That said semi-automatic and automatic rifles and shotguns are outright banned here.
Why? Is it really helping anything?
But yeah, I can understand why handguns are so controlled. I was making more of a comment about the US gun control movement, which seems to concentrate 90% of their efforts on targeting the most popular rifles in the country, which are responsible for less than 5% of firearm murders(not even ALL murders), while not saying much at all about handguns.
They're also notorious about introducing legislation in response to a famous shooting, dedicated to said famous shooting, where if you look at the proposed laws, would have done NOTHING to prevent said shooting. For example, take the 'assault weapon ban' It was championed by an organization that formed in response to an assassination attempt against Reagan that seriously injured James Brady. What was the weapon used in said assassination attempt? A.22 caliber revolver. Not something targeted under the ban at all.
Have you ever sued someone? It costs money, it takes years, and if you might prevail to the tune of a return, the llc just declares bankruptcy, then it takes more money, more time, and in my case, I couldn't stop the bankruptcy.
It also costs them money to defend, thus my comment about 'raising expenses'. Don't forget the sue the CEOs by name. It is explicitly a 'scorched earth' campaign where I wasn't intending to even cover my own expenses, the idea is to raise theirs.
In order to achieve anything like that, everyone would be compelled to have a self-driving car and all current cars would be scrapped. Good luck with getting that to happen in America.
First, give us about 20 years. Average car 'life expectancy' is around 13. After some point people will end up driving their classic cars on tracks, but even without that the autodrive systems they're working on can be on the road with non-AI cars. You just need the 'vast majority'.
Besides that, insisting on alcohol and drug tests is missing 'most' of the problem. 'Only' 35-40% of fatal crashes involved(not necessarily caused by) alcohol, and while I'm sure other drugs contribute as well, I do not believe that they pass the 50% mark. You still have to worry about those driving distracted, tired, old, young, mad, and just bad.
No, the 'fix' isn't drug testing. The 'fix' is to get rid of the driver.
I've yet to see a test of what happens with a self-driving car when it has a tire blow-out at 60 mph. I suspect it won't be pretty. Or what happens when it encounters an accident or incident involving the police.
Is there any reason to believe that they wouldn't assess this and program in the proper, yet counter-intuitive, course of action? As for accident/incident/construction - do you have any idea of how many accidents have been caused by human drivers rubbernecking? The police throw out their lights and such, the car recognizes that something's up, and it does what's necessary. Well, google apparently still has some work to do on getting it's system to recognize and work with cones correctly, but they're working on it.
Then there is the problem of liability. If an SDC hits another - who is responsible?
Assuming it hasn't been improperly modified but has been properly maintained, and wasn't 'set up' like being put on a slick ramp, or caused by 'act of nature' like an earthquake or tsunami, I'd generally point to the manufacturer of the striking SDC. Remember my first criteria for a SDC is 'doesn't hit stuff'. From what I've seen, it looks like they have that pretty well covered, better than humans. The problem they have right now is that they can get 'stuck' where they can't see a safe way out so they don't move. Improper pathing that can get them stuck, etc...
Use the same amount of legal stuff that they do. Sue them anyways, and the parent company. At the very least it'll reduce their precious profit margin, and increase the expense for the company hiring them. Word will get around.
So knives kill more people than assault rifles and assault shotguns combined by a two to one margin.
Worse, actually, with the including of 'assault' in the description. Not all murders by those two categories are by weapons that also meet the 'assault' standard.
However, there are 1684 "undefined gun" homicides in the list. Not sure what is up with that. Never recovered the weapon, so couldn't say for sure?
Probably so. You can normally tell the difference by the wound characteristics between a center-fire rifle shot, shotgun, or handgun. However, a surprising number of people are murdered each year with a.22lr caliber firearm, which besides being the smallest and least powerful caliber(.17HMR is actually more powerful), is commonly chambered in both handguns and rifles. So unless you recover a weapon or have some other evidence, somebody killed with one could have been killed by either a handgun or rifle.
Other than that you still have improvised 'zip guns' out there which don't fit any category well, and probably cases where the police don't want to make the call, for whatever reason.
