Reminds me of some religious types. "If it ain't in the book, I don't believe it."
There's a big difference between religion and relying on a reasonably unbiased testing company like consumer reports.
Your bias against CFLs approaches religion more. I think it was last month that we had quite the discussion about them.
BTW, I just had my first CFL blow on me - it still produced a visible glow, but no longer lit like the 100W equivalent it's supposed to be. It was in the bathroom, and a transplant from the time I lived in an apartment. It saw at least 5 years of usage, it predated the time I started writing the install date on the base in permanent marker.
That's why I said 'a little'. It was no snake eyes that she survived, my coworker was, well, very unlucky.:(
You're 15 times more likely to die of a car accident this year than from H1N1. You're 1000 times more likely to die from cancer. You're 1000 times more likely to die from heart disease.
My car has a lot more than $30 of safety devices and design work in it. We haven't found a sub $100 shot that can prevent either cancer or heart disease. Heck, we've found ONE vaccine that prevents a virus that causes ONE type of cancer and they're recommending everyone get it.
Heck, cancer and heart diseases became the #1 killers BECAUSE we got so good at eliminating everything else.
Your co-worker was unlucky. Out of millions of confirmed cases of H1N1 that end with 14 days of bed rest untreated or two weeks of bedrest treated, you ended up knowing a fluky statistic who died.
Thus far H1N1 has shown worrying levels of lethality - it's already killed as many kids as a normal flu season does.
As for the bedrest snark - the normal effect of a vaccine is that you don't get sick at all. Thus it's unvaccinated: 10% chance of getting sick, 2 weeks bedrest if you do vs vaccinated: 1% chance, 2 weeks if you do.
1. Your girlfriend got lucky, at least a little. One of my coworkers wasn't so lucky. She died from H1N1, and it wasn't pretty. One could argue that it takes bad luck(and pre-existing conditions) to die from the flu, most cases aren't bad, but even if the death rate was.1%, that's still 100 dead out of 100k infections. 2. Being in the hospital predisposes you to see the bad effects. Kinda like how if you work in a prison you'll see more criminals. 3. Vaccines aren't a cure. If you view viruses like terrorists(who all share a family resemblence), a vaccine is like distributing a rap/identification sheet. Your immune system still has to respond to fight the infection, it just gets a leg up. Against a replicating 'enemy', said leg up can be the difference between life and death.
You might have an arguement about the antibiotics, but that's a 'too late, open another front in the war' - the immune system has already been roused.
If anything, antibacterial soap and sanitizing cleaning products would make a better target. But even then, how much is it our immune systems 'getting lazy' and how much is 'people with weak immune systems aren't dying early'?
Yeah, I also forgot to mention the whole brush problem, and/or the expense of brushless designs.
I perhaps should have said that it's easier to use an AC motor as a generator than it is for DC motors. I knew it's possible to make a DC generator, I think I even remembered it can double as a motor, but I remembered there was some issue such that AC generators are normally used today, even if it's going to promptly rectified into DC. Lookin stuff up - the only DC generator designs I'm seeing are brush type. They also, by default, don't produce even DC electricity - it looks more like AC output through a rectifier.
At one point I was looking at making my own EV. After reading the literature and engineering, I was determined to go with an AC drive system. DC was cheaper, but the AC systems were both more powerful and more efficient. All the DC installs I saw didn't use regenerative braking, for example. It was a standard feature for the AC ones. Even without regenerative braking the AC system would have more range for a given battery pack.
He is right in that aspect that real-world products, trademarks or ads in real-world game can go towards players experience.
My most recent experience with this would be playing Prototype and going to Times Square. Now, I'm not exactly a New Yorker, and I'm not all that familiar with times square. But I'm pretty sure that Gamestop doesn't own the biggest billboards.
Some of the ads are obviously purchased, and some are made up. But my point would be that I found the ads a bit jarring in their selection/mode, even though I've never seen times square in real life. I guess my problem was the variety - they were rather obviously slanted towards computer gamers, and there wasn't enough different types of ads.
It would have been more distorting if there'd been NO advertising there though.
