It's the compromises made to make the B share the same frame as the other planes that cases the problems.
Relatively speaking, the A version is 'great' compared to the B, but note that I didn't say that the F-35 is a suitable replacement, merely that we need new planes.
It's not the F-35a that's problematic, it's the F-35b STOVL variant that's costing a lot of the money.
Also, as retired USAF, I can tell you that there's reasons WHY we really need new planes. Seriously, we're still flying planes that the pilot's grandfather flew when HE was in.
That's not to say that the current system for acquiring new planes isn't messed up beyond belief. Just the process for new refuelers has been horrifying beyond imagination.
I would not be surprised to find a better constructed idiot (though I do not expect most people to know) attempting to drive with a trailer.
How to put it? While I'd expect accidents because of the trailer, I'd expect accidents no matter what - after all, most accidents in the country, much less the world, don't involve trailers at all.
Basically, the number of accidents would be at 'acceptable' levels such that U-haul and such would be willing to rent them out. You're always going to have 'better idiots', but that can't be used as an excuse to not deploy a technology unless the results are too catastrophic - and a 'few' accidents here and there are acceptable.
I think it should be something you can disconnect from the vehicle, when you get to your destination, and used as a generator as well as a then-static EV charging platform.
Shouldn't be a problem to provide. A Model S uses 37kwh to go 100 miles. At 60 mph, that would be 22.2 kWh/h or 22.2 kW. Please note that this is a 'napkin back' calculation and is more for estimation. There are many real world considerations, including but not limited to: actual driving speed, any grade, additional drag from the trailer, the range of the EV assuming you're starting with the battery full and are willing to end driving with it near empty, any breaks taken, that you're skipping the 'battery' part which removes a 10% loss step, etc... Honestly, I think 22 kW would be 'oversized' in most situations.
And if a ~22kW generator isn't enough for your camp site...
Adaptive steering is going to help on vehicles that are equipped with it.
It's actually on the trailer. But I'm of the opinion that technological solutions are often superior to education, because education can be ignored, and often ends up being less effective and more expensive(time's expensive).
In the end, consider this: Most of the accidents you've described were to a person's own property. My scale of 'caring': Other people's lives. The operator's life. Other people's property, the operator's property. If they only damage their own stuff, who cares? If the trailers are costing people their lives, the it matters a great deal.
In the end, I think you're picturing a larger trailer than I am. Seriously, what's I'm figuring on would be tiny. How tiny? Not visible from the rear view mirror tiny.
You're also figuring on a 'vast increase'. I'm not, and even if there is, most of it would be on the highway where it's the safest, not on the roads in the cities.
As for added danger - how do you balance this against cars that will do things like apply the brakes themselves to keep you from hitting something? Backing cams?
It may be possible, safer, to simply engineer a method that allows carrying this generator behind the vehicle without it actually being towed.
As you say, such capacity would have to be engineered into the vehicle. You're looking at about 600 pounds for the generator and fuel alone. Well within range for a class 1 hitch that most EVs can take, but they're normally only rated to 70 pounds or so for tongue weight. Hell, it'd exceed the capability for the class 3 on my light truck if you wanted to just suspend it there. I can't put much more than a bike rack or grill on my hitch if it's going to just be suspended there.
Plus, you might not be thinking about this, but it'd affect the balance of the whole car, and not in a good way. So no, it's not a 'trivial matter'.
People on this site keep saying that, but I have yet to see any proof.
This is a forum site; have you gone looking for 'proof'?
There is no reason why over the course of 20--30 years we couldn't invest in more energy storage
I'm going to have to rephrase my statements a bit. Tense problems, mostly. We couldn't, and currently can't, produce enough green energy to replace coal&oil economically, IE without making major sacrifices in quality of life elsewhere.
Somehow I dropped the battery part of my post as an additional option. Where the cheaper and more efficient the storage technology is, the more likely you are to store power rather than just build out your renewable energy infrastructure and just 'throw away' power during 'good' power production days.
Still, we appear to be on the cusp of radical changes. 30 years ago solar technology produced less power even at 100 times the cost. Lithium-Ion technology was a gleam in somebody's eye, much less possibly poised to take the market as the cheapest battery technology. Lead Acid: $.194/wh. LiIon: $.236/wh.
If ONE of the recent battery technologies that I've read about succeeds, or Musk's factory to cut the cost of his batteries in half, that means that LiIon will actually be cheaper than Lead-Acid. This would be huge.
Meanwhile they keep working to cut the cost of solar panels even as they increase their efficiency.
I'm still irked by the pricing. Now, I don't expect to be able to buy an ebook for the price of a used book, but by golly, I refuse to pay more for the book than I do for a dead-tree version, and given that I'm a halfway 'smart' shopper, 30% under 'list' is the average for me, I can often reach 50% or more, for a book that's not quite a new release. As such, I'm pretty much stuck buying from Baen for now.
They need to hold more sales like Steam. But no, the publishers don't want that. Apple & Amazon don't want that.
Of course household outlets won't do that, but a properly wired supercharger can probably do that.
If the battery is cheap enough, you could have one of those tesla home batteries which would trickle charge through the day, then 'dump' the accumulated charge into your EV battery.
So when you get home, given enough time to shower, change clothes, apply makeup and have a snack, you have a vehicle back up to 80% charge.
So many 'fun' things would be possible if we could have a battery that stores 1kWh for $1.;)
In other words, all thinkable problems regarding modern power production can and should first be tackled via SmartGrids, then comes long nothing, and then potentially come storages.
Except that EVs are storage devices and smart grids normally involve storage to help make managing them 'smart'.
there is no nation in the world that right now has so much surplus that there is a "storage problem".
That's the problem, you keep arguing that it's not needed now, which I've never actually disputed. You keep arguing against it though when I mention that it would be handy in the future WHEN renewables are the biggest slice of the power production pie.
So: when does such a situation arise? Obviously it can't arise when the total non dispatch able input is only 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% or 50% or even 75% of peak!
Nope, 50% would be enough. Minimum power draw is generally around 40% of max.