As Mspangler mentioned, follow your own cite, rereading what I said: ~90% of firearm murders are with a handgun 'bare hands'(in quotes because I'm not being literal, kicking somebody to death still counts) murders outnumber the statistics for rifles and shotguns, at least counted separately. Even adjusted they add up to 'darn close'.
Pulling the statistics from the cite: 8,583 murders with a firearm. 6,899 where the firearm was known. We'll figure that the 'other gun/type not stated' follows the ratio where known. Realistically, the only 'other gun' I can think of that wouldn't be a handgun, rifle, or shotgun would be improvised 'zip guns', which I'd probably count as a handgun anyways. 6,220 handguns. 90.16% 323 rifles 4.68% (Adjusts to 402) 356 shotguns 5.16% (Adjusts to 443)
This is the reason why I've said in the past that I'd respect gun control proponents more if they went after handguns, responsible for the most murders, as opposed to seemingly targeting rifles the most when, outside of unusual years, shotguns are actually responsible for more murders.
What is the obvious technical or economic advantage of not having a human driver?
How about preventing some of the 43k deaths, $164.2B in damages caused by car accidents a year? Give a car enough sensors and the right programming and it shouldn't hit stuff. If it doesn't hit stuff, no damage. Note: I'm not even demanding NO accidents, just reduced. Half the rate or something. I'd expect the car to be excellent in preventing accidents via 'fast twitch' responses, but lousier in avoiding obvious but unusual events (something getting ready to fall onto the highway, for example).
Get it good enough, and now you're increasing the mobility of the disabled who can't currently drive themselves. Not to mention those who don't have a license due to DUI or just being a bad driver. Heck, now I can take a nap or read on the way to/from work. Or that long trip.
Package delivery/pickup doesn't need a dedicated driver. Reduces costs.
Taxis don't need a person anymore, reducing costs, and even your personal vehicle could pick you up at the door while parking in a remote(cheap) lot.
Sometimes you run into problems though: 1. Life changes. People get married and trade in their coupe for a 4 door or even a SUV when they start having kids. However, a home is a much longer term investment. 2. Not being aware - they should be, but many have the blinders on for the purchase of their new home. Like anything, home buying is something experience makes you better at. 3. The character of the HOA itself changing - the old busybody dies or retires, you get a new one that's even more a fussbudget* than the last one, and things that used to 'slide' no longer do. Plus, new bylaws.
Live-streaming of a rifle-scope? That sounds like death-porn. Who's the audience?
My first thought was the justice system. Tasers, for example, log a heck of a lot of information - time and duration of any shocks, when it was fired, etc... Some have proposed 'gun cams' to have a view of exactly what the officer was aiming at.
Second thought was training - here's what went down in situation XYZ - police, hunting, military, whatever.
Last thought(should have been earlier) was military. They already have 'gun cams' in aircraft and many land vehicles. Intelligence agents will go over the footage to help determine whether the target was properly 'serviced'(or if they hit the wrong target), damage levels, estimated repair/restoration times, etc...
Activated sludge isn't mentioned in either article. Ash is. Presumably they have filters such that they get a relatively dry sludge, which they can then indeed burn to ash and produce power.
It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.
Actually, modern aircraft have collision avoidance systems. While Boeing planes tend to default to 'trust the pilot', Airbus's planes will act to avoid collision no matter what the pilot does.
But, yeah, in a city, forget it. When my 'driverless car' starts sliding sideways on ice, I don't want it to suddenly tell me to take over and then blame 'human error' when I crash.
I have the feeling that the standard would be 'I can't handle this, pull over to a safe stop; if you want to continue before conditions improve you do it' rather than just abruptly handing control over to you.
Indeed, it's my understanding that the collision avoidance detectors in many of these new vehicles are always on. So if you fall asleep or whatever it'll hit the brakes before you ram into something.
You're right. Machines see a bunch of random blobs and think it's a bike.
Doesn't really matter. On average you don't want the car to be hitting said blobs, whether it's a bike, sign, people, another vehicle, animal, or random road debris.