I guess, in the end that game developers and advertisers need to realize: 1. Gamers, like most americans and citizens of other countries for that matter, are going to be sophisticated consumers of ads. 2. Most gamers aren't just gamers - they also purchase cars, TVs, stereos, soda, feminine and masculine products, groceries, etc... 3. When it comes to product placement - whether in movies or computer games, subtle is often better than blaring. Directors need to put their foot down in favor of maintaining the art, not maximizing ad revenue before the feature is even released.
understand the technology of the time and how difficult it was to come up with a timed mechanism.
True, but there's more requirements to consider: 1. Cheap enough to put on non-premium cars 2. Reliable enough to not be a warranty nightmare through a nightmare range of operating temperatures/conditions 3. Easy to control by relatively untrained operators.
That makes it more complicated.
Reading this, I think it fails for non-specificness, I don't see how it applies to most hybrids because it seems to describe an all-wheel drive hybrid with seperate motors for the front/back. Otherwise it reads like the series hybrid diesel-electric trains that there were prototypes of back before '96.
Okay, first, I'd like to point out that the Tesla Roadster, a pure EV, uses an AC motor as well.
1. AC Motors, especially large ones, tend to be cheaper and more efficient than DC ones. You can go from ~80% to 90% 2. AC Motors can also act as generators, enabling regenerative braking/charging the batteries on a hybrid without an extra generator. 3. A simple rheostat works well at low power levels and efficiency - but when you're looking to strangle every meter out of a kwh, a rheostat is very inefficient at controlling power levels, and at car power levels, you're looking at wasting a LOT of watts as heat. What you'd really want is a DC-DC converter - which normally converts it to high frequency AC to do the transformation. Might as well skip that and just feed it to the motor as AC. 4. At the power levels we're looking at, an advanced controller can convert the DC to AC at better than 90% efficiency and control power/speed much closer than a DC motor + rheostat. It can also compensate for changing voltage levels due to battery depletion.
I suppose I should have clarified that I was talking more about those places where everyone wears identical shirts, shoes, pants and possibly hats as well as name tags with the company logo.
You think that's bad, one guy in a topic some time ago was issued company boxers - and he was working for a bank.
Worse- they wanted them back when he left.
When I worked retail my uniform was company shirt(issued), black pants(self obtained, conservative - IE no latex/leather/10 sizes too large) and name tag.
Doesn't help very much if you're in an area where the temp doesn't drop below 100 even at night during parts of the year.
A good idea in such cases would be to build/insulate your house correctly for the climate, then power AC to make up the remaining requirements via solar. Whether this be by solar panels powering a heat pump or using direct thermal heat to power an absorption chiller.
If you're really worried about money for the post-apocalyptic society of tomorrow, I'd suggest you start collecting bottle caps.
Heh, even in the game I tended to keep most of my assets in ammunition, not caps.;)
For the record, I have no real problem with properly run fractional reserve banking backed by insurance- the trick is to keep the rules such that the banks can't drop their reserve too low, like what happened before the crash.
Oh yeah, we spend a bundle defending our bananas....
I chose bananas because at one point we were actually using military personnel to help protect them, it was in a history channel special I saw a while back. Probably had something to do with the drug war, but I thought it was odd, so it stuck.
You have set off-peak hours? I was picturing a system like what we have - the power company sends a signal and turns off the off peak stuff when power demand peaks.
There's like six levels/zones, with different setpoints.
1. I've always figured it'd be people with garages actively used to store cars first, then driveways, then apartments with dedicated parking, working it's way down. If you're considering buying an EV, at this point running the power 15-20 feet isn't going to be a big deal. Should be a couple thousand at most, I could do it for a couple hundred. Your situation might be different.
2. Have you ever used a timer? My heating system is on one, I have a couple plug in ones that allow me to set the times the circuit is powered on.
Giving people an incentive to drive more efficient cars should be done with either gas taxes or things that affect the sticker price, really
I agree. Many states actually penalize hybrids with higher taxes. This can be fixed fairly easily. A couple hundred in registration credits for a SULEV, for example.
