You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
While electrons are easier to transport over distances, molecules are much easier to stockpile and transfer without loss.
Merely even refining transportation fuels is a much less efficient process than charging li-ions.
Carrying your own oxidizer with you is stupid when the air is 20% oxygen, not to mention that riding on a ton of fuel and oxidizer packed in close proximity is silly
Li-ions don't work by oxidation processes, they work by intercalation processes. On one side you have graphite and/or silicon, and on the other you have nickel/cobalt/aluminum oxides. One or both of them are infiltrated with lithium ions in the interstitial space; the charge state is defined by which side the lithium is on.
You seem to be under the mistaken concept that energy density corresponds to safety. Tell me, which is more of a hazard, 100kg of aluminum or 100kg of nitroglycerine? Now tell me, which is more energy dense?
What boggles the mind *to me* is that gasoline vehicles are allowed to store such huge quantities of a highly flammable fuel in just a big tank. No compartmentalization / isolation system, just pour it in, and there you go!
And lastly: IC engines have consumables yes, but they are field-serviceable and don't require complete remanufacturing to maintain their efficiency.
Simply not true. ICE efficiencies decline over time, and the level of cost required to keep them running at as-of-manufactured efficiency makes it impractical to do for most consumers. Older ICE vehicles are generally much less efficient than new ones. Which also, BTW, reduces range. Proper li-ion packs, like Tesla's, do lose range with time, but only slowly. Click on "charts". Typical degradation is about 4% in the first year, but much slower thereafter. A typical 5-year old car has only about 6-7% total degradation. It's hard to know at this point whether you can continue extrapolating such a slow decline slope over time, but it's at the very least extremely promising. Typical results from Tesla taxis with hundreds of thousands of miles on them are less than 10% degradation.
We're talking "Now, not in a hundred years."
BTW, it also sounds like you're under the impression that EVs remain unusually heavy. Check out the curb weights of the Model 3 variants. SR is 3549lbs (1609kg) and LR is 3814 lbs (1730kg). Its ICE class competitors (BMW 3-series, Audi A4, Mercedes C300, etc) come in a wide variety of configurations:
BMW 3-Series: 1475-1770kg Audi A4: 1410-1695kg Mercedes C300: 1630-1715+kg
There's nothing unusual about the Model 3's weight versus its ICE competitors. The LR is a bit on the heavy side, but the SR slots right in the middle.
That's basically how Teslas are built. Model S and X are built on the same skateboard. Model 3 and Y are built on the same skateboard, smaller than the MX/MY one. The two skateboard designs are very similar, although the M3/MY skateboard is updated based on the latest technology and "lessons learned" in the MS/MX line.
As a random example: M3/MY have no battery pack heater. Tesla has always been great with heat management (shunting heat to/from the drive unit(s), battery pack, cabin, compressor, and radiators so that whatever needs more heat gets it and whatever loses it). With the new design, rather than having a dedicated heater, they deliberately run the motor(s) inefficiently (when at a standstill, with 0% efficiency), wasting all energy as resistive heating in the stator which is captured and shunted to the pack. It costs them nothing extra to do this (since the waveforms created by the IGBTs in the inverter are fully customizeable) but eliminates another part (the pack heater) to manufacture, install, and which could potentially break.
Even the very concept is broken. If you want an electric vehicle to be good (and competitive), you don't "electrify" a vehicle designed for an internal combustion engine. You end up needlessly poor aero drag (having the shape designed around containing an ICE), high center of gravity (batteries are best kept as a base "skateboard" at the bottom of the vehicle) and thus poorer handling/safety, poor packing density (little range and/or awkward shaped / hard to manufacture packs), and a bunch of other issues.