Of course, the 'race for the self-driving car' seems to be shaping up to be a bit like the race for the first heavier than air flying vehicle. You ended up with multiple companies working on multiple solutions, and many of them more or less succeeded in a relatively short period of time. In some cases they had to carefully consider time zones to figure out who 'invented' some bit first.
Which would produce enough electricity to "fill" a car or two, per rooftop. That sure does solve everything!
If it's a residential rooftop, then yeah, it does pretty much solve everything. Well, at least the 'How do we charge these EVs?' question. You can already produce enough electricity to power the average home if it has about 50% of it's roof facing south, without using all of the roof.
From another post I did, the average household uses about 11k kWh/year and has 1.9 cars it drives ~15k miles each with.
So you need roughly 20k kWh/year. Figuring on 30% capacity factor, a 300 watt panel should produce around 788 kwh/year. So you'd need 26 panels. Call it 22 square feet per panel, that's 572 square feet of roof needed to cover 100% of the household's needs. Given that the average house size is up to 2.2k square feet, that's 1.1k square feet available even before you consider roof pitch. Of course, lacking something like 'retired to grid use' Tesla EV batteries this would mean that you'd have a massive over-production during the day if 'everybody' did it, so long before it happened the power company would actually start charging more for power produced at night(and paying solar producers less).
Don't forget that all the above depends on solar panels continuing to experience price drops that I think are unsustainable. IE it's not economical for now.
Sorry if you consider basic physics a straw-man. Not much I can do to help you if you insist physical laws of the universe do not matter any,
You're fine to cite physics, but you might want to actually do the math first. It doesn't actually take that much rooftop space to keep a car powered. The problem with solar panels on a car is that you need something like 200 square feet of solar panels placed in a fairly optimized fashion to keep it powered, and a car isn't going to be placed in a 'fairly optimized' position all that often and it just doesn't have that much surface area that's practical to use anyways. Instead you're seeing things like solar rooftops that aren't intended to power the car's movement so much as to counter the drain from all the gadgets.
*Lots of caveats here. I'm only considering 'average' case - average latitude, solar exposure, etc...
average home averages 1KW load --> 24kwh/day. Nissan Leaf (and similar smallish EVs) has a 24kwh battery.
You're missing that the battery isn't going to be empty on average. If the battery is at 50% charge, that's only 12kwh needing to be charged, or another 500 watts of average load. 50% more.
Keep in mind that I said 'median everything' for a reason.
Redoing some work:.3 kwh/mile (leaf/roadster/model S are all about the same - the leaf is lighter but Tesla's inverter and motors are a bit more efficient). 12k miles/year per car 11k kWh/year per household 1.9 vehicles per household(2.58 people) 6,840 kwh, about a 62% increase.
Thanks, I need to update my figures - electricity use has dropped per household(and/or I hit on a study that was looking at higher usage areas more). If you use the alternate 15k average miles per vehicle, that would be 8.5k extra kwh per household per year, or 78%.
No to mention it would give you something like 10 minutes of power for a solar cell mounted on a car!?!No to mention it would give you something like 10 minutes of power for a solar cell mounted on a car!?!
How'd you get the damnfool idea that I was proposing to mount the solar cells on the cars? You put them on building roofs and such where they belong! The idea is that if we start producing more than about 20% of our electrical energy from solar that the balance of generation vs consumption would flip from nighttime being the cheap time for electricity(due to always on powerplants matched with lower nighttime demand), to daytime because you have so many solar panels only producing power during the day, actually outweighing the increases in power demand.
Because what cities are no for is so many open areas where sunlight falls down upon everything
Cities cores don't have the open space. On the other hand, you shouldn't be parking there either. Worst case, import the electricity from the solar panels mounted on roofs out in the suburbs, where they aren't using the power because 'everybody' is at work. If you have a parking lot(other than a multilevel garage), that's a lot of open space you could slap solar panels over and even 'improve' your space because now there's 'improv' car-ports for everyone to keep their fancy electric cars in the shade, not being rained or snowed on.;)
I cannot believe the massive ignorance of reality that goes on around thinking of mass numbers of EV chargers.
