When NYPD spends $60,000 while saying it's going to cost more for only 60 cameras there are people involved who WANT it to be as expensive as possible of a deterrent.
As somebody who once worked in government purchasing, $60k for 60 cameras didn't even make me blink at the expense, to the point that I was figuring it's equipment expenses alone, not including labor and such.
Let's start with the camera: $399 One mounted on a pair of glasses: $599 Miscellaneous: Dock hardware (price not listed), a few different mounting options(price not listed), etc...
IT costs, well I figure the NYPD will want to set up it's own solution but the same company offers cloud storage specifically for the video with the necessary bells and whistles for chain of evidence/custody at evidence.com: Starts at $15/month, though I wouldn't see the NYPD going for less than the 'Pro' Package at $39/month per officer(because that includes redaction and agency reports), and it could go as high as $55.
That's $468/year for storage, putting us right at $1k for the glasses and storage** for 1 year, and we don't even have anybody administering the program yet!
I was going to chime in with pretty much the same deal - the NYPD has about 4k more people than Juneau, the capital of Alaska.
On the topic of the IT costs - 60 cameras and associated gear for $60k sounds about right for hardware cost alone. IT costs, if you're counting labor it's going to cost more than that to obtain a person with a background in security video and preferably justice in the first quarter alone. Then you start looking at storing all the video...
Given the task, I'd probably go with the netflix solution - lots of hard drives. Speed isn't really required since the video will only be pulled up if there's a question, and any video pulled up is more likely to be viewed again, so if the main array starts getting too slow, put a caching SSD in as necessary. There's going to be just too much video to justify SSD storage. Heck, off-line tapes would be an eventual step if the program expands.
On the topic of the CAMERAS. From various places such as Canada deploying them, I've heard that rates of both assault of police officers AND allegations of police misconduct, verified and unverified both dropped with the introduction of the cameras. To me at least, it seems that people tend to 'be on their best behavior' when they know they're being recorded. It's just that to keep the 'bad' cops* from turning them off or such you need to regularly review the records and punish improper shut downs and/or abuse of the equipment. Get it to the point that 'turned off the camera' counts less as lack of evidence and more evidence that you concealed/destroyed evidence.
There USED to be a good reason for many of them. Then they started being used to cull competition, raise prices and barriers to entry for no other reason than to make more money. This is why Taxi Medallions in certain cities are worth MILLIONS.
Good points. Let's look at Taxi Medallions. Now, when they were originally implemented the idea was that there were too many taxis on the roads clogging things up. So let's restrict the number, move more people to public transit. Except that the cities keep expanding and issuing NEW medallions becomes extremely hard because you have these hugely wealthy taxi companies that hold most of the medallions that realize that every new medallion issued reduces the value of their existing ones.
In NYC at least as a result you have 'livery services' which are essentially taxis that aren't allowed to stop for 'flags' on the street. IE you call one up, negotiate a price over the phone(or internet) and the car will come pick you up at a designated time and drop you off. There are additional complexities involving airports, of course.
By the same token, for the longest time the only vehicle that was considered 'suitable' for a NYC cab was a special stretch Crown Vic, apparently under concerns about leg space that assumed both the driver and passengers were all NBA athletes.
As is, new 'taxicab of the future', a Nissan NV200, has some issues because it's not handicapped accessible.
Personally, I think it'd be cheaper to simply subsidize a number of cars to have the ability and use them on a call out basis so they're no more expensive than taxis. Same with apartments, really. Requiring 100% of apartments be wheelchair accessible is more expensive than simply giving the population in wheelchairs free handicapped apartments.
You know, I think it's true that Europe had a much higher rate of fraud, which convinced them to move to chip&pin sooner.
Yes, I've heard that they're working to move to chip&pin, my bank sent out a notice that they're working on it. When I get closer to the expiration of my card I might call them up and ask to be moved over as I actually travel internationally occasionally and it'd be nice to be able to use my card in European stores.
By operating a high capacity full-time, "base lead" plants are shoving the problem of variability onto other generators and making the swings much worse for them.
Perhaps, but they impose half the problem that wind does, because wind is pretty much variable by design. Outside of emergencies, you can time a base load power plant's outages so that it's up and at full power when the demand is peaking. You can't even count on that for wind/solar. Ergo the ratio of backup you need in case production drops is much higher, costing money. Whether the backup is natural gas, battery systems charged during lulls, etc... You need more backup. Of course, I'm serviced by the largest NiCd battery in the world...