EVs should be designed from the start as EVs. Battery at the bottom, everything else sitting atop it, and a shape having nothing to do with the constraints of ICEs. Motors located inline with the wheels that they drive - ideally 2 motors if you can afford it for AWD, otherwise FWD or RWD as per consumer preference (generally RWD). Etc. By the way, the reason that you really want two motors (beyond gaining the benefits of AWD without having to add a heavy front-rear linkage) is that you can gear them differently. This lets you "sleep" the motor that's operating outside of its ideal power band during normal operation (instantly waking it when you need more torque or traction), which means greater efficiency, and thus range. It also lets you combine both high acceleration at low speeds and at higher speeds (with a higher top speed) rather than having to pick.
Amazing that the fact that landing skyscraper-sized objects with pinpoint accuracy after a hypersonic reentry from outer-freaking-space has now become "boring";)
That is not a "paper"; it's not peer-reviewed, and is simply something created by a conservative think tank (Institute for Energy Research) and put on their website. The previous job of the guy who founded and runs it was as a policy analyst for Enron.
I assume you mean "costing vastly less to launch a rocket" and "earning a 25% profit margin on electric cars, completely changing their image from sluggish to crazy-fast, building a global network of fast chargers, and bringing EVs to the mass market while building a company to become the 4th highest market cap automaker in the world".
Nighttime power is dirt cheap because it's in excess.
No, solar power is not cheap "because the government deems it so". It's cheap because panel prices has plummeted as silicon prices have plunged in the face of new production technologies, and panel production technologies and particularly scales have improved exponentially. And solar and wind prices are cheaper than most baseload technologies, and much cheaper than nuclear.
1) There is only a single HVDC interlink in South Australia (where the electricity problems have been) - Murraylink. It's old (26 years), short (180km), and has never been a problem (although since it's aging and not up to modern standards it's going to need some upgrades soon - in particular bushfire suppression systems, but also replacing some old equipment at the terminals)
2) South Australia's problems are because they started taking power plants offline with inadequate peaking or interlinks to replace it. They are preparing to fix it with 129 MWh / 100MW of battery storage.
South Australia is a perfect example of precisely the opposite of your point: what happens when you neglect your distribution infrastructure. Now they're considering (too late) building a new HVDC line ("Murraylink 2") to more than double the connection with Victoria - something that should have been in place years ago.
Not exactly; the Guardian is messing up the sourcing a bit. First we have "a warning in 2008 by its own engineers". When you follow the link, it's simply "an internal report" - the source cited to Kyodo. Kyodo however says the report wasn't from Tepco - it was from a Tepco subsidiary (and thus Tepco's engineers weren't involved in drafting it - they would have, however, been involved in evaluating it).
It's also worth noting that the report talked about stopping waves 10,2m high coming in from the south side by reinforcing the south side sea wall. What actually happened was waves 14-15 meters high came in from the east side. So even if they had followed up on the report's suggestion, it would have done nothing to prevent the disaster.
Lastly: your notion that building a sea wall to stop 15 meter waves costs "a couple thousand bucks" is remains absurd.
Oh, and the average PV capacity factor in the US is 27,2%. A 700MW PV plant at average capacity factor is equivalent to 206MW of nuclear. So yes, there is a 10x difference in total generation; however, it more closely follows the demand curve, meaning that you can wholesale the power for significantly more per MWh, and the price you get for your power is the figure that really matters, not the total generation. Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
Also it's worth noting that Duke's pricing on this solar plant is abnormally expensive; new plants in the desert southwest are coming in as low as $1,50/W (half as much). Florida's insolation is worse, but I'm not sure that fully explains the difference.
Except that, while nuclear plant operational costs are predominantly capital costs, they still have relevant operational costs (a much larger share than maintenance share of solar costs). Capital costs make up only about 3/4ths of the cost of a nuclear plant, vs. nearly 90% for a solar PV plant. They also have significant decommissioning liabilities at end-of-life. And are heavily subsidized in that they don't have to pay for their own catastrophic liability coverage, only base liability coverage - a simple factor that on its own would price nuclear plants out of the market if they had to pay for it on their own (I doubt they'd find any insurer who'd be willing to - or even could - cover them against Fukushima-scale disasters).