Going by your response to me, that's mostly because you construct straw-men and take every statement in the worst way possible. Though re-reading my post, I did screw up - "use 50% more power" should be "use 50% more electricity" - I don't want to imply that the peaks would go up 50%. Using proper load-leveling systems power demand should actually even out a bit.
But it DOES have to have enough power coming into the garage to run through the massive number of power lines you now have all ever, each one of which can expect a high voltage load...
Wiring the garage and running a power line of sufficient size to it are somewhat separate issues, at least in my mind.
Also, I'd say less 'high voltage' and more 'high wattage'.
Not to mention that all of those conduits being attached to the walls means a MASSIVE increase in maintenance to keep the concrete walls from crumbling around every bolt...
There's already plenty of bolts and such in them... As for attaching it, with rigid steel you don't need a lot of bolts. For maintenance that's more the realm of applying the proper epoxy/glue/sealant that might be chemically fancy, but simple to apply.
Is it trivial or not???
I wouldn't call it trivial, no. If the economics support it it'll still get done though. Consider if EV prices come down enough that apartment dwellers want them. Suddenly an electric charging port becomes a selling point for them, much like wireless in hotels. They'll install them just to get (better) business.
You have to be even more dim to not understand how MANY would have to be added to serve a world with only electric cars.
Let's say that 2016 is the 'year of the electric' because they manage to figure out a battery that acts like LiIon but holds 10x the charge, using sodium chloride and carbon, so it's also 10x cheaper.;)
However, cars today are living to 13 on average. Even with such a cheaper battery, it would normally only make sense to upgrade to EV when you're looking for a new car anyways.
Tesla managed to build enough supercharger stations to cover all the major highways in about 3 years, and it's still a relatively small company.
I'm not going to deny that in such a scenario that the electricians wouldn't be busy, but you'd only have to build around 10% of the capacity necessary a year.
Also, I figure you'll still sell quite a few gasoline vehicles, as the price per gallon drops through the floor as demand decreases. They'll still be useful in many locations. Though in my scenario the electric vehicles would actually have more range than gasoline. Without the extra energy gasoline vehicles might be a common rental/road warrior/rural/remote/field item.
I think you'll see a LOT of hybrids before you see any sort of wholesale change to pure electrics. In some locations (remote and cold especially) I don't see internal combustion going away anytime soon.
Perhaps. Up here in Alaska I actually proposed installing a small hydrocarbon burner to provide the heat necessary as opposed to burning it in an engine. Even up here 'most' of the heat goes out the tailpipe and such. A gallon or two of 'something' burned intentionally for heat would still be a lot less energy wasted. Plus, faster heat!
Expanding the electrical grid feeder for a residential block where the block energy use goes up 10x? then this happens throughout a city? extraordinarily expensive and difficult.
Wouldn't be 10X, at least in most use cases. I once figured it out - at 100% penetration, using median cases for power usage, miles driven, miles per kwh, cars per household, etc... The average household would use 50% more power if all their vehicles were electric.
Figure that the high 3 figure into 4 figure chargers are capable of standard time of use/load moderation signals, they'll even start charging at like 11pm when the grid is at it's lowest ebb anyways.
Though if solar power keeps taking off, it's possible that charging during the day(like at work) will become the new thing.
Look inside a parking garage sometime and think of how "trivial" it would be to route power to every spot, when all that exists currently (ha!) is wiring built to support a handful of lights.
That sounds like a job for exterior grade conduit. It's a parking garage, it doesn't have to be pretty.
I'm not going to say that it'd be cheap, but it'd be a fairly straight forward job. Expense would depend on how many garages they're doing, whether they want rigid steel conduit or are willing to go with flexible and/or plastic stuff. My thought is rigid steel.
As for parking meters - mechanical is legacy. Solar is because the power demands are trivial enough that solar is just plain cheaper than running wires.
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That said semi-automatic and automatic rifles and shotguns are outright banned here.
Why? Is it really helping anything?
But yeah, I can understand why handguns are so controlled. I was making more of a comment about the US gun control movement, which seems to concentrate 90% of their efforts on targeting the most popular rifles in the country, which are responsible for less than 5% of firearm murders(not even ALL murders), while not saying much at all about handguns.