Most base load power plants don't operate at 100% all the time just because they have to, it's because they have the cheapest marginal cost per kwh, so it makes sense to use them to produce as much power as you can. After that you start running into economic decisions often made decades ago - IE they 'knew' it was always going to be a base load plant, so they designed it to be a base load plant, giving it very limited load following capabilities.
One thing to remember is that in most cases base load plants are owned and operated by their associated electric company, so the electric company itself manages the mix of baseload, peaking, and storage systems. It's not quite the case with renewable systems, with lots of small operators and even for the big dedicated systems the power company typically owns only about half of them itself.
Of course, I didn't say 20% hydro, did I? I said 20% 'other, including hydro'. As in a subset of the 20%, meaning less than 20%. The other category would be a grab-bag of stuff including hydro, biomass, geothermal, tidal, etc...
I'm well aware that hydro in the USA is effectively maxed. New dam construction barely keeps up with demolishing badly placed old ones and increasing efficiency through upgrading existing ones such as installing new turbines can only do so much.
If I don't list hydro, people complain. I list it people complain. I can't win, can I?
I remember reading that it turns out that preying mantis females don't actually eat their mate all that often in the wild, it's just that all the observations were of caged mantises, where due to the stress of being caged the females ate their mates a lot more frequently.
I'm actually a bit surprised that no one ever talks about using grid-connected electric cars as distributed storage.
Well, I talk about using their old batteries as grid storage, does that count? I've looked at using the batteries while they're still in the car, but right now I figure that they're better off using EV charging to help match demand with production, but not actually 'run things in reverse' outside of using the car as a big UPS in specific scenarios, where they're using it in an outright outage, not merely to help level the load.
My reasoning is that people are generally going to be more range conscious, they want that 10-20% to be able to drive further/elsewhere. If they really don't need that 10%, the car company is better off putting in a smaller battery and charging a touch less.
Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.
1. Gas turbine designs for wind power exist, but are currently not 'mainstream', ergo more expensive and less efficient per watt produced. You're looking at a 10-15% drop in joules produced per year* for a given turbine size.
2. In order for them to have an effective amount of 'battery' you need some sort of air storage facility. There are underground formations that are ideal for this, but those are often used to store other things and thus, selection is limited. Just building a giant pressure vessel is possible, but currently too expensive.
As for your vision of the future, I can see it happening in Hawaii 'fairly quickly'. Many of their substations have already passed 'Minimum daily load' for solar capacity, which is the point at which you have to start accounting for power actually flowing FROM substations(IE neighborhoods) to the rest of the grid.
As a note, I really like the idea of electric cars. When I did the math using all averages, I figured out that the average family would use about 50% more electricity if they switched completely from fossil fueled vehicles to electric ones. Everybody's actual result would vary, of course. Unless you happen to own 2.2 cars in your house of 2 adults with 2.5 children and drive precisely 15k miles per car every year.;)
But anyways, in a 'Solar wins bigtime!' scenario I'd actually see daytime power being cheaper than nighttime, and if you have a parallel of EVs win as well, that means that charging during the day at work would be the 'in' thing. At which point, if you start replacing EV batteries that reach 70% of original capacity in order to maintain range & efficiency, you have a bunch of 70% batteries available for relatively cheap. Delay recycling them for about a decade, put them to use providing grid storage. Given that 1 Model S battery at 50%** provides the average family with about 1 days storage, it should be plenty given that the average family has 2.2 cars.
*I use this metric because you're really looking at average power produced, which will vary widely at any given period of time. **To account for even more aging!
First, it'd be nice if you included a link to the Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station, rather than just reference it. Heck, with a dam breakage in 2005 that took it out of operation until 2010, it seems that catastrophic failure is still a possible problem. The 2005 failure luckily didn't kill anybody, but it did sweep one home aside and injure 5.
Hopefully modern engineering combined with using 'rollar compacted concrete', which is a modern version of 'Roman Concrete' for those of you out there that like that, sharing many of the traditional benefits of lower erosion.
Second, Reading about it, while it's not actually located on the Taum Sauk mountain, it is built on top of a mountain, thus 'specific geography' is still required, even if like most things we can do without if we're willing to spend the money an resources on major earth moving projects.