Your conflation of coal and gas is wrong. They're very different fuels from an environmental footprint standpoint, and while gas is most definitely on the rise, coal is likewise most definitely on the decline.
The US power grid is overwhelmingly headed in the direction of being a mix of gas, wind and solar (the latter small but undergoing an exponential scaleup similar to wind in its early days). All three will be major players over the next few decades at least, while coal continues its death spiral. At present, nameplate wind + solar installs already exceed nameplate gas installs, although baseload gas is higher capacity factor (peaking gas, however, is very low capacity factor); wind and solar are growing faster, too. That said, until battery storage becomes cheap and proven enough, gas will remain a critical component of that mix.
Indeed, and it hardly did even before. The "nuclear renaissance"'s promise of much cheaper nuclear power failed to deliver; cost overruns was the name of the game with them. And more frequently than not, due to technical / construction reasons rather than regulatory. See Olkiluoto 3 for one of the worst examples. Nearly a decade past schedule and still years from opening.
Building nuclear plants is just plain hard. The corrosion environment is terrible (irradiation-induced embrittlement, decay products, transmutation products, simple hydrogen embrittlement), all sorts of unusual materials have to be used (for example, to maintain neutron transparency or reflectivity) that few people have experience working with, and on and on. And the consequences of doing something wrong can be extremely severe, so everything must be done perfectly. You know, for example, how many people out there have experience making X-ray-perfect welds on high diameter zirconium pipes?
Nuclear power is the one industry which has undergone a negative learning curve with time - that is, where the more people have learned, the more costs have risen rather than falling.
If we want to be specific, quality li-ion recycling (ignoring techniques that attempt to avoid having to rebuild the cathode material) generally involves crushing under controlled conditions, removal of the electrolyte with supercritical CO2 (followed by redistillation after precipitating out lithium salts), and reprocessing the remainder. With pyrometalluric processes, separator membranes and carbon from the anodes burn off (silicon anodes end up as slag), lithium ends up in the slag side and can be extracted, etc, but in general it's surprisingly similar to high grade nickel-cobalt ore in composition and the smelting process very similar. Contrarily, acid leaching processes involve for example H2O2 + H2SO4 ("Piranha solution") dissolves lithium, cobalt and nickel, allowing them to be individually precipitated. Some new techniques involve things like enhanced supercritical CO2 extraction, using reaction promoters like H2O2 to allow the CO2 to dissolve cobalt and lithium out of the mix.
Either way, yes, they're eminently recycleable. There didn't use to be that much interest in recycling because, first off, batteries were small and not worth the hassle to collect - but a major reason was that raw material costs were only a small fraction of battery costs. Today, however, as li-ion prices keep falling as production reaches ever-larger scales, raw materials become increasingly dominant factor in production costs, and used batteries an increasingly important feedstock. The concept of throwing away a car battery pack - a nice self-contained box containing about $3k of lithium, nickel, and cobalt, plus some copper and other metals - becomes increasingly absurd.
But who plans on taking care of the waste from the battery plants?
What "waste from the battery plants" are you thinking of?
? Those things age and need replacing more often than you'd realize
Tesla's powerpacks (to pick one) are rated for 5000 cycles to 80% capacity. Not that you have to get rid of them at 80% capacity.
Solar panels need a lot of upkeep especially in a place like Florida
Solar panel maintenance costs are almost meaningless compared to the amortized capital costs.
the stated output is best case peak capability
Yes, it's called nameplate capacity for a reason, every location has its own capacity factor, and I'm not sure why you think this is news to anyone here.
Will the battery stations really be able to keep the AC running at night
Releasing stored energy is precisely what a battery does (although in practice, geographically distributed + mixed-source generation is cheaper than pure local solar + storage)
I can't be bothered to look up the last major study on the subject again, but while it's a lot more than "a percentage point" of the cost, nationwide HVDC links do indeed pay for themselves, whether compared to the cost of more fossil peaking, or when compared to the cost of more renewable generation to help compensate for fluctuating output. A geographically high-renewables + HVDC grid is actually more stable than a low-renewables local-only grid because of the stabilization effects of HVDC and the reduction in the effects of single-point-of-failure generation / transmission issues.