Increasing gas taxes is probably the best option - it incentives using less gas period, whether that be by switching to hybrids or EV, or simple things like driving less or getting a smaller vehicle.
Something like a penny a gallon a month for 120 months. While you're at it, take a good hard look at emissions standards with a mind to make compromises, control pollution without sacrificing gas mileage.
Put the money gathered into something like PRT - something that CAN realistically replace much of the uses for cars.
Providing an extra pair of wires with high voltage to the home from the nearest pole would not be too much of an extra cost; the wiring could be smaller gauge which would probably cover the increased insulation cost.
Lowering the gauge decreases amperage capacity. If you don't make it big enough, you can't charge any faster anyways. Strung wiring doesn't really have insulation, that's why they put them so high - they still kill a fair number of large birds which accidentally span the wires. There's sweet spot gauges - too small and they snap easy.
You'd still have to run an extra set of wires from the closest step-down transformer station through the neighborhood, that adds up.
The cost of the transformer would vary a lot. I don't know if it's worth it if you can, on average, 'top off' the car in under an hour for daily use.
The problem I see with that is twofold - Either you run extra wires to bring the higher power into the house, which depending on transformer location could be quite a distance away, or you increase the voltage the wires handle, which brings up issues of whether the insulation is rated for the higher voltage, plus you need to install transformers into every home.
Remember, it'd only take the 3 hours if the battery is completely dry, which is unlikely. If you've only used 24 miles of a 244* mile charge, you'd be able to top it off in 18-20 minutes**. If it's at 50%, 1.5 hours instead of 3. And so on...
*Tesla Roadster's rated **Maybe a bit longer depending on how close to a LiIon's actual 100% line you go. The last 10% of charge can take as long as the first 80%. Only charging to 80% would significantly increase the battery pack's life and how fact you can charge it to the somewhat fake '100%.
You're probably not familiar with me, but I'm also a big advocate of nuclear power.
I once figured it out - Switching to EVs would probably raise most peoples electric usage by ~30%. Extremely highly variable on an individual scale, of course.
I think EVs could be a great way to help balance demand via load control systems - IE the electric cars only charge off-peak.
You might want to check your local rates, who's your power company? They probably have a webpage I can check. You might be able to get your power for about the same price I pay for anytime power if you go for an off-peak system.
The hybrids *are* better even at highway speeds -- but not by that much, compared to the better gas cars (like mine).
My point is that an efficient straight ICE vehicle might pollute 2 units per mile at highway speeds, but do 5 in stop&go. Keeping said vehicles out of stop&go traffic saves 3 units of pollution. Meanwhile a hybrid battery-ICE vehicle might pollute 1.8 units per mile highway, 3 in stop&go, for a difference of 1.2 units of pollution.
Due to how many straight ICE vehicles are out there compared to hybrids, you'd save more pollution overall keeping them out of stop&go traffic/jams a little better than you do by letting hybrids zip along a commuter lane. Heck, a truck lane would help better - they're even worse than standard vehicles in jams.
Actually, you can fast charge a LiIon battery in around 15 minutes to 80%. Give a car 300 miles of range on that 80% charge, and you're looking at a range where you're needing/supposed to take a break anyways. Not willing to do that? Put a tow kit on the car and haul a small generator with you.
Where the bottleneck is is currently your home service. 240V@200A, a bit on the high side even for a modern home, only gives you 48 kwh an hour. Saving half for your house, you'd be able to charge up a Tesla in 2.5 hours, maybe 3.
Everytime you halve the charging time you double the amps. That gets expensive quick. Heavy cables, high voltages, etc...
Cheap batteries would help - either to swap into the car or to provide the extra power necessary to perform the fast charge.
After that you're looking at fixing the infrastructure, which would make my brother happy(he's an electrician). In my estimate first those with garages would get EV's, then those with dedicated parking spots, working their way down. At some point apartment managers would be retrofitting their properties to provide charging as a selling feature.
An ICE averages 15% efficiency, A proper supercritical coal steam plant can hit 40% easy. Natural Gas can hit 60%. Line losses are normally only 5-10%.