You're the one using 'desperate', not me. I use things like 'economical'. And yes, it can be 'economical' to be able to spin down some of your plants more or less permanently, while keeping others spinning at their optimal load, while storing power during low demand and releasing it during high. The cheaper and more efficient the storage method, the more practical and economical this is.
Have you driven with a trailer? Have you done so in an urban area? Have you done so in heavy highway traffic? Have you seen other people drive? How about on poorly maintained roads?
Yes, sort of, not really, yes, define 'poorly maintained' and explain why people with an EV will be going over them.
My trailer is single axle.
Also, you ignored my point about the adaptive steering that they can do. You literally can't jackknife them.
Yes, and that is why I said I think we're a long way from that, the price of the battery is the real problem.
I'm sorry, this made me crack up because just yesterday I was arguing with a guy who was saying it's NOT the cost of the battery that's killing EVs. He kept insisting it's 'range anxiety' and that they're 'too slow to refuel'. He couldn't seem to understand that a bigger battery would fix both issues*, and the reason they don't put a bigger battery in is cost.
*You probably already know this, but you wouldn't need to charge a 300-600 mile battery as often and as a bonus you can put more watts into it, translating into more 'miles per minute' of charging.
Can the small engine in the series hybrid do that? Would the regenerative brakes act as engine braking on downgrades? Can the engine pull 8,000lbs up a 6% grade when the battery has run dry?
1. Yes. Note that 'small' would only be relative to the engine you have now. 2. Of course. Probably also do the trick of putting resistive strips somewhere in case you need to resistive brake when the battery is full. Locomotives put them on their roof. 3. Not the use case, but yes. You'd just end up going slower. If you want 'full speed', you don't deliberately run the battery dry before that slope. I'm picturing you either telling the truck's computer that you want that battery charged, or even that you have your route planned on it's GPS and it recognizes that the slope is ahead and prepares the battery accordingly. 4. Hell, as I've mentioned for pure EVs before, put a generator in the trailer so it's providing the extra watts necessary.
I may need grade power for 20 min at times, and I imagine the battery wouldn't last long pulling a combined 14,000lbs up a 6% grade for anything other than a min or two.
Nitpick: It's likely to be more than 14k lbs once you add the battery pack, and given that I was picturing one capable of about 100 miles without a trailer, it probably would be able to take the 20 minutes of 6%, though there wouldn't be much left. You'd charge it again on the down slope. Still, if you're looking at towing through Colorado as a regular thing, you might want to either spring for extra battery or bigger engine(though still not as big as current). Or hell, build the battery and/or supplemental engine into the trailer.
Perhaps it would make more sense to turn stuff like the Ford Explorer and Toyota Highlander into full EVs first, since they are not used to tow nearly as often (but they can, up to 5,000lbs)
They've made them before. But the hybrids have either been weak with minimal fuel savings or not have the towing capacity.
It's similar to the case where the guy got his YouTube URL taken away just because someone with money wanted it. Or Nissan.com - the original owner had the store way before the car company renamed themselves.
Another example would be McDonald's restaurant(USA, Arches) suing MacDonald's family restaurant(UK). They lost, because there had been a MacDonald family restaurant(reincarnated on a regular basis, but always with 'MacDonald' in the name) there since before the USA was a country...
As Lost Race mentioned, there's a HUGE difference between a boat trailer and the little dinky generator trailer I'm specifying. Also frequency? Not all that often. It'd only be the road warriors who are too determined to drive straight through that they can't even make usage of things like supercharger stations.
For example, the big trucks hauling those boats you're talking about? Could probably hold the whole generator system on their hitch.
Now yes, once you add fairings I figure that you might as well add the ability to toss a couple bags of luggage into the trailer with the generator(suitably shielded from the heat&emissions), because if you're using one you're obviously going on a long trip, and that's associated with carrying more stuff.
Also, parallel park, 'get through traffic'? The specified use for the trailer is extended range, IE zipping down the highway.
Hell, with a trailer this small they have adaptive steering packages that make the darn thing pretty much invisible - it'll steer itself to keep itself out of trouble.
This is not happening in a meaningful way. Production of solar energy is high when the demand is high.
Actually, peak solar precedes peak demand by about 2-4 hours. Though I'll admit, this doesn't matter, like I've already said, until renewable penetration, including solar, reaches 'ridiculous' levels.
Also I really doubt that Hawaii has already enough solar installed that it is physically possible to have a surplus on a very good day.
No. It's about 2 years away from it if the electric company hadn't slammed on the regulatory brakes, outright banning the additional installation of solar photovoltiac power on roofs for periods of time.
My point is simple: unless you have such situations OFTEN storage is not useful. And storage is certainly not NEEDED.
As I stated earlier, it's not needed until penetration is a lot higher, but penetration is heading that way in at least limited markets for now.
Or you use wind power at night. Problems solved. Facepalm, that again was so easy. Or in case of Hawaii: wave plants.
facepalming doesn't give your argument any more validity. The wind blows when it blows. Now, yes, a mix of wind and solar can *usually* give you all the power you need, but again, it's non-dispatchable power, where fossil fuel is dispatchable and nuclear is generally always present(though you can have it load-follow as well). So as long as the wind and solar is low enough, you don't need storage because the various reserves are enough. But when it gets to be high enough, you still have that you don't want to install any more solar or wind than you have to, because the power they produce is fairly expensive from a capital standpoint, but not a marginal standpoint, so you want to use all of it you can. If the wind is blowing well on a sunny day during a holiday, you can see power usage drop to the point that you have excess power even after shutting the fossil fuel plants down to their minimum.
As such, in order to even all this out you have storage solutions. Speaking of which, you know what blows your whole argument out of the water? Pumped storage, which already exists around the world for evening power production, long predating renewables.
This is impossible. Don't you get that? Either there is a peak and you produce more POWER than you need at that peak, or you don't. If you produce less power, you can not store anything. Simple.
I get what you're saying. I don't see it as 'simple', I see it as 'incorrect'. I'm not sure where the breakage in your understanding is.