Storage is also an option, although $50m for a 700 MW solar plant is not so much long-term storage as just buying you time to ramp up/down other sources (and eliminating the significance of random cloud banks drifting over the plant). Which should be obvious when you compare prices - they'll probably pay $1,5B or so for that solar plant; the battery buffer will be only 3% of that cost.
Right. Because a sea wall totally costs a couple thousand bucks.
Citation needed on the "engineers wanted a higher seawall" claim, too. And more than just one or two random people - show that there was any sort of serious belief among the engineering team responsible for the plant that the seawall wasn't high enough.
There's shades of that in Tesla's response (which of course Slashdot, eternally lacking any sort of attempt to be balanced, did not post):
"As we approach Labor Day weekend, there’s a certain irony in just how far the UAW has strayed from the original mission of the American labor movement, which once advocated so nobly for the rights of workers and is the reason we recognize this important holiday.
Faced with declining membership, an overwhelming loss at a Nissan plant earlier this month, corruption charges that were recently leveled against union leaders who misused UAW funds, and failure to gain traction with our employees, it’s no surprise the union is feeling pressured to continue its publicity campaign against Tesla.
For seven years, the UAW has used every tool in its playbook: misleading and outright false communications, unsolicited and unwelcomed visits to the homes of our employees, attempts to discredit Tesla publicly in the media, and now another tactic that has been used in every union campaign since the beginning of time–baseless ULP filings that are meant only to generate headlines. These allegations, which have been filed by the same contingent of union organizers who have been so outspoken with media, are entirely without merit. We will obviously be responding as part of the NLRB process.”
Front crumple zones are a reason to have the furthest forward point be a significant distance ahead of you, but it's not a reason to include a significant enclosed volume ahead of you. The latter is a pointless style feature that works against visibility and aerodynamics.
Has ISRO been doing that "women in spaceflight" superstition stuff too? I know Russia has, but I've never heard of anything from India about it. Russia even once blamed a technical mishap that could have killed the crew on the fact that there were two women aboard the craft. It appears to stem from the old naval superstition about women on ships being bad luck.
Slashdot Mirror
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Merely even refining transportation fuels is a much less efficient process than charging li-ions.
Li-ions don't work by oxidation processes, they work by intercalation processes. On one side you have graphite and/or silicon, and on the other you have nickel/cobalt/aluminum oxides. One or both of them are infiltrated with lithium ions in the interstitial space; the charge state is defined by which side the lithium is on.
You seem to be under the mistaken concept that energy density corresponds to safety. Tell me, which is more of a hazard, 100kg of aluminum or 100kg of nitroglycerine? Now tell me, which is more energy dense?
Here's the reality of fire safety in Tesla battery packs. They're so non-flammable that you can generally burn the rest of the car to the ground without burning the pack. Try that with a gasoline car. Gasoline fires in cars are extremely common. 152k gasoline cars catch fire in the US alone every year. Tesla rates of fires are far less than those in gasoline cars.
What boggles the mind *to me* is that gasoline vehicles are allowed to store such huge quantities of a highly flammable fuel in just a big tank. No compartmentalization / isolation system, just pour it in, and there you go!
Simply not true. ICE efficiencies decline over time, and the level of cost required to keep them running at as-of-manufactured efficiency makes it impractical to do for most consumers. Older ICE vehicles are generally much less efficient than new ones. Which also, BTW, reduces range. Proper li-ion packs, like Tesla's, do lose range with time, but only slowly. Click on "charts". Typical degradation is about 4% in the first year, but much slower thereafter. A typical 5-year old car has only about 6-7% total degradation. It's hard to know at this point whether you can continue extrapolating such a slow decline slope over time, but it's at the very least extremely promising. Typical results from Tesla taxis with hundreds of thousands of miles on them are less than 10% degradation.