They're also notorious about introducing legislation in response to a famous shooting, dedicated to said famous shooting, where if you look at the proposed laws, would have done NOTHING to prevent said shooting. For example, take the 'assault weapon ban' It was championed by an organization that formed in response to an assassination attempt against Reagan that seriously injured James Brady. What was the weapon used in said assassination attempt? A .22 caliber revolver. Not something targeted under the ban at all.
Have you ever sued someone? It costs money, it takes years, and if you might prevail to the tune of a return, the llc just declares bankruptcy, then it takes more money, more time, and in my case, I couldn't stop the bankruptcy.
It also costs them money to defend, thus my comment about 'raising expenses'. Don't forget the sue the CEOs by name. It is explicitly a 'scorched earth' campaign where I wasn't intending to even cover my own expenses, the idea is to raise theirs.
In order to achieve anything like that, everyone would be compelled to have a self-driving car and all current cars would be scrapped. Good luck with getting that to happen in America.
First, give us about 20 years. Average car 'life expectancy' is around 13. After some point people will end up driving their classic cars on tracks, but even without that the autodrive systems they're working on can be on the road with non-AI cars. You just need the 'vast majority'.
Besides that, insisting on alcohol and drug tests is missing 'most' of the problem. 'Only' 35-40% of fatal crashes involved(not necessarily caused by) alcohol, and while I'm sure other drugs contribute as well, I do not believe that they pass the 50% mark. You still have to worry about those driving distracted, tired, old, young, mad, and just bad.
No, the 'fix' isn't drug testing. The 'fix' is to get rid of the driver.
I've yet to see a test of what happens with a self-driving car when it has a tire blow-out at 60 mph. I suspect it won't be pretty. Or what happens when it encounters an accident or incident involving the police.
Is there any reason to believe that they wouldn't assess this and program in the proper, yet counter-intuitive, course of action? As for accident/incident/construction - do you have any idea of how many accidents have been caused by human drivers rubbernecking? The police throw out their lights and such, the car recognizes that something's up, and it does what's necessary. Well, google apparently still has some work to do on getting it's system to recognize and work with cones correctly, but they're working on it.
Then there is the problem of liability. If an SDC hits another - who is responsible?
Assuming it hasn't been improperly modified but has been properly maintained, and wasn't 'set up' like being put on a slick ramp, or caused by 'act of nature' like an earthquake or tsunami, I'd generally point to the manufacturer of the striking SDC. Remember my first criteria for a SDC is 'doesn't hit stuff'. From what I've seen, it looks like they have that pretty well covered, better than humans. The problem they have right now is that they can get 'stuck' where they can't see a safe way out so they don't move. Improper pathing that can get them stuck, etc...
Use the same amount of legal stuff that they do. Sue them anyways, and the parent company. At the very least it'll reduce their precious profit margin, and increase the expense for the company hiring them. Word will get around.
So knives kill more people than assault rifles and assault shotguns combined by a two to one margin.
Worse, actually, with the including of 'assault' in the description. Not all murders by those two categories are by weapons that also meet the 'assault' standard.
However, there are 1684 "undefined gun" homicides in the list. Not sure what is up with that. Never recovered the weapon, so couldn't say for sure?
Probably so. You can normally tell the difference by the wound characteristics between a center-fire rifle shot, shotgun, or handgun. However, a surprising number of people are murdered each year with a .22lr caliber firearm, which besides being the smallest and least powerful caliber(.17HMR is actually more powerful), is commonly chambered in both handguns and rifles. So unless you recover a weapon or have some other evidence, somebody killed with one could have been killed by either a handgun or rifle.
Other than that you still have improvised 'zip guns' out there which don't fit any category well, and probably cases where the police don't want to make the call, for whatever reason.
As Mspangler mentioned, follow your own cite, rereading what I said:
~90% of firearm murders are with a handgun
'bare hands'(in quotes because I'm not being literal, kicking somebody to death still counts) murders outnumber the statistics for rifles and shotguns, at least counted separately. Even adjusted they add up to 'darn close'.
