with organics in general. Past attempts at composite rockets haven't exactly had a spectacular success record. Even prolongued vacuum exposure is challenging with composites. I understand why they want to use them - the strength to weight ratios are just far too tempting to ignore. But... it's not easy.
I do think they'll be able to get it eventually. Even if they have to coat the whole thing in a layer of CVD ceramic or alumium. The sheer size they're going for makes the mass of coatings less significant (r^2 scaling vs. r^3 scaling).
En route to success, however, I expect at least a couple nice fireballs and some corresponding unfortunate setbacks.
Hmm, scratch that. A third-party supplier I found cited lower reaction times than I'm finding elsewhere. It appears that Powerwall 1 takes several seconds to switch over, while Powerwall 2 is "under 0,25 seconds". Close, but not quite enough, unless your power supply has some sort of capacitor buffer.
FYI, a "normal" solar install (without a battery backup) doesn't protect you from outages at all, even in the summer. The grid-tied inverter disconnects from the grid; it can only match to an existing waveform, not build one from scratch.
It's the battery backup and the hardware that manages - if you have one - it that lets you keep the lights on when the power goes out; a second inverter, running on the batteries creates a driving signal to mimic the grid after the disconnect, which the primary inverter then matches its power conversion to (with DC either from a solar array, the batteries, or both). So you need something like a Powerwall either way if you want to keep the lights on, and it'll keep them on regardless of whether the sun is shining (aka, using power from the grid if it's been dim).
BTW, using the NREL PVWatts calculator (sort of the go-to page for solar system sizing), a nominal 1kW solar system produces the following July / January monthly energy at the following tilt angles (degrees: kWh July / kWh January / kWh total), assuming a south-facing slope:
Seattle's sun exposure is about average for Europe; about half of Europe is sunnier and about half is dimmer. That's not stopped Europe from going big on solar.
If you're talking several kWh, you're definitely getting into home backup system ranges, such as a Tesla Powerwall ("a production-quality UPS with li-ion cells" - you can see the results of fire testing on their industrial scale version here). And then you'd already have an inverter if you ever did decide to go solar.
Even if you decide that the payback time on solar is too long for you (which I can understand), it's definitely worth considering when your roof has to be replaced / fixed next. I mean, if they're already up working on the roof, you need the labour either way, and panels are dirt cheap now.
A real 1,8kW, not a nominal 1,8kW? At 1,8kW for 30 minutes (after DoD limits, a kWh or more, versus a several dozen to a couple hundred watt hours in a traditional consumer UPS battery), and such a output power need, you're straddling a sort of awkward middle ground between a UPS and a home backup system (such as a Tesla Powerwall). Which is indeed a UPS (plus a grid-tied inverter and other things), although too pricey for your average UPS user's needs since the smallest you can get (if you can find one) is Powerwall 1, at 6,4 kWh / 2kW ($3k). Powerwall 2 is easier to get, but is even further out of spec for you (13,5 kWh / 7kW peak / 5kW continuous, $5,9k). #1 would run your computer for nearly 3 1/2 hours, while #2 would run it for over 7 hours.
I'm sure that there's some "middle ground" li-ion backup products out there, though. I assume you want li-ion for the longer lifespan and higher peak output of a properly managed li-ion pack?
The cross-sectional area of a pod big enough for a bicyclist or pedestrian is much smaller than that needed to transport a typical car
Which would be a meaningful criticism if the passenger pods were the size of a single bicyclist or pedestrian. They're not. They're the exact same size as the car transporters.
There are minimal differences between the two, so I can't imagine how you could consider one a "debacle" but the other a "clearly non-debacle" alternative.
It's honestly not a dramatic shift. Loop has always been planned for both passenger and vehicle pods - both on the same drive platform, in the same tunnel. The only change here is the order in which the types of pods are introduced. It's not like the plan is going to be "introduce passenger pods, then sit around doing nothing until everyone in the city is using them, then introduce vehicle pods". It just means a 6-12 month difference in the order they're introduced, depending on the time to engineer the differences.
I personally despise this point of view, that there should be fewer lanes/roads so that people will drive less so there will be less traffic.