We're talking "Now, not in a hundred years."
BTW, it also sounds like you're under the impression that EVs remain unusually heavy. Check out the curb weights of the Model 3 variants. SR is 3549lbs (1609kg) and LR is 3814 lbs (1730kg). Its ICE class competitors (BMW 3-series, Audi A4, Mercedes C300, etc) come in a wide variety of configurations:
BMW 3-Series: 1475-1770kg
Audi A4: 1410-1695kg
Mercedes C300: 1630-1715+kg
There's nothing unusual about the Model 3's weight versus its ICE competitors. The LR is a bit on the heavy side, but the SR slots right in the middle.
That's basically how Teslas are built. Model S and X are built on the same skateboard. Model 3 and Y are built on the same skateboard, smaller than the MX/MY one. The two skateboard designs are very similar, although the M3/MY skateboard is updated based on the latest technology and "lessons learned" in the MS/MX line.
As a random example: M3/MY have no battery pack heater. Tesla has always been great with heat management (shunting heat to/from the drive unit(s), battery pack, cabin, compressor, and radiators so that whatever needs more heat gets it and whatever loses it). With the new design, rather than having a dedicated heater, they deliberately run the motor(s) inefficiently (when at a standstill, with 0% efficiency), wasting all energy as resistive heating in the stator which is captured and shunted to the pack. It costs them nothing extra to do this (since the waveforms created by the IGBTs in the inverter are fully customizeable) but eliminates another part (the pack heater) to manufacture, install, and which could potentially break.
Even the very concept is broken. If you want an electric vehicle to be good (and competitive), you don't "electrify" a vehicle designed for an internal combustion engine. You end up needlessly poor aero drag (having the shape designed around containing an ICE), high center of gravity (batteries are best kept as a base "skateboard" at the bottom of the vehicle) and thus poorer handling/safety, poor packing density (little range and/or awkward shaped / hard to manufacture packs), and a bunch of other issues.
EVs should be designed from the start as EVs. Battery at the bottom, everything else sitting atop it, and a shape having nothing to do with the constraints of ICEs. Motors located inline with the wheels that they drive - ideally 2 motors if you can afford it for AWD, otherwise FWD or RWD as per consumer preference (generally RWD). Etc. By the way, the reason that you really want two motors (beyond gaining the benefits of AWD without having to add a heavy front-rear linkage) is that you can gear them differently. This lets you "sleep" the motor that's operating outside of its ideal power band during normal operation (instantly waking it when you need more torque or traction), which means greater efficiency, and thus range. It also lets you combine both high acceleration at low speeds and at higher speeds (with a higher top speed) rather than having to pick.
I only trust a very limited subset of individuals. Thankfully, my trust will be rewarded when the space ship arrives.
Amazing that the fact that landing skyscraper-sized objects with pinpoint accuracy after a hypersonic reentry from outer-freaking-space has now become "boring" ;)
I love living in the future.
That is not a "paper"; it's not peer-reviewed, and is simply something created by a conservative think tank (Institute for Energy Research) and put on their website. The previous job of the guy who founded and runs it was as a policy analyst for Enron.
I assume you mean "costing vastly less to launch a rocket" and "earning a 25% profit margin on electric cars, completely changing their image from sluggish to crazy-fast, building a global network of fast chargers, and bringing EVs to the mass market while building a company to become the 4th highest market cap automaker in the world".
Nighttime power is dirt cheap because it's in excess.
No, solar power is not cheap "because the government deems it so". It's cheap because panel prices has plummeted as silicon prices have plunged in the face of new production technologies, and panel production technologies and particularly scales have improved exponentially. And solar and wind prices are cheaper than most baseload technologies, and much cheaper than nuclear.