Third, a citation on 90% would be appreciated, what I found with the Taum Sauk is that it was upgraded to 71% in 2005, which would put as an 'under performing' station even in 2005. Wiki lists 70-80%, with the highest reported being 87%. Which makes sense, breaking 90% efficiency in either pumping or generation is difficult. 2 90% efficient steps(pump up and generate down) and a little bit of water loss from the reservoir adds up to 80% efficient.
Free storage: What he was more talking about is that at lower levels it's hard to distinguish demand reduced by said renewables and regular power demand swings, IE well within the peaking capabilities of regular power. Due to most home use renewables being on a 'net metering' plan, the end result is that they sell power during the day when electricity is expensive and buy some power at night when it's cheap, so people tend to refer to it as banking/storing it.
California is poised to have 33% renewables by 2020, and they don't need additional storage. (There's an order for ~1.5 GW of storage to be procured, but it's not needed -- it's CA's way of pushing progress forward, seeing that eventually storage will be a less expensive resource (LCOE) than CTs.)
Citation on this?
As for 'why' they should pay for the storage, it's because they're seen as introducing the problem. Nuclear and coal at least operate all the time, and nobody is building another baseload plant that would exceed the demand limit. Other power generating sources are at least on demand and/or peak-following. It's wind and to a lesser extent solar(which at least produces power during the day when demand is much higher) that isn't nice enough to be 'on demand' yet expensive enough that they really need to sell every joule they produce in order to break even.
Personally, I think that used EV batteries might be a valuable source of grid storage - roughly 90% efficiency, and should be cheap to obtain.
Part of the problem with using reactors for load-following is that all the reactors in the USA are very old Gen-II designs, you need to be at least 'newer' Gen-II to do a lot of load following, and we don't have enough nuclear for them to NEED to load-follow, leaving them as the cheapest margin for on-demand power.
If we went from our current mix of about 20% nuclear, 40% coal, to a carbon-neutral mix of 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other, including hydro', you'd have most of your peaking power in 'other', but nuclear power would still have to adjust for peaking.
That's Lamarkian evolution. Not quite true(there are some weird things that do work that way).
That would only be true if the offspring of the animal inherited the bigger muscles and such as well. Instead, outside of mutations and such, the offspring will have to develop the muscles the same way it's parents did - through stressing them via work.
We see some level of this even with humans - a human who grows up lifting heavy objects will develop more muscles for doing so, and one that experiences regular bone stress will develop stronger bones in those areas.
I agree that they were exposed to it in the past, probably on a regular basis. There's a reason these fish are air breathers. The ability to move between various shallow ponds really raises the habitat areas for mudskippers, for example.
You think with the popularity of programs like Top Gear that there won't be millions around who still prefer to drive their own cars?
I think that sooner or later they'd be restricted to the track for their self-driving desires(and I don't think motorsports will go away that soon) due to insurance costs.
If self driving cars are shown to reduce accidents by 90%, that's roughly a 90% reduction in insurance expenses, which can amount to a couple thousand a year pretty quick. In short, even if a self driving car is $10k more expensive, if it saves you $1500 or more a year in insurance costs, discounting any savings from improved fuel economy or time recovered, it's worth it.
Now consider who has the highest insurance costs - people with DUIs - I can see drunk drivers being forced into self-driving vehicles very quickly, without manual overrides. People with bad driving records. Young/New Drivers.
Then you get the exact same thing as you did with automatic transmissions. Once you start putting those that would be driving in automated cars rather than making them actually do the driving, they'll tend to stick with self driving cars. Then it'll expand to the point that finding a vehicle with manual controls is about as easy as finding a vehicle in the USA with a manual transmission.
You're thinking about flying drones, not driverless cars. Depending on the drone it pretty much varies between the remote operator actually flying it all the way down to simply programming a flight path that the drone then uses to take off, fly, and land without further intervention. Most military drones do have plenty of intervention, but again, that can range from taking over and 'flying' to simply adjusting waypoints.
California is playing it safe. It will take a while for us to trust the software enough to remove the steering wheel.
Perhaps sad, but my first thought was 'What about all the DUI revenue?' If you remove the steering wheel and associated equipment and simply put a big emergency stop button around where the hazard switch is now, you can get into expensive court battles about 'actual control' and all that. Going by various court cases, people have gotten out of DUIs when they proved they were sleeping in or around a vehicle that was, in fact, disabled and unable to move without repair.