You know what I call the ability to go where you want, when you want, comfortably, in as little time as possible at as little expense as possible?' I call that "quality of life".
Forget Hyperloop, even traditional tunneling costs are lower than this - let alone the costs Boring Company is looking for. While it's easy to focus on the most expensive, ridiculously priced urban tunnel projects in history, which can be over a billion dollars per mile, most tunnels are far cheaper. The Shanghai River crossing tunnel in China, for example, was $27m/mi. For tunnels in the western world, Westerschelde in the Netherlands was $60m per mile. For 11m diameter twin tunnels.
$10,6B for 119 miles is $89m per mile, primarily in "land acquisition", "relocating utility systems" and "the need for safety barriers" - none of which exist on a per-mile basis for a bored tunnel of sufficient depth. You don't even need improvements in boring technology to make tunnels more economical than this, you just need a reasonable bid on a fixed-price contract at current modern pricing. And if you bore, the number of miles can generally be reduced. It's just crazy that 119 miles from Wasco to Merced costs so much. Look at it on a map; it's just farmland.
I'm getting it from *I Live In Iceland*. Google all of the numbers I cited above. Google our population. It's 334k. Google our birth rate. It's 13,7 per 1000 women per year. Do the math. That's 4576 children per year. The number of Downs syndrome children per year in Iceland can be found here, although I assume you don't speak Icelandic - that site, by the way, is a society for parents of children with Down's Syndrome. The page starts out with "Congratulations on the birth of your new child!" - Downs is not in any way, shape or form shunned here; as I pointed out, there's even a theatre troupe of people with Down's, and you can see them in a music video of one of our most popular bands. There's a huge amount of government support given to people with disabilities, including Down's, so that they can live good lives. Divide 4576 by 5-6 Down's births per year and tell me what you come up with. Now google the number of Down's birth rates in the US. Compare. Now go google our abortion laws. Is googling too hard for you? Just look at a map.
In short: ***Stop spreading BS about my country.*** Yes, I know it was "widely reported" in your country. Guess what? People spread a lot of BS about Iceland in general overseas. No, most people here don't believe in elves. No, we did not adopt a new "crowdsourced constitution" and "jail all the bankers" (and the few who went to prison got the most cushy, forgiving sentences you can imagine, and were let out early). No, we're not the biggest banana producer in Europe; we don't even sell them commercially at all. I could go on and on with dozens of "widely reported" stories about Iceland that are pure, unadulterated BS.
What I fail to understand is why, after having been repeatedly corrected, you keep insisting on a falsehood.
Does the government make sure everyone knows screening tests are available, or is that part made up?
Everything mainstream medical is available to all people. It's called universal healthcare, and we're hardly the only country to have it. There is no special effort made concerning Down's versus any other health condition, related to pregnancy or not. Now maybe you live in a country that doesn't like people having access to medical care - but that's your problem, not ours. We have, and will continue to, ensure that people have access to all of the latest technology in every field, to the degree that we can afford to (the healthcare budget being mainly a consequence of whether Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn or Endurreisn are in the government;) ) Should we ban sonograms too because you're terrified that some people may choose to abort (despite our stricter than the US abortion laws) a child of a particular gender? Are you signing up start a campaign to ban sonograms in the US because they might be misused? The simple facts are that our rates of Down's Syndrome births are very similar to the US's. Period. And there is much more support here for people with Down's.
You sure seem touchy about this.
I'm touchy about BS being spread about my country when people refuse to acknowledge the facts despite having been repeatedly corrected on them.
. So, sure, 1-2 Down's births a year in Iceland, mostly due to the test being imperfect
Wrong. Do you not read?
From statistics, we have 334k people and a birth rate of 13,7 per 1000 per year, or 4576 children per year, of which 5-6 have Down's - 1 in every 832. The rate of Down's Syndrome in the US is 1 in 700 children.
You have a fictional version of Iceland in your mind. Our rate of Down's births is nearly the same as the US; what little difference exists has more to do with our younger average age of mothers than anything else.