Pulling the statistics from the cite:
8,583 murders with a firearm.
6,899 where the firearm was known. We'll figure that the 'other gun/type not stated' follows the ratio where known. Realistically, the only 'other gun' I can think of that wouldn't be a handgun, rifle, or shotgun would be improvised 'zip guns', which I'd probably count as a handgun anyways.
6,220 handguns. 90.16%
323 rifles 4.68% (Adjusts to 402)
356 shotguns 5.16% (Adjusts to 443)
This is the reason why I've said in the past that I'd respect gun control proponents more if they went after handguns, responsible for the most murders, as opposed to seemingly targeting rifles the most when, outside of unusual years, shotguns are actually responsible for more murders.
What is the obvious technical or economic advantage of not having a human driver?
How about preventing some of the 43k deaths, $164.2B in damages caused by car accidents a year? Give a car enough sensors and the right programming and it shouldn't hit stuff. If it doesn't hit stuff, no damage. Note: I'm not even demanding NO accidents, just reduced. Half the rate or something. I'd expect the car to be excellent in preventing accidents via 'fast twitch' responses, but lousier in avoiding obvious but unusual events (something getting ready to fall onto the highway, for example).
Get it good enough, and now you're increasing the mobility of the disabled who can't currently drive themselves. Not to mention those who don't have a license due to DUI or just being a bad driver. Heck, now I can take a nap or read on the way to/from work. Or that long trip.
Package delivery/pickup doesn't need a dedicated driver. Reduces costs.
Taxis don't need a person anymore, reducing costs, and even your personal vehicle could pick you up at the door while parking in a remote(cheap) lot.
Sometimes you run into problems though:
1. Life changes. People get married and trade in their coupe for a 4 door or even a SUV when they start having kids. However, a home is a much longer term investment.
2. Not being aware - they should be, but many have the blinders on for the purchase of their new home. Like anything, home buying is something experience makes you better at.
3. The character of the HOA itself changing - the old busybody dies or retires, you get a new one that's even more a fussbudget* than the last one, and things that used to 'slide' no longer do. Plus, new bylaws.
*There's my word of the day!
Realistically the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with cheap "throw-away" handguns.
Roughly 90% of firearm murders. More people are killed by 'bare hands' than by rifles or shotguns.
Live-streaming of a rifle-scope? That sounds like death-porn. Who's the audience?
My first thought was the justice system. Tasers, for example, log a heck of a lot of information - time and duration of any shocks, when it was fired, etc... Some have proposed 'gun cams' to have a view of exactly what the officer was aiming at.
Second thought was training - here's what went down in situation XYZ - police, hunting, military, whatever.
Last thought(should have been earlier) was military. They already have 'gun cams' in aircraft and many land vehicles. Intelligence agents will go over the footage to help determine whether the target was properly 'serviced'(or if they hit the wrong target), damage levels, estimated repair/restoration times, etc...
Activated sludge isn't mentioned in either article. Ash is. Presumably they have filters such that they get a relatively dry sludge, which they can then indeed burn to ash and produce power.
It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.
Actually, modern aircraft have collision avoidance systems. While Boeing planes tend to default to 'trust the pilot', Airbus's planes will act to avoid collision no matter what the pilot does.
But, yeah, in a city, forget it. When my 'driverless car' starts sliding sideways on ice, I don't want it to suddenly tell me to take over and then blame 'human error' when I crash.
I have the feeling that the standard would be 'I can't handle this, pull over to a safe stop; if you want to continue before conditions improve you do it' rather than just abruptly handing control over to you.
Indeed, it's my understanding that the collision avoidance detectors in many of these new vehicles are always on. So if you fall asleep or whatever it'll hit the brakes before you ram into something.
You're right. Machines see a bunch of random blobs and think it's a bike.
Doesn't really matter. On average you don't want the car to be hitting said blobs, whether it's a bike, sign, people, another vehicle, animal, or random road debris.