1) There is only a single HVDC interlink in South Australia (where the electricity problems have been) - Murraylink. It's old (26 years), short (180km), and has never been a problem (although since it's aging and not up to modern standards it's going to need some upgrades soon - in particular bushfire suppression systems, but also replacing some old equipment at the terminals)
2) South Australia's problems are because they started taking power plants offline with inadequate peaking or interlinks to replace it. They are preparing to fix it with 129 MWh / 100MW of battery storage.
South Australia is a perfect example of precisely the opposite of your point: what happens when you neglect your distribution infrastructure. Now they're considering (too late) building a new HVDC line ("Murraylink 2") to more than double the connection with Victoria - something that should have been in place years ago.
Not exactly; the Guardian is messing up the sourcing a bit. First we have "a warning in 2008 by its own engineers". When you follow the link, it's simply "an internal report" - the source cited to Kyodo. Kyodo however says the report wasn't from Tepco - it was from a Tepco subsidiary (and thus Tepco's engineers weren't involved in drafting it - they would have, however, been involved in evaluating it).
It's also worth noting that the report talked about stopping waves 10,2m high coming in from the south side by reinforcing the south side sea wall. What actually happened was waves 14-15 meters high came in from the east side. So even if they had followed up on the report's suggestion, it would have done nothing to prevent the disaster.
Lastly: your notion that building a sea wall to stop 15 meter waves costs "a couple thousand bucks" is remains absurd.
Oh, and the average PV capacity factor in the US is 27,2%. A 700MW PV plant at average capacity factor is equivalent to 206MW of nuclear. So yes, there is a 10x difference in total generation; however, it more closely follows the demand curve, meaning that you can wholesale the power for significantly more per MWh, and the price you get for your power is the figure that really matters, not the total generation. Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
Also it's worth noting that Duke's pricing on this solar plant is abnormally expensive; new plants in the desert southwest are coming in as low as $1,50/W (half as much). Florida's insolation is worse, but I'm not sure that fully explains the difference.
Except that, while nuclear plant operational costs are predominantly capital costs, they still have relevant operational costs (a much larger share than maintenance share of solar costs). Capital costs make up only about 3/4ths of the cost of a nuclear plant, vs. nearly 90% for a solar PV plant. They also have significant decommissioning liabilities at end-of-life. And are heavily subsidized in that they don't have to pay for their own catastrophic liability coverage, only base liability coverage - a simple factor that on its own would price nuclear plants out of the market if they had to pay for it on their own (I doubt they'd find any insurer who'd be willing to - or even could - cover them against Fukushima-scale disasters).
Your conflation of coal and gas is wrong. They're very different fuels from an environmental footprint standpoint, and while gas is most definitely on the rise, coal is likewise most definitely on the decline.
The US power grid is overwhelmingly headed in the direction of being a mix of gas, wind and solar (the latter small but undergoing an exponential scaleup similar to wind in its early days). All three will be major players over the next few decades at least, while coal continues its death spiral. At present, nameplate wind + solar installs already exceed nameplate gas installs, although baseload gas is higher capacity factor (peaking gas, however, is very low capacity factor); wind and solar are growing faster, too. That said, until battery storage becomes cheap and proven enough, gas will remain a critical component of that mix.
Indeed, and it hardly did even before. The "nuclear renaissance"'s promise of much cheaper nuclear power failed to deliver; cost overruns was the name of the game with them. And more frequently than not, due to technical / construction reasons rather than regulatory. See Olkiluoto 3 for one of the worst examples. Nearly a decade past schedule and still years from opening.
Building nuclear plants is just plain hard. The corrosion environment is terrible (irradiation-induced embrittlement, decay products, transmutation products, simple hydrogen embrittlement), all sorts of unusual materials have to be used (for example, to maintain neutron transparency or reflectivity) that few people have experience working with, and on and on. And the consequences of doing something wrong can be extremely severe, so everything must be done perfectly. You know, for example, how many people out there have experience making X-ray-perfect welds on high diameter zirconium pipes?
Nuclear power is the one industry which has undergone a negative learning curve with time - that is, where the more people have learned, the more costs have risen rather than falling.