40% efficiency, even assuming 20% losses for line and charging losses still hits 32%, or double the efficiency of an ICE.
Plus, of course, the ability to 'fuel up' on hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear.
The problem I have with this is that traditional gasoline vehicles pollute LESS per mile traveled when they're not stuck in stop&go traffic - they're at their best at highway speeds.
Hybrids like the Prius actually pollute less at slower speeds and moderate stop&go.
Opening up the carpool lane to everyone has a good chance to actually reduce pollution more than the encouragement of hybrids/carpooling.
Heh, my goal for vehicles is 10 years. My strategy is to buy new, then drive for double the loan period. What I do is when I finish paying off the loan I start paying myself - the goal is to be able to pay cash for my next car. Last car made it 6 before an accident. Just paid the sucker off the year before.:( I don't see myself keeping a car for 30 unless I'm really, really lucky.
Anyways, back on topic a common concept for environmental stuff is 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - Cars are pretty much 100% recycled, but recycling is at the bottom of the list. For reducing pollution from cars, first you'd reduce your usage of cars. Then you're reuse(drive used, for example), repair, etc... Only when those fail do you recycle(buy a new car).
There are exceptions - an older vehicle with something wrong with it can pollute more than replacing it would, but that's case by case. Generally if it's not spewing thick smelly smoke you're better off sticking with it, assuming it meets your needs*. Another reason to replace would be if/when repair costs to keep it meeting your needs exceeds that of obtaining a different, better suited vehicle. The old 'it'd cost more to fix than it's worth'.
In my area, gas is currently $2.50/gallon. Filling up with 10 gallons would be $25, and in a 30mpg vehicle would get you 300 miles. End cost is 8.3 cents a mile.
Meanwhile the Tesla Roadster* has a 53 kWh battery that would cost $5.30 or less in my area to fill up, at home. Could be as low as $2.65 if you make some deals with the power company and have the charger on a circuit they can turn off when electrical demand is high. Per the wiki, it can go 244 miles on that charge. That gives me 2.17 cents per mile.
Basically divide your gas bill by four in order to figure out how much an EV would save you in gas money**.
Right now the difficulty isn't so much the range or lifespan of the battery, it's the COST. If the batteries were 1/10th their current price, we'd be driving EVs today.
*I know it's too expensive, but it's the best known commercial EV. **Assuming your driving habits are compatible.
but get him off the streets before he costs someone else another million dollars to defend against his criminal actions.
It's unfortunate, but filing harrasing lawsuits is one of the few crimes people in prison can commit on those outside of it.
Personally, I think this shows just why Jack was disbarred - a blatant, persistent disregard for any laws that don't say what he wants them to say.
In this case, while I'm not a lawyer, I know that angry letters can be submitted to a newspaper and published without consequence - they can be angry in tone as long as they don't pass into libel.
A facebook page is just another point of distribution, with a lower cost of entry so the editorial controls are lowered. In some ways, it can even be considered self-publishing - at which point as long as you avoid libel/slander you're supposed to be protected under the 1st ammendment.
Jack is a legally trained lawyer, even if he's been banned for malpractice. He should realize this.
I've had an idea for types like this - at some point you award anybody they sue in an asshat way all their legal fees, lost wages, etc... Be generous. Until they're paid off they can't sue anybody else.
The slight loss of justice for them* would be outweighed by the increase in justice for everybody else.
*IE a construction company could 'accidentally' knock down their house, shrug and say *so sue me* and the asshat *couldn't*, not until he's paid all his court mandated settlements off.
Great way to learn, and great in the event of an emergency too.
I'm in North Dakota. 'Emergencies' that leave a home inhabitable are something that happens in the winter. During Blizzards, when there's a foot of snow on the roof. I'm not getting any solar power then.
I've played around with my electrical systems enough that if I do anything, I'm likely to try for a combined cycle generator - using a generator for both power AND heat.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of some religious types. "If it ain't in the book, I don't believe it."
There's a big difference between religion and relying on a reasonably unbiased testing company like consumer reports.