I'll note that the case I remember there was no proof that the guy drove. He drove to the convenience store, bought his alcohol, then was unable to get the vehicle restarted(reason unstated in the article). He then pretty much said 'screw it' and started drinking. Offers responded and they were also unable to start the vehicle, but charged him with dui anyways. He won.
Because transient residents are not intimately familiar with the fire escapes and layout of the building.
I mentioned that... 'less so for short term dwellings'. Also, low level exit signs are good no matter what - even residents can get turned around in thick smoke.
Mandating fire codes that are less stringent for permanent lodging, where people are more often cooking than hotel/motel rooms, seems counterproductive.
I.e. The reasoning given for the law was to protect public safety, specifically to ensure compliance with fire and safety codes.
I have to say that my thought on this is 'Why?'. Why is the fire code stricter for a hotel than an apartment? I can see it if the density is higher - More people packed into a smaller space means that without taking extra measures evacuation will take more time. Such measures can mean things to slow fires down like sprinklers, fire walls and such as well as additional exits, larger hallways and fire escapes to accommodate more people. I can also see more signage - presumably everybody in an apartment complex will have a good idea about all the exits, less so for short term dwellings.
I understand, though do you mean double the average ONE WAY, or both ways? Also, I'd consider double my commute the 'minimum safety factor'. IE it gives me margin for battery wear and the opportunity to alter my route if necessary. I'd hate to be unable to make it home because road construction sent me out of my way.
Also, you haven't lived where I do if you consider a ~60 miles max drive to your friend's to be 'long'. Longer than anything else, certainly.
True on absolute terms, but NOT true in the actual day to day commute/usage of the majority of the U.S. population. Even the lowest range electric cars can go over 2x the average commute... and people can charge overnight at home or some at work, as you mention.
True, but if you limit yourself to the 'average' commute your range is going to be too short for half of commuters, never mind if they need to divert somewhere without charge opportunity.
Are you driving a pure EV or a strong hybrid? I'm thinking a leaf?
Personally, I wish people the best of luck with the vehicle they choose, I just note that the longer the range of the EV, the wider it's potential customer base.
Please note that I said 'notably', not 'vastly' or 'slightly'. Model S: 4647 pounds with the 85kwh battery. 2014 Mercedes E350: 4100-4350 BMW 5 series: 3737 - 3825
I'd say that ~600 pounds heavier, on average, is 'notable'.
Of course, the Model S went very far into lightening the car other than the battery.
With the ability to start 'from the ground up', the model S relocates the battery from a box in the rear to more of a flat sheet covering most of the undercarriage. They couldn't do this with the Roadster's Elise frame because it wasn't designed for it.
This change evens out the weight distribution and helps with stability, to the point that in rollover tests they had to resort to 'extreme measures' to flip the test car. Well duh, obviously it's not going to want to flip when approximately half the weight is UNDER the axles! Model S totals 4,647 pounds: 1323 lbs - Battery 350 - Motor/Inverter(per diagram it's under the axle height as well)
It's a friggin inconvenience to park at a gas station when you're car is outta juice, and they have to have an enterntainment park next to every one of them to keep you busy while you wait the "superfast" recharce of 30 minutes.
Why? Gas stations are isolated for a very good reason - the fuel is volatile of not treated with respect. We have doing it right down to an art, but it's still an aspect.
To bring it back to Rei's point: Why are you attacking the slow charge time of an EV as though you HAVE to go to a fueling station to recharge it when you can charge at home? In some cases you can even charge at work!
Battery Swap: It hasn't gone anywhere because California changed up it's rules again, but Tesla built a system to do it. Look up 'core charge'.
Limited Range: I'll admit that the Model S is currently the only vehicle to compete with gasoline for range, but you disregard the higher efficiency of electric motors granting you a lot more range for a unit of energy, as well as the ability to charge anywhere there's an electric drop. Entertainment park? All you need is a sit down restaurant.
I don't think liquid ammonia is the 'fuel of the future' because unlike gasoline or lithium, there's a good chance of it killing you with any tank breakage.
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When NYPD spends $60,000 while saying it's going to cost more for only 60 cameras there are people involved who WANT it to be as expensive as possible of a deterrent.
As somebody who once worked in government purchasing, $60k for 60 cameras didn't even make me blink at the expense, to the point that I was figuring it's equipment expenses alone, not including labor and such.
Let's start with the camera: $399
One mounted on a pair of glasses: $599
Miscellaneous:
Dock hardware (price not listed), a few different mounting options(price not listed), etc...