Power DEMAND fluctuates through the day. Renewable power SUPPLY also fluctuates. The goal is to EXACTLY match supply and demand. So what you can do is that when power demand is at 60% of peak(for example), you turn down the various spinning generators. But, assuming you have 'extensive' penetration by green power, and I'm talking 'eliminate all fossil fuel usage, especially coal' here, you might not have enough generators to turn down, or it might be cheaper to keep them spinning, etc... So you store the power to use later.
As long as you do not produce constantly, every day for X hours more than you need at those hours, you can not store X hours of excess energy to use it at another time!!!!!
It's not anything as clean as 'x hours more'. It's 'you store X MWh for use later'. Then, when you're approaching that peak usage period(or an emergency happens), you release that power from the storage system.
So, for example, your systems are producing 100% power during the hours of 10am to 2 pm. Demand is only 80% of peak, so you end up storing 20MWh. 6 pm rolls around, people are getting home, the sun's going down, so you're now producing 60% of peak power, but demand is 100%. You spin up some generators to supply that and use your storage to provide the 20% until 10pm rolls around and p
You don't HAVE to generate it within a fraction of a second of when it's used - that's just been convenient so far. So it's not with renewables? Fine! Store that juice!
Good point. I thought I had battery tech in there. It's in other posts of mine here, but somehow I forgot it.
Because it is law? At least in my country. And I'm pretty sure in your country as well. Or are the energy companies not by law required to guarantee undisrupted power supply for the population?
No, my country doesn't require 'undisrupted power supply' because that's a standard they can't meet. That being said, they do a very good job of it most of the time, as they don't get paid when they're not distributing power. As such, keeping a steady supply is an engineering problem, not a legal one. There's no legal requirement for them to keep a spinning reserve of any specific amount. They determine that themselves on the basis of historical trends and such.
The document you posted is about reserve energy.
One subcategory of which is spinning reserve. The wiki mentions it in at least 4 sentences.
I would ask them? Perhaps they are not connected to a grid and want to be self sufficient? Or they like to test nw technology?
Hint: I live there. I found out about the battery system in the little magazine all electric subscribers here get. We're not connected to the national grid, but we have an intertie with Anchorage.
No it is not. At which time of the day would you have surplus in such an amount that storing makes sense? There is none. Pretty simple.
Well now, how do you determine this? You're just declaring it like it's truth, with nothing to back it up. When would there be a surplus? Let's look at current examples: Hawaii, on the weekend, moderate weather. A good amount of sun, a lot of businesses are closed and people are out doing outside things. Result: All their roof panels are over-producing.
So we're looking at a potential overproduction period of 10 am to 2 pm.
When would we then discharge the batteries, outside of emergencies and such? 6pm to 11pm, by the looks of that chart.
And before you are close to 100% production or even significantly above, storage is *nice to have* but certainly not needed.
How are you defining '100% production'? Because I'd be considering demand as well. The optimal point to store is when production is high and demand is low.
What you perhaps mean is that you need more pumped storage to balance the grid when the amount of "undispatchable" renewals increase. But that is in terms of GW not GWh, so it is reaction time and not storage capacity that is needed.
1. No, I do NOT mean more 'pumped storage', I mean storage, period. You're acting like you believe there's only 'ONE TRUE SOLUTION!!!'. Personally, I believe that there are multiple solutions, each with it's own costs and benefits. 2. Yes, you need more storage as undispatchable power sources come online. 3. I'm very well aware of the difference between GW and GWh. See where I use the term 'power' for GW, and 'energy' for GWh. With renewables you want to install enough generation to cover the energy needed, and enough storage to cover not just the peak power needs, because you still need enough energy to cover the whole peak that exceeds the power coming from renewables. 4. That being said, you can avoid some of the storage issues by installing enough baseload capability, such as nuclear, to cover things like night-time use.
Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough.
Wahhhh! A technology still in the deployment phase isn't yet deployed enough to cover everything! 45 minutes is quick enough if you're taking the recommended breaks, IE go have a sit-down meal in between.
Or get a generator-trailer for those highway trips. Because remember, you can charge at home with an EV, as opposed to having to go to a gas station. Often at work.
Finally, 100% solution fallacy. EVs don't need to be 100% of the market. You make them cheap enough, primarily by reducing the cost of the battery, while maintaining or improving range, and people will switch and just 'put up' with renting a different vehicle if they need to travel a long ways because it's just plain cheaper to do it that way.
With fast charging you don't need longer range EVs - we already have EVs that can do over 200 miles on a charge now with more on the way.
Increasing range is straight forward. Making charging faster, without increasing range, is complicated because it's chemistry limited, not to mention the fun of getting all that wattage to the car. To get the speeds you're looking for you pretty much need a battery swap, not a charge. Tesla has designed such, but found the actual demand not enough to put the swap into it's supercharger locations.
Double the size of the battery pack and you double the potential charge rate. Which is why Tesla vehicles can charge at wattages that would cause other EV battery packs to burst into flames(if protective measures weren't taken to limit flow).
Given that, I can't help but think that you're not the target audience for an EV (yet), or that you're clinging to any hope you have for EVs 'not making it'.
Basically you won't get cheaper batteries unless you can build them in larger quantities. You won't get to build them in larger quantities until you can convince them that they can refuel their vehicles in a convenient manner.
Tesla uses 18650 cells. There's no lithium ion cell so common. They're already built in huge quantities. Despite this Tesla is building another factory, hoping to cut the cost approximately in half. I wish them luck. They're selling so many cars they're straining the capability to make that cell.
A Nissan leaf is a tiny car with an absurdly short range and doesn't have a huge amount of space for a large battery pack no matter what the cost is. While it works fine, for most people it's pretty limiting.
Have you seen how the battery is placed for the Tesla and Leaf? There's plenty of 'room' for more battery if you're designing it to take that much battery in the first place. Worst case they'd have to sit the passengers up a couple inches if they want to keep the same wheel-base. The car is basically a skateboard with the battery serving as the 'board' with the car shell and occupants sitting on top of it. So it doesn't impact cargo capacity. And Tesla has demonstrated that 300 miles is perfectly practical for an EV.
The size of the battery in a Leaf is small because they're trying to make the car affordable, not because the battery 'takes up too much room', or even weighs too much.