Of course, the 'race for the self-driving car' seems to be shaping up to be a bit like the race for the first heavier than air flying vehicle. You ended up with multiple companies working on multiple solutions, and many of them more or less succeeded in a relatively short period of time. In some cases they had to carefully consider time zones to figure out who 'invented' some bit first.
Which would produce enough electricity to "fill" a car or two, per rooftop. That sure does solve everything!
If it's a residential rooftop, then yeah, it does pretty much solve everything. Well, at least the 'How do we charge these EVs?' question. You can already produce enough electricity to power the average home if it has about 50% of it's roof facing south, without using all of the roof.
From another post I did, the average household uses about 11k kWh/year and has 1.9 cars it drives ~15k miles each with.
So you need roughly 20k kWh/year. Figuring on 30% capacity factor, a 300 watt panel should produce around 788 kwh/year. So you'd need 26 panels. Call it 22 square feet per panel, that's 572 square feet of roof needed to cover 100% of the household's needs. Given that the average house size is up to 2.2k square feet, that's 1.1k square feet available even before you consider roof pitch.
Of course, lacking something like 'retired to grid use' Tesla EV batteries this would mean that you'd have a massive over-production during the day if 'everybody' did it, so long before it happened the power company would actually start charging more for power produced at night(and paying solar producers less).
Don't forget that all the above depends on solar panels continuing to experience price drops that I think are unsustainable. IE it's not economical for now.
Sorry if you consider basic physics a straw-man. Not much I can do to help you if you insist physical laws of the universe do not matter any,
You're fine to cite physics, but you might want to actually do the math first. It doesn't actually take that much rooftop space to keep a car powered. The problem with solar panels on a car is that you need something like 200 square feet of solar panels placed in a fairly optimized fashion to keep it powered, and a car isn't going to be placed in a 'fairly optimized' position all that often and it just doesn't have that much surface area that's practical to use anyways. Instead you're seeing things like solar rooftops that aren't intended to power the car's movement so much as to counter the drain from all the gadgets.
*Lots of caveats here. I'm only considering 'average' case - average latitude, solar exposure, etc...
I think you over-estimate the value of it. Finding an empty house isn't hard. I'd be more worried about stalkers and such.
average home averages 1KW load --> 24kwh/day. Nissan Leaf (and similar smallish EVs) has a 24kwh battery.
You're missing that the battery isn't going to be empty on average. If the battery is at 50% charge, that's only 12kwh needing to be charged, or another 500 watts of average load. 50% more.
Keep in mind that I said 'median everything' for a reason.
Redoing some work: .3 kwh/mile (leaf/roadster/model S are all about the same - the leaf is lighter but Tesla's inverter and motors are a bit more efficient).
12k miles/year per car
11k kWh/year per household
1.9 vehicles per household(2.58 people)
6,840 kwh, about a 62% increase.
Thanks, I need to update my figures - electricity use has dropped per household(and/or I hit on a study that was looking at higher usage areas more). If you use the alternate 15k average miles per vehicle, that would be 8.5k extra kwh per household per year, or 78%.
No to mention it would give you something like 10 minutes of power for a solar cell mounted on a car!?!No to mention it would give you something like 10 minutes of power for a solar cell mounted on a car!?!
How'd you get the damnfool idea that I was proposing to mount the solar cells on the cars? You put them on building roofs and such where they belong! The idea is that if we start producing more than about 20% of our electrical energy from solar that the balance of generation vs consumption would flip from nighttime being the cheap time for electricity(due to always on powerplants matched with lower nighttime demand), to daytime because you have so many solar panels only producing power during the day, actually outweighing the increases in power demand.
Because what cities are no for is so many open areas where sunlight falls down upon everything
Cities cores don't have the open space. On the other hand, you shouldn't be parking there either. Worst case, import the electricity from the solar panels mounted on roofs out in the suburbs, where they aren't using the power because 'everybody' is at work. If you have a parking lot(other than a multilevel garage), that's a lot of open space you could slap solar panels over and even 'improve' your space because now there's 'improv' car-ports for everyone to keep their fancy electric cars in the shade, not being rained or snowed on. ;)
I cannot believe the massive ignorance of reality that goes on around thinking of mass numbers of EV chargers.