Your bias against CFLs approaches religion more. I think it was last month that we had quite the discussion about them.
BTW, I just had my first CFL blow on me - it still produced a visible glow, but no longer lit like the 100W equivalent it's supposed to be. It was in the bathroom, and a transplant from the time I lived in an apartment. It saw at least 5 years of usage, it predated the time I started writing the install date on the base in permanent marker.
You have a poor definition of "lucky".
That's why I said 'a little'. It was no snake eyes that she survived, my coworker was, well, very unlucky. :(
You're 15 times more likely to die of a car accident this year than from H1N1. You're 1000 times more likely to die from cancer. You're 1000 times more likely to die from heart disease.
My car has a lot more than $30 of safety devices and design work in it. We haven't found a sub $100 shot that can prevent either cancer or heart disease. Heck, we've found ONE vaccine that prevents a virus that causes ONE type of cancer and they're recommending everyone get it.
Heck, cancer and heart diseases became the #1 killers BECAUSE we got so good at eliminating everything else.
Your co-worker was unlucky. Out of millions of confirmed cases of H1N1 that end with 14 days of bed rest untreated or two weeks of bedrest treated, you ended up knowing a fluky statistic who died.
Thus far H1N1 has shown worrying levels of lethality - it's already killed as many kids as a normal flu season does.
As for the bedrest snark - the normal effect of a vaccine is that you don't get sick at all. Thus it's unvaccinated: 10% chance of getting sick, 2 weeks bedrest if you do vs vaccinated: 1% chance, 2 weeks if you do.
1. Your girlfriend got lucky, at least a little. One of my coworkers wasn't so lucky. She died from H1N1, and it wasn't pretty. One could argue that it takes bad luck(and pre-existing conditions) to die from the flu, most cases aren't bad, but even if the death rate was .1%, that's still 100 dead out of 100k infections.
2. Being in the hospital predisposes you to see the bad effects. Kinda like how if you work in a prison you'll see more criminals.
3. Vaccines aren't a cure. If you view viruses like terrorists(who all share a family resemblence), a vaccine is like distributing a rap/identification sheet. Your immune system still has to respond to fight the infection, it just gets a leg up. Against a replicating 'enemy', said leg up can be the difference between life and death.
You might have an arguement about the antibiotics, but that's a 'too late, open another front in the war' - the immune system has already been roused.
If anything, antibacterial soap and sanitizing cleaning products would make a better target. But even then, how much is it our immune systems 'getting lazy' and how much is 'people with weak immune systems aren't dying early'?
Yeah, I also forgot to mention the whole brush problem, and/or the expense of brushless designs.
I perhaps should have said that it's easier to use an AC motor as a generator than it is for DC motors. I knew it's possible to make a DC generator, I think I even remembered it can double as a motor, but I remembered there was some issue such that AC generators are normally used today, even if it's going to promptly rectified into DC. Lookin stuff up - the only DC generator designs I'm seeing are brush type. They also, by default, don't produce even DC electricity - it looks more like AC output through a rectifier.
At one point I was looking at making my own EV. After reading the literature and engineering, I was determined to go with an AC drive system. DC was cheaper, but the AC systems were both more powerful and more efficient. All the DC installs I saw didn't use regenerative braking, for example. It was a standard feature for the AC ones. Even without regenerative braking the AC system would have more range for a given battery pack.
He is right in that aspect that real-world products, trademarks or ads in real-world game can go towards players experience.
My most recent experience with this would be playing Prototype and going to Times Square. Now, I'm not exactly a New Yorker, and I'm not all that familiar with times square. But I'm pretty sure that Gamestop doesn't own the biggest billboards.
Some of the ads are obviously purchased, and some are made up. But my point would be that I found the ads a bit jarring in their selection/mode, even though I've never seen times square in real life. I guess my problem was the variety - they were rather obviously slanted towards computer gamers, and there wasn't enough different types of ads.
It would have been more distorting if there'd been NO advertising there though.
I guess, in the end that game developers and advertisers need to realize:
1. Gamers, like most americans and citizens of other countries for that matter, are going to be sophisticated consumers of ads.