Tesla is selling a specialty supercar that costs $100,000.
I use it as an example of how to do EVs 'right'. I know they're too expensive right now. Still, $75k is a better figure, not $100k unless you buy the most expensive car they have, and their cheapest is like $60k.
As for superchargers, they're still installing more of them.
Just read the relevant law for that in your jurisdiction:D
Why the hell would the spinning reserves be law? That's an engineering issue, not a legal one.
And please point out in which part of the document you believe you have found a contradiction. I don't see any.
You haven't provided a document for me to find a contradiction in. I provided sources saying that spinning reserve is a thing and that the demand for such is generally acknowledged to increase with solar power.
I doubt that Germany has even a single "spinning reserve" plant in operation. Modern grids don't use that anymore, much to expensive and there are simpler means to have reserve power.
Not a citation, not even a definitive statement. Read the documents. What 'spinning reserve' today amounts to isn't an idling generator, but something like running 5 generators at 80% power rather than 4 at 100%
So: as long as your total installed wind + solar power is not at 100% of the daily demand curve: it makes no sense to store anything. Because you literally have no excess to store. This is basically the reason why in Germany most private roof top solar plants simply feed into the grid. And inhabitants simply draw from the grid.
I would assume that a country like the USA already has enough pumped storage to simply switch to solar and wind. For Germany that certainly is the case.
It's certainly NOT the case in the USA, and more pumped storage is expensive(because of the sheer amount of earth-moving required), so we're looking for alternatives as is.
As for renewables, more storage is practically required as renewables start exceeding about 40% of the supply. We're nowhere near that yet, but it's something to consider. This is seen as necessary because renewables produce on their schedule and are expensive enough that you don't want to throw away that energy. Install enough renewables to cover 100% of a grid's energy needs and the problem is that it won't produce enough POWER for all of a grid's time of demand needs. So you install like 110% of the energy needs, and when production exceeds demand you store, and when demand exceeds production you drain. Simple enough.
In response to the AC that triggered mlts's post, I didn't say one word about having house level generators. I was talking about the power company using the big-ass generators it owns and maintains, that are so huge it takes 15+ minutes to get them fired up from 'cold'. Basically, rather than having a few of them idling, using a fair bit of fuel to produce next to no power(they're most efficient at around 80-90% of capability), you shut them off because you have a humongous UPS providing power until they can be started.
As for maintenance, it's no different than keeping your gasoline lawn mower working, but then, I acknowledge that 'lack of maintenance' is the biggest killer of mowers out there. I've been running the same one for near 20 years, because I maintain it. Which consists of: new oil, air filter, and blade sharpening every year, new blade & spark plug as necessary. Most don't change anything, and thus the mower only lasts ~4 years.
Well, come the next would be disaster, that generator is pulled out... and won't start. The E-10 gasoline in the tank has turned to varnish, the carb is clogged to uselessness, and in some climates, the windings on the armature are corroded, so it can't even get a current in the first place.
Even non-ethanol gasoline will varnish up the carb in that situation. Arguably worse than the ethanol version will. It's more where they simply shove it into the backyard that you get corroded windings, even a car port will normally protect from that.
Or the generator gets maintained and oiled... and the person uses a "widow maker" cord to backfeed the house power, which is not a good thing for people working on the lines when power is out. Some pocos are so tired of this, they will pull an offending house's meter, and not reconnect power until the place puts in a up to code way of allowing for generator power (transfer switch [1], safety breaker interlock [1].)
Not that I excuse idiots, but do you know what generally happens when somebody plugs in such a cord when the main breaker hasn't been popped off? The generator's breaker pops because you're trying to feed the neighborhood.
Though I wonder what the power company would think my milspec manual interlock/transfer switch? - It's a piece of painted sheet metal riveted to the panel such that it will only slide when both the generator and the main breaker are off, and each position only allows ONE of the two to be on. IE to go to generator power I have to flip the main breaker off, slide the piece over(blocking turning main on), then flip the generator switch.
You happen to have a citation on that? Because mine says the opposite.
Power companies maintain spinning reserve even when there isn't any solar/wind power. Fairbanks doesn't have significant amounts of solar or wind power, but they have the BESS irregardless. It enabled them to keep generation facilities at a lower state of readiness while still reducing power outages when a generation source goes off line(such as the inter-tie with Anchorage).
Your statement implies that there's only 1 problem, which I dispute. When it comes to powering our civilization, there are many interconnected problems.
So which problem isn't being solved? The only one I claimed it would solve is the demand for power during peak periods. To be more specific, one of the problems with renewable energy today is that you need to keep a certain amount of 'spinning reserve' going in case the wind dies off and clouds cover the sun. If batteries become cheap enough, you can turn off the spinning reserve. It's only a small part of a much bigger picture, sure, but that means that it still needs to be addressed.
The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time.
Tesla Supercharging stations. Charging time circles back to the cost of the batteries. I drive two vehicles that are 200 miles(motorcycle) and 300 miles respectively. I don't have a problem with them.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs, and bigger batteries can generally be charged in the same time as a smaller battery, you just use a higher wattage charger. So that helps take care of the charging time issue.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV, that's enough penetration to ensure charging stations all over the place, as well as other technologies to take care of the range issue.
One example would be a small generator trailer that provides about 12kW. A motorcycle engine provides enough power to keep even a heavy EV moving at highway speeds. Optimize it for fuel efficiency...
The cost of the battery packs it is really a second order result because EV production is still too small to get full economies of scale.
I view it as the opposite. Or perhaps it's a negative circle - the high cost of the battery pack limits range, creating range anxiety, limiting sales, which limits the economy of scale for the battery packs, which increases their cost, which means that the manufacturers try to get by with the smallest battery pack they can, etc...
Still, Tesla is reportedly selling every car they can manufacture, which tells me that they don't need 400 miles, 250+ is enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Why shouldn't you be able to buy it at the price of a used book?
It's in the context of it being a 'not quite a new release'. Depending on the books I've bought used, they've often been under a buck.
Still, yeah, the price should decline.