IT costs, well I figure the NYPD will want to set up it's own solution but the same company offers cloud storage specifically for the video with the necessary bells and whistles for chain of evidence/custody at evidence.com: Starts at $15/month, though I wouldn't see the NYPD going for less than the 'Pro' Package at $39/month per officer(because that includes redaction and agency reports), and it could go as high as $55.
That's $468/year for storage, putting us right at $1k for the glasses and storage** for 1 year, and we don't even have anybody administering the program yet!
I was going to chime in with pretty much the same deal - the NYPD has about 4k more people than Juneau, the capital of Alaska.
On the topic of the IT costs - 60 cameras and associated gear for $60k sounds about right for hardware cost alone. IT costs, if you're counting labor it's going to cost more than that to obtain a person with a background in security video and preferably justice in the first quarter alone. Then you start looking at storing all the video...
Given the task, I'd probably go with the netflix solution - lots of hard drives. Speed isn't really required since the video will only be pulled up if there's a question, and any video pulled up is more likely to be viewed again, so if the main array starts getting too slow, put a caching SSD in as necessary. There's going to be just too much video to justify SSD storage. Heck, off-line tapes would be an eventual step if the program expands.
On the topic of the CAMERAS. From various places such as Canada deploying them, I've heard that rates of both assault of police officers AND allegations of police misconduct, verified and unverified both dropped with the introduction of the cameras. To me at least, it seems that people tend to 'be on their best behavior' when they know they're being recorded. It's just that to keep the 'bad' cops* from turning them off or such you need to regularly review the records and punish improper shut downs and/or abuse of the equipment. Get it to the point that 'turned off the camera' counts less as lack of evidence and more evidence that you concealed/destroyed evidence.
*Many of whom I think belong in prison.
There USED to be a good reason for many of them. Then they started being used to cull competition, raise prices and barriers to entry for no other reason than to make more money. This is why Taxi Medallions in certain cities are worth MILLIONS.
Good points. Let's look at Taxi Medallions. Now, when they were originally implemented the idea was that there were too many taxis on the roads clogging things up. So let's restrict the number, move more people to public transit. Except that the cities keep expanding and issuing NEW medallions becomes extremely hard because you have these hugely wealthy taxi companies that hold most of the medallions that realize that every new medallion issued reduces the value of their existing ones.
In NYC at least as a result you have 'livery services' which are essentially taxis that aren't allowed to stop for 'flags' on the street. IE you call one up, negotiate a price over the phone(or internet) and the car will come pick you up at a designated time and drop you off. There are additional complexities involving airports, of course.
By the same token, for the longest time the only vehicle that was considered 'suitable' for a NYC cab was a special stretch Crown Vic, apparently under concerns about leg space that assumed both the driver and passengers were all NBA athletes.
As is, new 'taxicab of the future', a Nissan NV200, has some issues because it's not handicapped accessible.
Personally, I think it'd be cheaper to simply subsidize a number of cars to have the ability and use them on a call out basis so they're no more expensive than taxis. Same with apartments, really. Requiring 100% of apartments be wheelchair accessible is more expensive than simply giving the population in wheelchairs free handicapped apartments.
You know, I think it's true that Europe had a much higher rate of fraud, which convinced them to move to chip&pin sooner.
Yes, I've heard that they're working to move to chip&pin, my bank sent out a notice that they're working on it. When I get closer to the expiration of my card I might call them up and ask to be moved over as I actually travel internationally occasionally and it'd be nice to be able to use my card in European stores.
By operating a high capacity full-time, "base lead" plants are shoving the problem of variability onto other generators and making the swings much worse for them.
Perhaps, but they impose half the problem that wind does, because wind is pretty much variable by design. Outside of emergencies, you can time a base load power plant's outages so that it's up and at full power when the demand is peaking. You can't even count on that for wind/solar. Ergo the ratio of backup you need in case production drops is much higher, costing money. Whether the backup is natural gas, battery systems charged during lulls, etc... You need more backup. Of course, I'm serviced by the largest NiCd battery in the world...
Most base load power plants don't operate at 100% all the time just because they have to, it's because they have the cheapest marginal cost per kwh, so it makes sense to use them to produce as much power as you can. After that you start running into economic decisions often made decades ago - IE they 'knew' it was always going to be a base load plant, so they designed it to be a base load plant, giving it very limited load following capabilities.