2. Most gamers aren't just gamers - they also purchase cars, TVs, stereos, soda, feminine and masculine products, groceries, etc...
3. When it comes to product placement - whether in movies or computer games, subtle is often better than blaring. Directors need to put their foot down in favor of maintaining the art, not maximizing ad revenue before the feature is even released.
understand the technology of the time and how difficult it was to come up with a timed mechanism.
True, but there's more requirements to consider:
1. Cheap enough to put on non-premium cars
2. Reliable enough to not be a warranty nightmare through a nightmare range of operating temperatures/conditions
3. Easy to control by relatively untrained operators.
That makes it more complicated.
Reading this, I think it fails for non-specificness, I don't see how it applies to most hybrids because it seems to describe an all-wheel drive hybrid with seperate motors for the front/back. Otherwise it reads like the series hybrid diesel-electric trains that there were prototypes of back before '96.
Okay, first, I'd like to point out that the Tesla Roadster, a pure EV, uses an AC motor as well.
1. AC Motors, especially large ones, tend to be cheaper and more efficient than DC ones. You can go from ~80% to 90%
2. AC Motors can also act as generators, enabling regenerative braking/charging the batteries on a hybrid without an extra generator.
3. A simple rheostat works well at low power levels and efficiency - but when you're looking to strangle every meter out of a kwh, a rheostat is very inefficient at controlling power levels, and at car power levels, you're looking at wasting a LOT of watts as heat. What you'd really want is a DC-DC converter - which normally converts it to high frequency AC to do the transformation. Might as well skip that and just feed it to the motor as AC.
4. At the power levels we're looking at, an advanced controller can convert the DC to AC at better than 90% efficiency and control power/speed much closer than a DC motor + rheostat. It can also compensate for changing voltage levels due to battery depletion.
I suppose I should have clarified that I was talking more about those places where everyone wears identical shirts, shoes, pants and possibly hats as well as name tags with the company logo.
You think that's bad, one guy in a topic some time ago was issued company boxers - and he was working for a bank.
Worse- they wanted them back when he left.
When I worked retail my uniform was company shirt(issued), black pants(self obtained, conservative - IE no latex/leather/10 sizes too large) and name tag.
insulate your house !
Doesn't help very much if you're in an area where the temp doesn't drop below 100 even at night during parts of the year.
A good idea in such cases would be to build/insulate your house correctly for the climate, then power AC to make up the remaining requirements via solar. Whether this be by solar panels powering a heat pump or using direct thermal heat to power an absorption chiller.
If you're really worried about money for the post-apocalyptic society of tomorrow, I'd suggest you start collecting bottle caps.
Heh, even in the game I tended to keep most of my assets in ammunition, not caps. ;)
For the record, I have no real problem with properly run fractional reserve banking backed by insurance- the trick is to keep the rules such that the banks can't drop their reserve too low, like what happened before the crash.
Oh yeah, we spend a bundle defending our bananas....
I chose bananas because at one point we were actually using military personnel to help protect them, it was in a history channel special I saw a while back. Probably had something to do with the drug war, but I thought it was odd, so it stuck.
You have set off-peak hours? I was picturing a system like what we have - the power company sends a signal and turns off the off peak stuff when power demand peaks.
There's like six levels/zones, with different setpoints.
1. I've always figured it'd be people with garages actively used to store cars first, then driveways, then apartments with dedicated parking, working it's way down. If you're considering buying an EV, at this point running the power 15-20 feet isn't going to be a big deal. Should be a couple thousand at most, I could do it for a couple hundred. Your situation might be different.
2. Have you ever used a timer? My heating system is on one, I have a couple plug in ones that allow me to set the times the circuit is powered on.
Giving people an incentive to drive more efficient cars should be done with either gas taxes or things that affect the sticker price, really
I agree. Many states actually penalize hybrids with higher taxes. This can be fixed fairly easily. A couple hundred in registration credits for a SULEV, for example.
Increasing gas taxes is probably the best option - it incentives using less gas period, whether that be by switching to hybrids or EV, or simple things like driving less or getting a smaller vehicle.