It's the compromises made to make the B share the same frame as the other planes that cases the problems.
Relatively speaking, the A version is 'great' compared to the B, but note that I didn't say that the F-35 is a suitable replacement, merely that we need new planes.
It's not the F-35a that's problematic, it's the F-35b STOVL variant that's costing a lot of the money.
Also, as retired USAF, I can tell you that there's reasons WHY we really need new planes. Seriously, we're still flying planes that the pilot's grandfather flew when HE was in.
That's not to say that the current system for acquiring new planes isn't messed up beyond belief. Just the process for new refuelers has been horrifying beyond imagination.
I would not be surprised to find a better constructed idiot (though I do not expect most people to know) attempting to drive with a trailer.
How to put it? While I'd expect accidents because of the trailer, I'd expect accidents no matter what - after all, most accidents in the country, much less the world, don't involve trailers at all.
Basically, the number of accidents would be at 'acceptable' levels such that U-haul and such would be willing to rent them out. You're always going to have 'better idiots', but that can't be used as an excuse to not deploy a technology unless the results are too catastrophic - and a 'few' accidents here and there are acceptable.
I think it should be something you can disconnect from the vehicle, when you get to your destination, and used as a generator as well as a then-static EV charging platform.
Shouldn't be a problem to provide. A Model S uses 37kwh to go 100 miles. At 60 mph, that would be 22.2 kWh/h or 22.2 kW. Please note that this is a 'napkin back' calculation and is more for estimation. There are many real world considerations, including but not limited to: actual driving speed, any grade, additional drag from the trailer, the range of the EV assuming you're starting with the battery full and are willing to end driving with it near empty, any breaks taken, that you're skipping the 'battery' part which removes a 10% loss step, etc... Honestly, I think 22 kW would be 'oversized' in most situations.
And if a ~22kW generator isn't enough for your camp site...
Adaptive steering is going to help on vehicles that are equipped with it.
It's actually on the trailer. But I'm of the opinion that technological solutions are often superior to education, because education can be ignored, and often ends up being less effective and more expensive(time's expensive).
In the end, consider this: Most of the accidents you've described were to a person's own property. My scale of 'caring': Other people's lives. The operator's life. Other people's property, the operator's property. If they only damage their own stuff, who cares? If the trailers are costing people their lives, the it matters a great deal.
In the end, I think you're picturing a larger trailer than I am. Seriously, what's I'm figuring on would be tiny. How tiny? Not visible from the rear view mirror tiny.
You're also figuring on a 'vast increase'. I'm not, and even if there is, most of it would be on the highway where it's the safest, not on the roads in the cities.
As for added danger - how do you balance this against cars that will do things like apply the brakes themselves to keep you from hitting something? Backing cams?
It may be possible, safer, to simply engineer a method that allows carrying this generator behind the vehicle without it actually being towed.
As you say, such capacity would have to be engineered into the vehicle. You're looking at about 600 pounds for the generator and fuel alone. Well within range for a class 1 hitch that most EVs can take, but they're normally only rated to 70 pounds or so for tongue weight. Hell, it'd exceed the capability for the class 3 on my light truck if you wanted to just suspend it there. I can't put much more than a bike rack or grill on my hitch if it's going to just be suspended there.
Plus, you might not be thinking about this, but it'd affect the balance of the whole car, and not in a good way. So no, it's not a 'trivial matter'.
People on this site keep saying that, but I have yet to see any proof.
This is a forum site; have you gone looking for 'proof'?
There is no reason why over the course of 20--30 years we couldn't invest in more energy storage
I'm going to have to rephrase my statements a bit. Tense problems, mostly. We couldn't, and currently can't, produce enough green energy to replace coal&oil economically, IE without making major sacrifices in quality of life elsewhere.
Somehow I dropped the battery part of my post as an additional option. Where the cheaper and more efficient the storage technology is, the more likely you are to store power rather than just build out your renewable energy infrastructure and just 'throw away' power during 'good' power production days.
Still, we appear to be on the cusp of radical changes. 30 years ago solar technology produced less power even at 100 times the cost. Lithium-Ion technology was a gleam in somebody's eye, much less possibly poised to take the market as the cheapest battery technology.
Lead Acid: $.194/wh.
LiIon: $.236/wh.
If ONE of the recent battery technologies that I've read about succeeds, or Musk's factory to cut the cost of his batteries in half, that means that LiIon will actually be cheaper than Lead-Acid. This would be huge.
Meanwhile they keep working to cut the cost of solar panels even as they increase their efficiency.
I'm still irked by the pricing. Now, I don't expect to be able to buy an ebook for the price of a used book, but by golly, I refuse to pay more for the book than I do for a dead-tree version, and given that I'm a halfway 'smart' shopper, 30% under 'list' is the average for me, I can often reach 50% or more, for a book that's not quite a new release. As such, I'm pretty much stuck buying from Baen for now.
They need to hold more sales like Steam. But no, the publishers don't want that. Apple & Amazon don't want that.
Of course household outlets won't do that, but a properly wired supercharger can probably do that.
If the battery is cheap enough, you could have one of those tesla home batteries which would trickle charge through the day, then 'dump' the accumulated charge into your EV battery.
So when you get home, given enough time to shower, change clothes, apply makeup and have a snack, you have a vehicle back up to 80% charge.
So many 'fun' things would be possible if we could have a battery that stores 1kWh for $1. ;)
In other words, all thinkable problems regarding modern power production can and should first be tackled via SmartGrids, then comes long nothing, and then potentially come storages.
Except that EVs are storage devices and smart grids normally involve storage to help make managing them 'smart'.
Preview is your friend, my friend.
there is no nation in the world that right now has so much surplus that there is a "storage problem".
That's the problem, you keep arguing that it's not needed now, which I've never actually disputed. You keep arguing against it though when I mention that it would be handy in the future WHEN renewables are the biggest slice of the power production pie.
So: when does such a situation arise? Obviously it can't arise when the total non dispatch able input is only 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% or 50% or even 75% of peak!
Nope, 50% would be enough. Minimum power draw is generally around 40% of max.