There has been in no way, shape, or form any effort to encourage abortion of anyone, and heavy efforts to discourage abortion. Iceland has - has been repeatedly pointed out to you - among the most restrictive abortion laws in the west, stricter than in the US.
Don't you agree we should be addressing, not ignoring, the moral and practical considerations while it's still early days?
I don't give a rat's arse about what debate you want to have. What I care about is you grossly misrepresenting my country in your attempt to do so.
That part where people claim Iceland has "Cured Down's syndrome" instead of saying "we use eugenics to avoid substandard people". I've read such newspaper articles.
And as I have very clearly spelled out to you, both of those claims are incorrect. So get your news from better sources.
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Heh, don't talk to me about cost of living, I live in Iceland. Petrol here is usually over $2,50 AUD per litre. ;) But there's one thing we've got cheap, and that's electricity!
I imagine that a home solar install probably has a pretty reasonable payback period in Australia, given how high your power rates are.
$5 would be nice and cheap compared to the ~$7,50 where I am ;) (Iceland)
A Prius is not a 5+2 seater supercar. You want to compare to the Model 3. And most of one's charging is at home, not at superchargers. Model 3 LR = 267Wh/mi (SR is less). With the average US residential power rate around 13 cents per kWH, that's $0,035/mi. For the LR. At your rates, it's $0,028/mi. 2/3rds of the cost of operating your Prius.
Please re-read: not peak hours. Peak kW. Power, not energy. Industrial and large commercial consumers everywhere (yes, including Washington) pay lower energy rates (kWh) than residential consumers, but offsetting this is the fact that they also have to pay "demand charges", which are based on their peak power (again, not energy) consumption. For a supercharger station - particularly a low utilization station - it's the demand charges that are killer, as just a single vehicle charging will give you thousands of dollars in demand charges for that month; you have to charge hundreds of paying customers to earn enough just to make up for the demand charges alone of the first vehicle that charges there that month. Power companies charge demand charges in order to pay for the cost of your connection and managing the instability that you add to the grid. It has nothing to do with the power source.
Demand charges are the reason that superchargers are starting to install powerpack battery buffers alongside them. With a buffer, your peak consumption reduces to your average consumption, thus significantly cutting demand charges.
Okay, San Francisco, I can actually believe that! Tesla's going big on their SF buildout right now for a reason; 4 just isn't enough for a place with so many Teslas. ;) But you've got 5 in construction, and another 5 in permitting, so the situation should be better soon.
Whoa, what supercharger is that? That's certainly not normal.
The big costs on operating an unbuffered supercharger station aren't per kWh. They're per-peak-kW in each billing period.
You also have to amortize capital costs, which historically have come in (taking Tesla's total investment in supercharging by the number of stations) at around $250k per station. Now, that sort of estimate tends to overestimate the unit cost significantly, but they're by no measure something that you can just ignore capital costs on.
To be fair:
1) For cars in Model S's performance bracket, 25 mpg isn't bad at all.
2) Model S uses a lot more power than Model 3. Model 3 LR is 126 MPGe, or 26,7kWh/100mi, or $0,064 at your stated rates. Equivalent to 47 mpg. Model 3 SR should be a bit better.
Now, as for home charging (most charging), the last I looked it up, US average residential rates were something like $0,13/kWh. Which is equivalent to 86 mpg as far as operating costs go.
That price for power is insane. Far more than California average.
And 0,25s is the stated maximum time to full power. The powerpacks (which are basically giant powerwalls) in Australia have been reacting to power fluctuations starting a couple dozenms after power drops out, reaching full power output in a bit over 100ms.
That said, it'd be nice if they could get those times down to under 10ms.
Even that's going to be extremely difficult. They're taking a huge gamble on carbon fibre tanks here; cryogenics don't play well with composites, and liquid oxygen doesn't play well with organics in general. Past attempts at composite rockets haven't exactly had a spectacular success record. Even prolongued vacuum exposure is challenging with composites. I understand why they want to use them - the strength to weight ratios are just far too tempting to ignore. But... it's not easy.
