Energy production, storage, and future technologies

And my gosh, there needs to be some kind of industry-wide standardization akin to "this is the nozzle size for petrol, and this is the nozzle size for diesel."
Just like the world having agreed upon black for diesel and green for unleaded nozzles? :tease:
 
Just like the world having agreed upon black for diesel and green for unleaded nozzles? :tease:
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Other cars do preconditioning now too so I dunno if thats still a Tesla only thing. It does help as optimal battery temperature gives you a remarkably higher charge speed…
Yeah—the Taycan did this as it navigated to chargers, IIRC. Pretty useful. Could get coffee, get a solid poop in and not have to wait much longer if at all.
Just like the world having agreed upon black for diesel and green for unleaded nozzles? :tease:
If you're chuckin' a hot dog down a hallway, you've got the wrong nozzle.
narf bringing out the pro-PAIN and pro-PAIN accessories

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Meanwhile, in Texas:



The power grid's holding up okaaaaay so far, but uhhh, that's a concerning predicted dip:
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Aaaaaand that reduced capacity line is likely in response to this:

Deja vu, here we go and this isn't even as severe a storm as last time. The only thing everyone in Texas could agree needed to be fixed—the frickin' power grid—was not. They'd rather ban books, make it harder to vote and micromanage our healthcare decisions than meaningfully fix the ONE thing we all agreed needed fixing after hundreds of needless deaths (if not more).

Peak demand per ERCOT (our power grid folks, where that chart comes from) is forecasted to be over 70 gigawatts Friday morning, with last February's deadly week-long storm being the only time there's ever been more demand. So uh, let's hope that capacity line doesn't drop too much more.

Talking to a friend in oil and gas, it's a bit more complicated to winterize gas infrastructure here because they also have to withstand triple-digit-Fahrenheit heat in the summer. A lot of facilities winterized regardless, but the state didn't actually set any standards for what "winterization" should be. An independent investigation found that only 41% of natural gas power facilities had actually gone to the trouble to test their winterization efforts out successfully, which is a far cry from the "98% winterized" figure the state government likes to trot out. (Our government?! Lying to us? Par for the course at this point.)

So, that's all the more reason we should tie into a nationwide power grid that has infrastructure already built to withstand the more extreme winter weather here and to encourage a variety of energy sources to make things more robust when one struggles with the conditions. I'm sure they'd be glad to lean on our producers when facilities further north can't cope with extreme summer heat or other issues, too. But no, windmills are evil despite having fewer issues than natural gas in the cold, and we should be willing to freeze to death for our independence from federal regulation that ensures better-functioning power grids, according to our state's dumbest, cruelest politicians.

...

Can central Texas just secede from this madhouse yet? And take Houston with us? We'll run an extension cord to Oklahoma and leave Greg Abbott up there while we're plugging in to a reliable grid.
 
Ha, yup. Ford loaned out a bunch of Lightnings in the last storm, and honestly, good on them. It's the cynical take to say it was to promote their stuff, but frankly, they had trucks that filled a vital need. There's some extra bits you need to get it to work with a house, though.

I think I'm on an "essential" circuit somehow as I didn't lose power in the "load shed" blackouts last year until it got knocked out by ice. Of course, my power seems to get knocked out in every storm for ??? (trees? old equipment? who knows), so that's a thing...and this storm is all garbage ice. Can't even make a snowman. Sucks.
 
One of Oslo's many electric busses fast charging at the end stop:
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About three years ago, a lot of battery electric busses started showing up in Oslo. The current city counsel had decided that electric busses were the way forward, so they wanted to phase in as many as possible. The problem was that noen of the constructors could deliver so many to oslo alone. The solution was that they purchased a lot of battery busses, splitting the order between BYD, VDL, Mercedes Benz, and Solaris.

The charging situation turned out not to be a big problem, as they have pantograph-style charges at the storage yard where they park them overnight, and they have fast chargers on either one of the turnaround stops, where they are obliged to have a 20 minute mandated rest break for the driver.

The bigger problem was actually in the beginning before the bus drivers got used to the electric busses and their all-of-the-torque-all-of-the-time power delivery and brisk acceleration, making the experience somewhat jerky in the beginning. They can also be a bit spooky as they are very quiet when they go slow, still prefer that to the noisy old diesels.

Also, electric excavator:
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Interesting concept, in therms of sound, it's not that much quieter, hydraulic pumps are still hydraulic pumps.
 
^
The jerky acceleration, sounds like a bad power map. Not tuned for use case. Could be dangerous for passengers.

Wonder are they any cheaper to run?

Lithium $$$$ is x3+ in the last couple of months.
 
At first, I thought, "Well, what happens when you get to the bottom...you couldn't possibly generate enough power to get you back to the top of the hill, right?

but then I realized that the train will likely be full on the way down, and empty on the way back up...so...like...could this actually work, for this narrow, niche use-case of bringing raw goods in one direction, from one location to another, and nothing back, without undulations in elevation?

 
At first, I thought, "Well, what happens when you get to the bottom...you couldn't possibly generate enough power to get you back to the top of the hill, right?

but then I realized that the train will likely be full on the way down, and empty on the way back up...so...like...could this actually work, for this narrow, niche use-case of bringing raw goods in one direction, from one location to another, and nothing back, without undulations in elevation?

Similar concepts have been used with aerial ropeways for ages, so why not on a larger scale.

View: https://youtu.be/6RiYXI1Tfu4
 
It's essentially the same principle as the Electric Mountain, systems like that are a good uses of excess energy from renewable sources if demand on the grid is low at any given time. If the ropeway was intended for energy generation, it could be powered by excess wind or solar energy to take material back up the hill.

I can't decide if water is the best medium or not compared to using dirt like the ropeway, you can get massive amounts of energy from water very quickly but if you don't contain it properly there's a potential to just piss it all away, less likely with a slow system and solid material.

As soon as I saw Tom's video I wondered how much energy those carts actually had, if you put a generator on it how much power could you harvest before the ropeway stopped? If the towers needed a beacon I imagine you could easily harvest the power needed for an LED without any noticeable slowing of the system.
 
It's much easier to move the humongous amounts of mass needed for any worthwhile storage system if said mass is water, though :) having a massive pipe down the side of a mountain is easier than building a ropeway capable of transporting the same amount of mass/time.
 
It's much easier to move the humongous amounts of mass needed for any worthwhile storage system if said mass is water, though :) having a massive pipe down the side of a mountain is easier than building a ropeway capable of transporting the same amount of mass/time.
Very true, I was trying to consider maintenance and the effect of a failure in my head too though. A burst pipe vs a snapped cable would have a dramatically different outcome in my examples, assuming the hill isn't so steep that the carts tumble down it after falling.
 
there have been thought experiments (i refuse to call it anything else) about just slicing a big part out of the countryside and raising that up. pretty daft shit... i remember that was fed to us in the "alternative energies" course at university that was read, by some reason, by the department for nuclear reactors and safety. yup. totally did not have an agenda in presenting ridiculous alternatives... nope nope nope.
 
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