You're the one using 'desperate', not me. I use things like 'economical'. And yes, it can be 'economical' to be able to spin down some of your plants more or less permanently, while keeping others spinning at their optimal load, while storing power during low demand and releasing it during high. The cheaper and more efficient the storage method, the more practical and economical this is.
Have you driven with a trailer? Have you done so in an urban area? Have you done so in heavy highway traffic? Have you seen other people drive? How about on poorly maintained roads?
Yes, sort of, not really, yes, define 'poorly maintained' and explain why people with an EV will be going over them.
My trailer is single axle.
Also, you ignored my point about the adaptive steering that they can do. You literally can't jackknife them.
Yes, and that is why I said I think we're a long way from that, the price of the battery is the real problem.
I'm sorry, this made me crack up because just yesterday I was arguing with a guy who was saying it's NOT the cost of the battery that's killing EVs. He kept insisting it's 'range anxiety' and that they're 'too slow to refuel'. He couldn't seem to understand that a bigger battery would fix both issues*, and the reason they don't put a bigger battery in is cost.
*You probably already know this, but you wouldn't need to charge a 300-600 mile battery as often and as a bonus you can put more watts into it, translating into more 'miles per minute' of charging.
Can the small engine in the series hybrid do that? Would the regenerative brakes act as engine braking on downgrades? Can the engine pull 8,000lbs up a 6% grade when the battery has run dry?
1. Yes. Note that 'small' would only be relative to the engine you have now.
2. Of course. Probably also do the trick of putting resistive strips somewhere in case you need to resistive brake when the battery is full. Locomotives put them on their roof.
3. Not the use case, but yes. You'd just end up going slower. If you want 'full speed', you don't deliberately run the battery dry before that slope. I'm picturing you either telling the truck's computer that you want that battery charged, or even that you have your route planned on it's GPS and it recognizes that the slope is ahead and prepares the battery accordingly.
4. Hell, as I've mentioned for pure EVs before, put a generator in the trailer so it's providing the extra watts necessary.
I may need grade power for 20 min at times, and I imagine the battery wouldn't last long pulling a combined 14,000lbs up a 6% grade for anything other than a min or two.
Nitpick: It's likely to be more than 14k lbs once you add the battery pack, and given that I was picturing one capable of about 100 miles without a trailer, it probably would be able to take the 20 minutes of 6%, though there wouldn't be much left. You'd charge it again on the down slope. Still, if you're looking at towing through Colorado as a regular thing, you might want to either spring for extra battery or bigger engine(though still not as big as current). Or hell, build the battery and/or supplemental engine into the trailer.
Perhaps it would make more sense to turn stuff like the Ford Explorer and Toyota Highlander into full EVs first, since they are not used to tow nearly as often (but they can, up to 5,000lbs)
They've made them before. But the hybrids have either been weak with minimal fuel savings or not have the towing capacity.
It's similar to the case where the guy got his YouTube URL taken away just because someone with money wanted it. Or Nissan.com - the original owner had the store way before the car company renamed themselves.
Another example would be McDonald's restaurant(USA, Arches) suing MacDonald's family restaurant(UK). They lost, because there had been a MacDonald family restaurant(reincarnated on a regular basis, but always with 'MacDonald' in the name) there since before the USA was a country...
As Lost Race mentioned, there's a HUGE difference between a boat trailer and the little dinky generator trailer I'm specifying. Also frequency? Not all that often. It'd only be the road warriors who are too determined to drive straight through that they can't even make usage of things like supercharger stations.
For example, the big trucks hauling those boats you're talking about? Could probably hold the whole generator system on their hitch.
Now yes, once you add fairings I figure that you might as well add the ability to toss a couple bags of luggage into the trailer with the generator(suitably shielded from the heat&emissions), because if you're using one you're obviously going on a long trip, and that's associated with carrying more stuff.
Also, parallel park, 'get through traffic'? The specified use for the trailer is extended range, IE zipping down the highway.
Hell, with a trailer this small they have adaptive steering packages that make the darn thing pretty much invisible - it'll steer itself to keep itself out of trouble.
This is not happening in a meaningful way. Production of solar energy is high when the demand is high.
Actually, peak solar precedes peak demand by about 2-4 hours. Though I'll admit, this doesn't matter, like I've already said, until renewable penetration, including solar, reaches 'ridiculous' levels.
Also I really doubt that Hawaii has already enough solar installed that it is physically possible to have a surplus on a very good day.
No. It's about 2 years away from it if the electric company hadn't slammed on the regulatory brakes, outright banning the additional installation of solar photovoltiac power on roofs for periods of time.
My point is simple: unless you have such situations OFTEN storage is not useful. And storage is certainly not NEEDED.
As I stated earlier, it's not needed until penetration is a lot higher, but penetration is heading that way in at least limited markets for now.
Or you use wind power at night. Problems solved. Facepalm, that again was so easy. Or in case of Hawaii: wave plants.
facepalming doesn't give your argument any more validity. The wind blows when it blows. Now, yes, a mix of wind and solar can *usually* give you all the power you need, but again, it's non-dispatchable power, where fossil fuel is dispatchable and nuclear is generally always present(though you can have it load-follow as well). So as long as the wind and solar is low enough, you don't need storage because the various reserves are enough. But when it gets to be high enough, you still have that you don't want to install any more solar or wind than you have to, because the power they produce is fairly expensive from a capital standpoint, but not a marginal standpoint, so you want to use all of it you can. If the wind is blowing well on a sunny day during a holiday, you can see power usage drop to the point that you have excess power even after shutting the fossil fuel plants down to their minimum.
As such, in order to even all this out you have storage solutions. Speaking of which, you know what blows your whole argument out of the water? Pumped storage, which already exists around the world for evening power production, long predating renewables.
This is impossible. Don't you get that? Either there is a peak and you produce more POWER than you need at that peak, or you don't. If you produce less power, you can not store anything. Simple.
I get what you're saying. I don't see it as 'simple', I see it as 'incorrect'. I'm not sure where the breakage in your understanding is.