If we want to be specific, quality li-ion recycling (ignoring techniques that attempt to avoid having to rebuild the cathode material) generally involves crushing under controlled conditions, removal of the electrolyte with supercritical CO2 (followed by redistillation after precipitating out lithium salts), and reprocessing the remainder. With pyrometalluric processes, separator membranes and carbon from the anodes burn off (silicon anodes end up as slag), lithium ends up in the slag side and can be extracted, etc, but in general it's surprisingly similar to high grade nickel-cobalt ore in composition and the smelting process very similar. Contrarily, acid leaching processes involve for example H2O2 + H2SO4 ("Piranha solution") dissolves lithium, cobalt and nickel, allowing them to be individually precipitated. Some new techniques involve things like enhanced supercritical CO2 extraction, using reaction promoters like H2O2 to allow the CO2 to dissolve cobalt and lithium out of the mix.
Either way, yes, they're eminently recycleable. There didn't use to be that much interest in recycling because, first off, batteries were small and not worth the hassle to collect - but a major reason was that raw material costs were only a small fraction of battery costs. Today, however, as li-ion prices keep falling as production reaches ever-larger scales, raw materials become increasingly dominant factor in production costs, and used batteries an increasingly important feedstock. The concept of throwing away a car battery pack - a nice self-contained box containing about $3k of lithium, nickel, and cobalt, plus some copper and other metals - becomes increasingly absurd.
What "waste from the battery plants" are you thinking of?
Tesla's powerpacks (to pick one) are rated for 5000 cycles to 80% capacity. Not that you have to get rid of them at 80% capacity.
Solar panel maintenance costs are almost meaningless compared to the amortized capital costs.
Yes, it's called nameplate capacity for a reason, every location has its own capacity factor, and I'm not sure why you think this is news to anyone here.
Releasing stored energy is precisely what a battery does (although in practice, geographically distributed + mixed-source generation is cheaper than pure local solar + storage)
I can't be bothered to look up the last major study on the subject again, but while it's a lot more than "a percentage point" of the cost, nationwide HVDC links do indeed pay for themselves, whether compared to the cost of more fossil peaking, or when compared to the cost of more renewable generation to help compensate for fluctuating output. A geographically high-renewables + HVDC grid is actually more stable than a low-renewables local-only grid because of the stabilization effects of HVDC and the reduction in the effects of single-point-of-failure generation / transmission issues.
Storage is also an option, although $50m for a 700 MW solar plant is not so much long-term storage as just buying you time to ramp up/down other sources (and eliminating the significance of random cloud banks drifting over the plant). Which should be obvious when you compare prices - they'll probably pay $1,5B or so for that solar plant; the battery buffer will be only 3% of that cost.
Just like tsunamis, apparently.
And actually, we've seen example after example after example of hurricanes breaching defenses that they weren't expected to be able to breach.
Right. Because a sea wall totally costs a couple thousand bucks.
Citation needed on the "engineers wanted a higher seawall" claim, too. And more than just one or two random people - show that there was any sort of serious belief among the engineering team responsible for the plant that the seawall wasn't high enough.
Not really.
There's shades of that in Tesla's response (which of course Slashdot, eternally lacking any sort of attempt to be balanced, did not post):
"If I only knew"? I literally posted a peer-reviewed study above on the topic. If you disagree with it, post your own peer-reviewed counter.
Front crumple zones are a reason to have the furthest forward point be a significant distance ahead of you, but it's not a reason to include a significant enclosed volume ahead of you. The latter is a pointless style feature that works against visibility and aerodynamics.
"Check on things"? I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you're talking Superchargers, a Trans-Canada supercharger route is planned for next year.
Has ISRO been doing that "women in spaceflight" superstition stuff too? I know Russia has, but I've never heard of anything from India about it. Russia even once blamed a technical mishap that could have killed the crew on the fact that there were two women aboard the craft. It appears to stem from the old naval superstition about women on ships being bad luck.