One thing to remember is that in most cases base load plants are owned and operated by their associated electric company, so the electric company itself manages the mix of baseload, peaking, and storage systems. It's not quite the case with renewable systems, with lots of small operators and even for the big dedicated systems the power company typically owns only about half of them itself.
Of course, I didn't say 20% hydro, did I? I said 20% 'other, including hydro'. As in a subset of the 20%, meaning less than 20%. The other category would be a grab-bag of stuff including hydro, biomass, geothermal, tidal, etc...
I'm well aware that hydro in the USA is effectively maxed. New dam construction barely keeps up with demolishing badly placed old ones and increasing efficiency through upgrading existing ones such as installing new turbines can only do so much.
If I don't list hydro, people complain. I list it people complain. I can't win, can I?
I remember reading that it turns out that preying mantis females don't actually eat their mate all that often in the wild, it's just that all the observations were of caged mantises, where due to the stress of being caged the females ate their mates a lot more frequently.
I'm actually a bit surprised that no one ever talks about using grid-connected electric cars as distributed storage.
Well, I talk about using their old batteries as grid storage, does that count? I've looked at using the batteries while they're still in the car, but right now I figure that they're better off using EV charging to help match demand with production, but not actually 'run things in reverse' outside of using the car as a big UPS in specific scenarios, where they're using it in an outright outage, not merely to help level the load.
My reasoning is that people are generally going to be more range conscious, they want that 10-20% to be able to drive further/elsewhere. If they really don't need that 10%, the car company is better off putting in a smaller battery and charging a touch less.
Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.
1. Gas turbine designs for wind power exist, but are currently not 'mainstream', ergo more expensive and less efficient per watt produced. You're looking at a 10-15% drop in joules produced per year* for a given turbine size.
2. In order for them to have an effective amount of 'battery' you need some sort of air storage facility. There are underground formations that are ideal for this, but those are often used to store other things and thus, selection is limited. Just building a giant pressure vessel is possible, but currently too expensive.
As for your vision of the future, I can see it happening in Hawaii 'fairly quickly'. Many of their substations have already passed 'Minimum daily load' for solar capacity, which is the point at which you have to start accounting for power actually flowing FROM substations(IE neighborhoods) to the rest of the grid.
As a note, I really like the idea of electric cars. When I did the math using all averages, I figured out that the average family would use about 50% more electricity if they switched completely from fossil fueled vehicles to electric ones. Everybody's actual result would vary, of course. Unless you happen to own 2.2 cars in your house of 2 adults with 2.5 children and drive precisely 15k miles per car every year. ;)
But anyways, in a 'Solar wins bigtime!' scenario I'd actually see daytime power being cheaper than nighttime, and if you have a parallel of EVs win as well, that means that charging during the day at work would be the 'in' thing. At which point, if you start replacing EV batteries that reach 70% of original capacity in order to maintain range & efficiency, you have a bunch of 70% batteries available for relatively cheap. Delay recycling them for about a decade, put them to use providing grid storage. Given that 1 Model S battery at 50%** provides the average family with about 1 days storage, it should be plenty given that the average family has 2.2 cars.
*I use this metric because you're really looking at average power produced, which will vary widely at any given period of time.
**To account for even more aging!
First, it'd be nice if you included a link to the Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station, rather than just reference it. Heck, with a dam breakage in 2005 that took it out of operation until 2010, it seems that catastrophic failure is still a possible problem. The 2005 failure luckily didn't kill anybody, but it did sweep one home aside and injure 5.
Hopefully modern engineering combined with using 'rollar compacted concrete', which is a modern version of 'Roman Concrete' for those of you out there that like that, sharing many of the traditional benefits of lower erosion.
Second, Reading about it, while it's not actually located on the Taum Sauk mountain, it is built on top of a mountain, thus 'specific geography' is still required, even if like most things we can do without if we're willing to spend the money an resources on major earth moving projects.
Third, a citation on 90% would be appreciated, what I found with the Taum Sauk is that it was upgraded to 71% in 2005, which would put as an 'under performing' station even in 2005. Wiki lists 70-80%, with the highest reported being 87%. Which makes sense, breaking 90% efficiency in either pumping or generation is difficult. 2 90% efficient steps(pump up and generate down) and a little bit of water loss from the reservoir adds up to 80% efficient.
Free storage: What he was more talking about is that at lower levels it's hard to distinguish demand reduced by said renewables and regular power demand swings, IE well within the peaking capabilities of regular power. Due to most home use renewables being on a 'net metering' plan, the end result is that they sell power during the day when electricity is expensive and buy some power at night when it's cheap, so people tend to refer to it as banking/storing it.