Something like a penny a gallon a month for 120 months. While you're at it, take a good hard look at emissions standards with a mind to make compromises, control pollution without sacrificing gas mileage.
Put the money gathered into something like PRT - something that CAN realistically replace much of the uses for cars.
Providing an extra pair of wires with high voltage to the home from the nearest pole would not be too much of an extra cost; the wiring could be smaller gauge which would probably cover the increased insulation cost.
Lowering the gauge decreases amperage capacity. If you don't make it big enough, you can't charge any faster anyways. Strung wiring doesn't really have insulation, that's why they put them so high - they still kill a fair number of large birds which accidentally span the wires. There's sweet spot gauges - too small and they snap easy.
You'd still have to run an extra set of wires from the closest step-down transformer station through the neighborhood, that adds up.
The cost of the transformer would vary a lot. I don't know if it's worth it if you can, on average, 'top off' the car in under an hour for daily use.
400B isn't half the US Defense Budget, and I don't believe that half of the DoD is dedicated to protecting Oil.
Some is, of course, but you could say the same about bananas and such.
The problem I see with that is twofold - Either you run extra wires to bring the higher power into the house, which depending on transformer location could be quite a distance away, or you increase the voltage the wires handle, which brings up issues of whether the insulation is rated for the higher voltage, plus you need to install transformers into every home.
Remember, it'd only take the 3 hours if the battery is completely dry, which is unlikely. If you've only used 24 miles of a 244* mile charge, you'd be able to top it off in 18-20 minutes**. If it's at 50%, 1.5 hours instead of 3. And so on...
*Tesla Roadster's rated
**Maybe a bit longer depending on how close to a LiIon's actual 100% line you go. The last 10% of charge can take as long as the first 80%. Only charging to 80% would significantly increase the battery pack's life and how fact you can charge it to the somewhat fake '100%.
You're probably not familiar with me, but I'm also a big advocate of nuclear power.
I once figured it out - Switching to EVs would probably raise most peoples electric usage by ~30%. Extremely highly variable on an individual scale, of course.
I think EVs could be a great way to help balance demand via load control systems - IE the electric cars only charge off-peak.
You might want to check your local rates, who's your power company? They probably have a webpage I can check. You might be able to get your power for about the same price I pay for anytime power if you go for an off-peak system.
The hybrids *are* better even at highway speeds -- but not by that much, compared to the better gas cars (like mine).
My point is that an efficient straight ICE vehicle might pollute 2 units per mile at highway speeds, but do 5 in stop&go. Keeping said vehicles out of stop&go traffic saves 3 units of pollution. Meanwhile a hybrid battery-ICE vehicle might pollute 1.8 units per mile highway, 3 in stop&go, for a difference of 1.2 units of pollution.
Due to how many straight ICE vehicles are out there compared to hybrids, you'd save more pollution overall keeping them out of stop&go traffic/jams a little better than you do by letting hybrids zip along a commuter lane. Heck, a truck lane would help better - they're even worse than standard vehicles in jams.
Actually, you can fast charge a LiIon battery in around 15 minutes to 80%. Give a car 300 miles of range on that 80% charge, and you're looking at a range where you're needing/supposed to take a break anyways. Not willing to do that? Put a tow kit on the car and haul a small generator with you.
Where the bottleneck is is currently your home service. 240V@200A, a bit on the high side even for a modern home, only gives you 48 kwh an hour. Saving half for your house, you'd be able to charge up a Tesla in 2.5 hours, maybe 3.
Everytime you halve the charging time you double the amps. That gets expensive quick. Heavy cables, high voltages, etc...
Cheap batteries would help - either to swap into the car or to provide the extra power necessary to perform the fast charge.
After that you're looking at fixing the infrastructure, which would make my brother happy(he's an electrician). In my estimate first those with garages would get EV's, then those with dedicated parking spots, working their way down. At some point apartment managers would be retrofitting their properties to provide charging as a selling feature.