Going by your response to me, that's mostly because you construct straw-men and take every statement in the worst way possible. Though re-reading my post, I did screw up - "use 50% more power" should be "use 50% more electricity" - I don't want to imply that the peaks would go up 50%. Using proper load-leveling systems power demand should actually even out a bit.
But it DOES have to have enough power coming into the garage to run through the massive number of power lines you now have all ever, each one of which can expect a high voltage load...
Wiring the garage and running a power line of sufficient size to it are somewhat separate issues, at least in my mind.
Also, I'd say less 'high voltage' and more 'high wattage'.
Not to mention that all of those conduits being attached to the walls means a MASSIVE increase in maintenance to keep the concrete walls from crumbling around every bolt...
There's already plenty of bolts and such in them... As for attaching it, with rigid steel you don't need a lot of bolts. For maintenance that's more the realm of applying the proper epoxy/glue/sealant that might be chemically fancy, but simple to apply.
Is it trivial or not???
I wouldn't call it trivial, no. If the economics support it it'll still get done though. Consider if EV prices come down enough that apartment dwellers want them. Suddenly an electric charging port becomes a selling point for them, much like wireless in hotels. They'll install them just to get (better) business.
TBH it doesn't make sense to me but according to !w "The Auto Train had the highest revenue of any long-distance train in the Amtrak system."
You also have all the snowbirds. But just keep in mind that revenue doesn't equal profit if the expenses are higher yet.
You have to be even more dim to not understand how MANY would have to be added to serve a world with only electric cars.
Let's say that 2016 is the 'year of the electric' because they manage to figure out a battery that acts like LiIon but holds 10x the charge, using sodium chloride and carbon, so it's also 10x cheaper. ;)
However, cars today are living to 13 on average. Even with such a cheaper battery, it would normally only make sense to upgrade to EV when you're looking for a new car anyways.
Tesla managed to build enough supercharger stations to cover all the major highways in about 3 years, and it's still a relatively small company.
I'm not going to deny that in such a scenario that the electricians wouldn't be busy, but you'd only have to build around 10% of the capacity necessary a year.
Also, I figure you'll still sell quite a few gasoline vehicles, as the price per gallon drops through the floor as demand decreases. They'll still be useful in many locations. Though in my scenario the electric vehicles would actually have more range than gasoline. Without the extra energy gasoline vehicles might be a common rental/road warrior/rural/remote/field item.
I think you'll see a LOT of hybrids before you see any sort of wholesale change to pure electrics. In some locations (remote and cold especially) I don't see internal combustion going away anytime soon.
Perhaps. Up here in Alaska I actually proposed installing a small hydrocarbon burner to provide the heat necessary as opposed to burning it in an engine. Even up here 'most' of the heat goes out the tailpipe and such. A gallon or two of 'something' burned intentionally for heat would still be a lot less energy wasted. Plus, faster heat!
Expanding the electrical grid feeder for a residential block where the block energy use goes up 10x? then this happens throughout a city? extraordinarily expensive and difficult.
Wouldn't be 10X, at least in most use cases. I once figured it out - at 100% penetration, using median cases for power usage, miles driven, miles per kwh, cars per household, etc... The average household would use 50% more power if all their vehicles were electric.
Figure that the high 3 figure into 4 figure chargers are capable of standard time of use/load moderation signals, they'll even start charging at like 11pm when the grid is at it's lowest ebb anyways.
Though if solar power keeps taking off, it's possible that charging during the day(like at work) will become the new thing.
Look inside a parking garage sometime and think of how "trivial" it would be to route power to every spot, when all that exists currently (ha!) is wiring built to support a handful of lights.
That sounds like a job for exterior grade conduit. It's a parking garage, it doesn't have to be pretty.
I'm not going to say that it'd be cheap, but it'd be a fairly straight forward job. Expense would depend on how many garages they're doing, whether they want rigid steel conduit or are willing to go with flexible and/or plastic stuff. My thought is rigid steel.
As for parking meters - mechanical is legacy. Solar is because the power demands are trivial enough that solar is just plain cheaper than running wires.