California is poised to have 33% renewables by 2020, and they don't need additional storage. (There's an order for ~1.5 GW of storage to be procured, but it's not needed -- it's CA's way of pushing progress forward, seeing that eventually storage will be a less expensive resource (LCOE) than CTs.)
Citation on this?
As for 'why' they should pay for the storage, it's because they're seen as introducing the problem. Nuclear and coal at least operate all the time, and nobody is building another baseload plant that would exceed the demand limit. Other power generating sources are at least on demand and/or peak-following. It's wind and to a lesser extent solar(which at least produces power during the day when demand is much higher) that isn't nice enough to be 'on demand' yet expensive enough that they really need to sell every joule they produce in order to break even.
Personally, I think that used EV batteries might be a valuable source of grid storage - roughly 90% efficiency, and should be cheap to obtain.
Because I try not to respond to ACs, I'll stick it in here.
As you pointed out, Nuclear ships DO NOT run their plants at 'full power all the time'.
But even HUGE nuclear plants can be built to be capable of 'load following', going from 100% down to 50% and below on a consistent basis. France has a number of them.
Part of the problem with using reactors for load-following is that all the reactors in the USA are very old Gen-II designs, you need to be at least 'newer' Gen-II to do a lot of load following, and we don't have enough nuclear for them to NEED to load-follow, leaving them as the cheapest margin for on-demand power.
If we went from our current mix of about 20% nuclear, 40% coal, to a carbon-neutral mix of 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other, including hydro', you'd have most of your peaking power in 'other', but nuclear power would still have to adjust for peaking.
That's Lamarkian evolution. Not quite true(there are some weird things that do work that way).
That would only be true if the offspring of the animal inherited the bigger muscles and such as well. Instead, outside of mutations and such, the offspring will have to develop the muscles the same way it's parents did - through stressing them via work.
We see some level of this even with humans - a human who grows up lifting heavy objects will develop more muscles for doing so, and one that experiences regular bone stress will develop stronger bones in those areas.
I agree that they were exposed to it in the past, probably on a regular basis. There's a reason these fish are air breathers. The ability to move between various shallow ponds really raises the habitat areas for mudskippers, for example.
You think with the popularity of programs like Top Gear that there won't be millions around who still prefer to drive their own cars?
I think that sooner or later they'd be restricted to the track for their self-driving desires(and I don't think motorsports will go away that soon) due to insurance costs.
If self driving cars are shown to reduce accidents by 90%, that's roughly a 90% reduction in insurance expenses, which can amount to a couple thousand a year pretty quick. In short, even if a self driving car is $10k more expensive, if it saves you $1500 or more a year in insurance costs, discounting any savings from improved fuel economy or time recovered, it's worth it.
Now consider who has the highest insurance costs - people with DUIs - I can see drunk drivers being forced into self-driving vehicles very quickly, without manual overrides. People with bad driving records. Young/New Drivers.
Then you get the exact same thing as you did with automatic transmissions. Once you start putting those that would be driving in automated cars rather than making them actually do the driving, they'll tend to stick with self driving cars. Then it'll expand to the point that finding a vehicle with manual controls is about as easy as finding a vehicle in the USA with a manual transmission.
You're thinking about flying drones, not driverless cars. Depending on the drone it pretty much varies between the remote operator actually flying it all the way down to simply programming a flight path that the drone then uses to take off, fly, and land without further intervention. Most military drones do have plenty of intervention, but again, that can range from taking over and 'flying' to simply adjusting waypoints.
California is playing it safe. It will take a while for us to trust the software enough to remove the steering wheel.
Perhaps sad, but my first thought was 'What about all the DUI revenue?' If you remove the steering wheel and associated equipment and simply put a big emergency stop button around where the hazard switch is now, you can get into expensive court battles about 'actual control' and all that. Going by various court cases, people have gotten out of DUIs when they proved they were sleeping in or around a vehicle that was, in fact, disabled and unable to move without repair.
I'll note that the case I remember there was no proof that the guy drove. He drove to the convenience store, bought his alcohol, then was unable to get the vehicle restarted(reason unstated in the article). He then pretty much said 'screw it' and started drinking. Offers responded and they were also unable to start the vehicle, but charged him with dui anyways. He won.