An ICE averages 15% efficiency, A proper supercritical coal steam plant can hit 40% easy. Natural Gas can hit 60%. Line losses are normally only 5-10%.
40% efficiency, even assuming 20% losses for line and charging losses still hits 32%, or double the efficiency of an ICE.
Plus, of course, the ability to 'fuel up' on hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear.
Most likely it's the pollution rationale..
The problem I have with this is that traditional gasoline vehicles pollute LESS per mile traveled when they're not stuck in stop&go traffic - they're at their best at highway speeds.
Hybrids like the Prius actually pollute less at slower speeds and moderate stop&go.
Opening up the carpool lane to everyone has a good chance to actually reduce pollution more than the encouragement of hybrids/carpooling.
Heh, my goal for vehicles is 10 years. My strategy is to buy new, then drive for double the loan period. What I do is when I finish paying off the loan I start paying myself - the goal is to be able to pay cash for my next car. Last car made it 6 before an accident. Just paid the sucker off the year before. :( I don't see myself keeping a car for 30 unless I'm really, really lucky.
Anyways, back on topic a common concept for environmental stuff is 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - Cars are pretty much 100% recycled, but recycling is at the bottom of the list. For reducing pollution from cars, first you'd reduce your usage of cars. Then you're reuse(drive used, for example), repair, etc... Only when those fail do you recycle(buy a new car).
There are exceptions - an older vehicle with something wrong with it can pollute more than replacing it would, but that's case by case. Generally if it's not spewing thick smelly smoke you're better off sticking with it, assuming it meets your needs*. Another reason to replace would be if/when repair costs to keep it meeting your needs exceeds that of obtaining a different, better suited vehicle. The old 'it'd cost more to fix than it's worth'.
*size, range, reliability, safety, etc...
In my area, gas is currently $2.50/gallon. Filling up with 10 gallons would be $25, and in a 30mpg vehicle would get you 300 miles. End cost is 8.3 cents a mile.
Meanwhile the Tesla Roadster* has a 53 kWh battery that would cost $5.30 or less in my area to fill up, at home. Could be as low as $2.65 if you make some deals with the power company and have the charger on a circuit they can turn off when electrical demand is high. Per the wiki, it can go 244 miles on that charge. That gives me 2.17 cents per mile.
Basically divide your gas bill by four in order to figure out how much an EV would save you in gas money**.
Right now the difficulty isn't so much the range or lifespan of the battery, it's the COST. If the batteries were 1/10th their current price, we'd be driving EVs today.
*I know it's too expensive, but it's the best known commercial EV.
**Assuming your driving habits are compatible.
but get him off the streets before he costs someone else another million dollars to defend against his criminal actions.
It's unfortunate, but filing harrasing lawsuits is one of the few crimes people in prison can commit on those outside of it.
Personally, I think this shows just why Jack was disbarred - a blatant, persistent disregard for any laws that don't say what he wants them to say.
In this case, while I'm not a lawyer, I know that angry letters can be submitted to a newspaper and published without consequence - they can be angry in tone as long as they don't pass into libel.
A facebook page is just another point of distribution, with a lower cost of entry so the editorial controls are lowered. In some ways, it can even be considered self-publishing - at which point as long as you avoid libel/slander you're supposed to be protected under the 1st ammendment.
Jack is a legally trained lawyer, even if he's been banned for malpractice. He should realize this.
I've had an idea for types like this - at some point you award anybody they sue in an asshat way all their legal fees, lost wages, etc... Be generous. Until they're paid off they can't sue anybody else.
The slight loss of justice for them* would be outweighed by the increase in justice for everybody else.
*IE a construction company could 'accidentally' knock down their house, shrug and say *so sue me* and the asshat *couldn't*, not until he's paid all his court mandated settlements off.
Great way to learn, and great in the event of an emergency too.
I'm in North Dakota. 'Emergencies' that leave a home inhabitable are something that happens in the winter. During Blizzards, when there's a foot of snow on the roof. I'm not getting any solar power then.
I've played around with my electrical systems enough that if I do anything, I'm likely to try for a combined cycle generator - using a generator for both power AND heat.