I do think they'll be able to get it eventually. Even if they have to coat the whole thing in a layer of CVD ceramic or alumium. The sheer size they're going for makes the mass of coatings less significant (r^2 scaling vs. r^3 scaling).
En route to success, however, I expect at least a couple nice fireballs and some corresponding unfortunate setbacks.
Hmm, scratch that. A third-party supplier I found cited lower reaction times than I'm finding elsewhere. It appears that Powerwall 1 takes several seconds to switch over, while Powerwall 2 is "under 0,25 seconds". Close, but not quite enough, unless your power supply has some sort of capacitor buffer.
FYI, a "normal" solar install (without a battery backup) doesn't protect you from outages at all, even in the summer. The grid-tied inverter disconnects from the grid; it can only match to an existing waveform, not build one from scratch.
It's the battery backup and the hardware that manages - if you have one - it that lets you keep the lights on when the power goes out; a second inverter, running on the batteries creates a driving signal to mimic the grid after the disconnect, which the primary inverter then matches its power conversion to (with DC either from a solar array, the batteries, or both). So you need something like a Powerwall either way if you want to keep the lights on, and it'll keep them on regardless of whether the sun is shining (aka, using power from the grid if it's been dim).
BTW, using the NREL PVWatts calculator (sort of the go-to page for solar system sizing), a nominal 1kW solar system produces the following July / January monthly energy at the following tilt angles (degrees: kWh July / kWh January / kWh total), assuming a south-facing slope:
0: 151 / 18 / 976
10: 156 / 23 / 1048
20: 157 / 26 / 1096
30: 155 / 29 / 1120
40: 149 / 31 / 1119
50: 140 / 33 / 1088
You choose the balance between summer, winter and total.
That was uncalled for. You can add information to a topic without being rude.
Seattle's sun exposure is about average for Europe; about half of Europe is sunnier and about half is dimmer. That's not stopped Europe from going big on solar.
If you're talking several kWh, you're definitely getting into home backup system ranges, such as a Tesla Powerwall ("a production-quality UPS with li-ion cells" - you can see the results of fire testing on their industrial scale version here). And then you'd already have an inverter if you ever did decide to go solar.
Even if you decide that the payback time on solar is too long for you (which I can understand), it's definitely worth considering when your roof has to be replaced / fixed next. I mean, if they're already up working on the roof, you need the labour either way, and panels are dirt cheap now.
A real 1,8kW, not a nominal 1,8kW? At 1,8kW for 30 minutes (after DoD limits, a kWh or more, versus a several dozen to a couple hundred watt hours in a traditional consumer UPS battery), and such a output power need, you're straddling a sort of awkward middle ground between a UPS and a home backup system (such as a Tesla Powerwall). Which is indeed a UPS (plus a grid-tied inverter and other things), although too pricey for your average UPS user's needs since the smallest you can get (if you can find one) is Powerwall 1, at 6,4 kWh / 2kW ($3k). Powerwall 2 is easier to get, but is even further out of spec for you (13,5 kWh / 7kW peak / 5kW continuous, $5,9k). #1 would run your computer for nearly 3 1/2 hours, while #2 would run it for over 7 hours.
I'm sure that there's some "middle ground" li-ion backup products out there, though. I assume you want li-ion for the longer lifespan and higher peak output of a properly managed li-ion pack?
Which would be a meaningful criticism if the passenger pods were the size of a single bicyclist or pedestrian. They're not. They're the exact same size as the car transporters.
There are minimal differences between the two, so I can't imagine how you could consider one a "debacle" but the other a "clearly non-debacle" alternative.
It's honestly not a dramatic shift. Loop has always been planned for both passenger and vehicle pods - both on the same drive platform, in the same tunnel. The only change here is the order in which the types of pods are introduced. It's not like the plan is going to be "introduce passenger pods, then sit around doing nothing until everyone in the city is using them, then introduce vehicle pods". It just means a 6-12 month difference in the order they're introduced, depending on the time to engineer the differences.
I personally despise this point of view, that there should be fewer lanes/roads so that people will drive less so there will be less traffic.
You know what I call the ability to go where you want, when you want, comfortably, in as little time as possible at as little expense as possible?' I call that "quality of life".