Because transient residents are not intimately familiar with the fire escapes and layout of the building.
I mentioned that... 'less so for short term dwellings'. Also, low level exit signs are good no matter what - even residents can get turned around in thick smoke.
Mandating fire codes that are less stringent for permanent lodging, where people are more often cooking than hotel/motel rooms, seems counterproductive.
I.e. The reasoning given for the law was to protect public safety, specifically to ensure compliance with fire and safety codes.
I have to say that my thought on this is 'Why?'. Why is the fire code stricter for a hotel than an apartment? I can see it if the density is higher - More people packed into a smaller space means that without taking extra measures evacuation will take more time. Such measures can mean things to slow fires down like sprinklers, fire walls and such as well as additional exits, larger hallways and fire escapes to accommodate more people. I can also see more signage - presumably everybody in an apartment complex will have a good idea about all the exits, less so for short term dwellings.
they don't get any public funding for smoking disease related heath care.
It's actually cheaper to just pay out the healthcare than to drive it underground.
Checking BMW's web site gives me 4365. Roughly 300 pounds isn't that much at that point, I'll admit, but that's with the heaviest engine.
Actually, I said over double the average commute.
I understand, though do you mean double the average ONE WAY, or both ways? Also, I'd consider double my commute the 'minimum safety factor'. IE it gives me margin for battery wear and the opportunity to alter my route if necessary. I'd hate to be unable to make it home because road construction sent me out of my way.
Also, you haven't lived where I do if you consider a ~60 miles max drive to your friend's to be 'long'. Longer than anything else, certainly.
True on absolute terms, but NOT true in the actual day to day commute/usage of the majority of the U.S. population. Even the lowest range electric cars can go over 2x the average commute... and people can charge overnight at home or some at work, as you mention.
True, but if you limit yourself to the 'average' commute your range is going to be too short for half of commuters, never mind if they need to divert somewhere without charge opportunity.
Are you driving a pure EV or a strong hybrid? I'm thinking a leaf?
Personally, I wish people the best of luck with the vehicle they choose, I just note that the longer the range of the EV, the wider it's potential customer base.
Please note that I said 'notably', not 'vastly' or 'slightly'.
Model S: 4647 pounds with the 85kwh battery.
2014 Mercedes E350: 4100-4350
BMW 5 series: 3737 - 3825
I'd say that ~600 pounds heavier, on average, is 'notable'.
Of course, the Model S went very far into lightening the car other than the battery.
Part of that problem is location of the battery. In a roadster it's essentially in the trunk over the rear axle.
Picture of a Roadster's battery location.
Picture of Model S battery placement.
With the ability to start 'from the ground up', the model S relocates the battery from a box in the rear to more of a flat sheet covering most of the undercarriage. They couldn't do this with the Roadster's Elise frame because it wasn't designed for it.
This change evens out the weight distribution and helps with stability, to the point that in rollover tests they had to resort to 'extreme measures' to flip the test car. Well duh, obviously it's not going to want to flip when approximately half the weight is UNDER the axles!
Model S totals 4,647 pounds:
1323 lbs - Battery
350 - Motor/Inverter(per diagram it's under the axle height as well)
Stuff above the axles - computers, hvac, seats, glass, etc...:1360 pounds.
Thus a Model S, while perhaps not as 'nimble' as a lighter vehicle, still performs much better than you'd expect from a car of that weight.
It's a friggin inconvenience to park at a gas station when you're car is outta juice, and they have to have an enterntainment park next to every one of them to keep you busy while you wait the "superfast" recharce of 30 minutes.
Why? Gas stations are isolated for a very good reason - the fuel is volatile of not treated with respect. We have doing it right down to an art, but it's still an aspect.
To bring it back to Rei's point: Why are you attacking the slow charge time of an EV as though you HAVE to go to a fueling station to recharge it when you can charge at home? In some cases you can even charge at work!
Battery Swap: It hasn't gone anywhere because California changed up it's rules again, but Tesla built a system to do it. Look up 'core charge'.
Limited Range: I'll admit that the Model S is currently the only vehicle to compete with gasoline for range, but you disregard the higher efficiency of electric motors granting you a lot more range for a unit of energy, as well as the ability to charge anywhere there's an electric drop. Entertainment park? All you need is a sit down restaurant.
I don't think liquid ammonia is the 'fuel of the future' because unlike gasoline or lithium, there's a good chance of it killing you with any tank breakage.