Power DEMAND fluctuates through the day. Renewable power SUPPLY also fluctuates. The goal is to EXACTLY match supply and demand. So what you can do is that when power demand is at 60% of peak(for example), you turn down the various spinning generators. But, assuming you have 'extensive' penetration by green power, and I'm talking 'eliminate all fossil fuel usage, especially coal' here, you might not have enough generators to turn down, or it might be cheaper to keep them spinning, etc... So you store the power to use later.
As long as you do not produce constantly, every day for X hours more than you need at those hours, you can not store X hours of excess energy to use it at another time!!!!!
It's not anything as clean as 'x hours more'. It's 'you store X MWh for use later'. Then, when you're approaching that peak usage period(or an emergency happens), you release that power from the storage system.
So, for example, your systems are producing 100% power during the hours of 10am to 2 pm. Demand is only 80% of peak, so you end up storing 20MWh. 6 pm rolls around, people are getting home, the sun's going down, so you're now producing 60% of peak power, but demand is 100%. You spin up some generators to supply that and use your storage to provide the 20% until 10pm rolls around and p
You don't HAVE to generate it within a fraction of a second of when it's used - that's just been convenient so far. So it's not with renewables? Fine! Store that juice!
Good point. I thought I had battery tech in there. It's in other posts of mine here, but somehow I forgot it.
Because it is law? At least in my country. And I'm pretty sure in your country as well. Or are the energy companies not by law required to guarantee undisrupted power supply for the population?
No, my country doesn't require 'undisrupted power supply' because that's a standard they can't meet. That being said, they do a very good job of it most of the time, as they don't get paid when they're not distributing power. As such, keeping a steady supply is an engineering problem, not a legal one. There's no legal requirement for them to keep a spinning reserve of any specific amount. They determine that themselves on the basis of historical trends and such.
The document you posted is about reserve energy.
One subcategory of which is spinning reserve. The wiki mentions it in at least 4 sentences.
I would ask them? Perhaps they are not connected to a grid and want to be self sufficient? Or they like to test nw technology?
Hint: I live there. I found out about the battery system in the little magazine all electric subscribers here get. We're not connected to the national grid, but we have an intertie with Anchorage.
No it is not. At which time of the day would you have surplus in such an amount that storing makes sense? There is none. Pretty simple.
Well now, how do you determine this? You're just declaring it like it's truth, with nothing to back it up. When would there be a surplus? Let's look at current examples: Hawaii, on the weekend, moderate weather. A good amount of sun, a lot of businesses are closed and people are out doing outside things. Result: All their roof panels are over-producing.
So we're looking at a potential overproduction period of 10 am to 2 pm.
When would we then discharge the batteries, outside of emergencies and such? 6pm to 11pm, by the looks of that chart.
And before you are close to 100% production or even significantly above, storage is *nice to have* but certainly not needed.
How are you defining '100% production'? Because I'd be considering demand as well. The optimal point to store is when production is high and demand is low.
What you perhaps mean is that you need more pumped storage to balance the grid when the amount of "undispatchable" renewals increase. But that is in terms of GW not GWh, so it is reaction time and not storage capacity that is needed.
1. No, I do NOT mean more 'pumped storage', I mean storage, period. You're acting like you believe there's only 'ONE TRUE SOLUTION!!!'. Personally, I believe that there are multiple solutions, each with it's own costs and benefits.
2. Yes, you need more storage as undispatchable power sources come online.
3. I'm very well aware of the difference between GW and GWh. See where I use the term 'power' for GW, and 'energy' for GWh. With renewables you want to install enough generation to cover the energy needed, and enough storage to cover not just the peak power needs, because you still need enough energy to cover the whole peak that exceeds the power coming from renewables.
4. That being said, you can avoid some of the storage issues by installing enough baseload capability, such as nuclear, to cover things like night-time use.
So mine wouldn't be up to code because it lacks the logo. Made it custom, but that's not exactly hard.
Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough.
Wahhhh! A technology still in the deployment phase isn't yet deployed enough to cover everything! 45 minutes is quick enough if you're taking the recommended breaks, IE go have a sit-down meal in between.
Or get a generator-trailer for those highway trips. Because remember, you can charge at home with an EV, as opposed to having to go to a gas station. Often at work.
Finally, 100% solution fallacy. EVs don't need to be 100% of the market. You make them cheap enough, primarily by reducing the cost of the battery, while maintaining or improving range, and people will switch and just 'put up' with renting a different vehicle if they need to travel a long ways because it's just plain cheaper to do it that way.
With fast charging you don't need longer range EVs - we already have EVs that can do over 200 miles on a charge now with more on the way.
Increasing range is straight forward. Making charging faster, without increasing range, is complicated because it's chemistry limited, not to mention the fun of getting all that wattage to the car. To get the speeds you're looking for you pretty much need a battery swap, not a charge. Tesla has designed such, but found the actual demand not enough to put the swap into it's supercharger locations.
Double the size of the battery pack and you double the potential charge rate. Which is why Tesla vehicles can charge at wattages that would cause other EV battery packs to burst into flames(if protective measures weren't taken to limit flow).
Given that, I can't help but think that you're not the target audience for an EV (yet), or that you're clinging to any hope you have for EVs 'not making it'.
Basically you won't get cheaper batteries unless you can build them in larger quantities. You won't get to build them in larger quantities until you can convince them that they can refuel their vehicles in a convenient manner.
Tesla uses 18650 cells. There's no lithium ion cell so common. They're already built in huge quantities. Despite this Tesla is building another factory, hoping to cut the cost approximately in half. I wish them luck. They're selling so many cars they're straining the capability to make that cell.
A Nissan leaf is a tiny car with an absurdly short range and doesn't have a huge amount of space for a large battery pack no matter what the cost is. While it works fine, for most people it's pretty limiting.
Have you seen how the battery is placed for the Tesla and Leaf? There's plenty of 'room' for more battery if you're designing it to take that much battery in the first place. Worst case they'd have to sit the passengers up a couple inches if they want to keep the same wheel-base. The car is basically a skateboard with the battery serving as the 'board' with the car shell and occupants sitting on top of it. So it doesn't impact cargo capacity. And Tesla has demonstrated that 300 miles is perfectly practical for an EV.