Forget Hyperloop, even traditional tunneling costs are lower than this - let alone the costs Boring Company is looking for. While it's easy to focus on the most expensive, ridiculously priced urban tunnel projects in history, which can be over a billion dollars per mile, most tunnels are far cheaper. The Shanghai River crossing tunnel in China, for example, was $27m/mi. For tunnels in the western world, Westerschelde in the Netherlands was $60m per mile. For 11m diameter twin tunnels.
$10,6B for 119 miles is $89m per mile, primarily in "land acquisition", "relocating utility systems" and "the need for safety barriers" - none of which exist on a per-mile basis for a bored tunnel of sufficient depth. You don't even need improvements in boring technology to make tunnels more economical than this, you just need a reasonable bid on a fixed-price contract at current modern pricing. And if you bore, the number of miles can generally be reduced. It's just crazy that 119 miles from Wasco to Merced costs so much. Look at it on a map; it's just farmland.
I'm getting it from *I Live In Iceland*. Google all of the numbers I cited above. Google our population. It's 334k. Google our birth rate. It's 13,7 per 1000 women per year. Do the math. That's 4576 children per year. The number of Downs syndrome children per year in Iceland can be found here, although I assume you don't speak Icelandic - that site, by the way, is a society for parents of children with Down's Syndrome. The page starts out with "Congratulations on the birth of your new child!" - Downs is not in any way, shape or form shunned here; as I pointed out, there's even a theatre troupe of people with Down's, and you can see them in a music video of one of our most popular bands. There's a huge amount of government support given to people with disabilities, including Down's, so that they can live good lives. Divide 4576 by 5-6 Down's births per year and tell me what you come up with. Now google the number of Down's birth rates in the US. Compare. Now go google our abortion laws. Is googling too hard for you? Just look at a map.
In short: ***Stop spreading BS about my country.*** Yes, I know it was "widely reported" in your country. Guess what? People spread a lot of BS about Iceland in general overseas. No, most people here don't believe in elves. No, we did not adopt a new "crowdsourced constitution" and "jail all the bankers" (and the few who went to prison got the most cushy, forgiving sentences you can imagine, and were let out early). No, we're not the biggest banana producer in Europe; we don't even sell them commercially at all. I could go on and on with dozens of "widely reported" stories about Iceland that are pure, unadulterated BS.
What I fail to understand is why, after having been repeatedly corrected, you keep insisting on a falsehood.
Everything mainstream medical is available to all people. It's called universal healthcare, and we're hardly the only country to have it. There is no special effort made concerning Down's versus any other health condition, related to pregnancy or not. Now maybe you live in a country that doesn't like people having access to medical care - but that's your problem, not ours. We have, and will continue to, ensure that people have access to all of the latest technology in every field, to the degree that we can afford to (the healthcare budget being mainly a consequence of whether Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn or Endurreisn are in the government ;) ) Should we ban sonograms too because you're terrified that some people may choose to abort (despite our stricter than the US abortion laws) a child of a particular gender? Are you signing up start a campaign to ban sonograms in the US because they might be misused? The simple facts are that our rates of Down's Syndrome births are very similar to the US's. Period. And there is much more support here for people with Down's.
I'm touchy about BS being spread about my country when people refuse to acknowledge the facts despite having been repeatedly corrected on them.
Large-scale theft is quite rare here. Even car theft is. That said, it does happen; the rate is not zero.
You seem to know Iceland quite well ;)
Wrong. Do you not read?
You have a fictional version of Iceland in your mind. Our rate of Down's births is nearly the same as the US; what little difference exists has more to do with our younger average age of mothers than anything else.
There has been in no way, shape, or form any effort to encourage abortion of anyone, and heavy efforts to discourage abortion. Iceland has - has been repeatedly pointed out to you - among the most restrictive abortion laws in the west, stricter than in the US.
I don't give a rat's arse about what debate you want to have. What I care about is you grossly misrepresenting my country in your attempt to do so.
And as I have very clearly spelled out to you, both of those claims are incorrect. So get your news from better sources.