The size of the battery in a Leaf is small because they're trying to make the car affordable, not because the battery 'takes up too much room', or even weighs too much.
Tesla is selling a specialty supercar that costs $100,000.
I use it as an example of how to do EVs 'right'. I know they're too expensive right now. Still, $75k is a better figure, not $100k unless you buy the most expensive car they have, and their cheapest is like $60k.
As for superchargers, they're still installing more of them.
Just read the relevant law for that in your jurisdiction :D
Why the hell would the spinning reserves be law? That's an engineering issue, not a legal one.
And please point out in which part of the document you believe you have found a contradiction. I don't see any.
You haven't provided a document for me to find a contradiction in. I provided sources saying that spinning reserve is a thing and that the demand for such is generally acknowledged to increase with solar power.
I doubt that Germany has even a single "spinning reserve" plant in operation. Modern grids don't use that anymore, much to expensive and there are simpler means to have reserve power.
Not a citation, not even a definitive statement. Read the documents. What 'spinning reserve' today amounts to isn't an idling generator, but something like running 5 generators at 80% power rather than 4 at 100%
So: as long as your total installed wind + solar power is not at 100% of the daily demand curve: it makes no sense to store anything. Because you literally have no excess to store. This is basically the reason why in Germany most private roof top solar plants simply feed into the grid. And inhabitants simply draw from the grid.
So why does Fairbanks, AK have their Battery Energy Storage System? To avoid outages, of course.
I would assume that a country like the USA already has enough pumped storage to simply switch to solar and wind. For Germany that certainly is the case.
It's certainly NOT the case in the USA, and more pumped storage is expensive(because of the sheer amount of earth-moving required), so we're looking for alternatives as is.
As for renewables, more storage is practically required as renewables start exceeding about 40% of the supply. We're nowhere near that yet, but it's something to consider. This is seen as necessary because renewables produce on their schedule and are expensive enough that you don't want to throw away that energy. Install enough renewables to cover 100% of a grid's energy needs and the problem is that it won't produce enough POWER for all of a grid's time of demand needs. So you install like 110% of the energy needs, and when production exceeds demand you store, and when demand exceeds production you drain. Simple enough.
In response to the AC that triggered mlts's post, I didn't say one word about having house level generators. I was talking about the power company using the big-ass generators it owns and maintains, that are so huge it takes 15+ minutes to get them fired up from 'cold'. Basically, rather than having a few of them idling, using a fair bit of fuel to produce next to no power(they're most efficient at around 80-90% of capability), you shut them off because you have a humongous UPS providing power until they can be started.
As for maintenance, it's no different than keeping your gasoline lawn mower working, but then, I acknowledge that 'lack of maintenance' is the biggest killer of mowers out there. I've been running the same one for near 20 years, because I maintain it. Which consists of: new oil, air filter, and blade sharpening every year, new blade & spark plug as necessary. Most don't change anything, and thus the mower only lasts ~4 years.
Well, come the next would be disaster, that generator is pulled out... and won't start. The E-10 gasoline in the tank has turned to varnish, the carb is clogged to uselessness, and in some climates, the windings on the armature are corroded, so it can't even get a current in the first place.
Even non-ethanol gasoline will varnish up the carb in that situation. Arguably worse than the ethanol version will. It's more where they simply shove it into the backyard that you get corroded windings, even a car port will normally protect from that.
Or the generator gets maintained and oiled... and the person uses a "widow maker" cord to backfeed the house power, which is not a good thing for people working on the lines when power is out. Some pocos are so tired of this, they will pull an offending house's meter, and not reconnect power until the place puts in a up to code way of allowing for generator power (transfer switch [1], safety breaker interlock [1].)
Not that I excuse idiots, but do you know what generally happens when somebody plugs in such a cord when the main breaker hasn't been popped off? The generator's breaker pops because you're trying to feed the neighborhood.
Though I wonder what the power company would think my milspec manual interlock/transfer switch? - It's a piece of painted sheet metal riveted to the panel such that it will only slide when both the generator and the main breaker are off, and each position only allows ONE of the two to be on. IE to go to generator power I have to flip the main breaker off, slide the piece over(blocking turning main on), then flip the generator switch.
You happen to have a citation on that? Because mine says the opposite.
Power companies maintain spinning reserve even when there isn't any solar/wind power. Fairbanks doesn't have significant amounts of solar or wind power, but they have the BESS irregardless. It enabled them to keep generation facilities at a lower state of readiness while still reducing power outages when a generation source goes off line(such as the inter-tie with Anchorage).
the problem
Your statement implies that there's only 1 problem, which I dispute. When it comes to powering our civilization, there are many interconnected problems.
So which problem isn't being solved? The only one I claimed it would solve is the demand for power during peak periods. To be more specific, one of the problems with renewable energy today is that you need to keep a certain amount of 'spinning reserve' going in case the wind dies off and clouds cover the sun. If batteries become cheap enough, you can turn off the spinning reserve. It's only a small part of a much bigger picture, sure, but that means that it still needs to be addressed.
The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time.
Tesla Supercharging stations. Charging time circles back to the cost of the batteries. I drive two vehicles that are 200 miles(motorcycle) and 300 miles respectively. I don't have a problem with them.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs, and bigger batteries can generally be charged in the same time as a smaller battery, you just use a higher wattage charger. So that helps take care of the charging time issue.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV, that's enough penetration to ensure charging stations all over the place, as well as other technologies to take care of the range issue.
One example would be a small generator trailer that provides about 12kW. A motorcycle engine provides enough power to keep even a heavy EV moving at highway speeds. Optimize it for fuel efficiency...
The cost of the battery packs it is really a second order result because EV production is still too small to get full economies of scale.
I view it as the opposite. Or perhaps it's a negative circle - the high cost of the battery pack limits range, creating range anxiety, limiting sales, which limits the economy of scale for the battery packs, which increases their cost, which means that the manufacturers try to get by with the smallest battery pack they can, etc...
Still, Tesla is reportedly selling every car they can manufacture, which tells me that they don't need 400 miles, 250+ is enough.