Posts by John Robson 5210 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008
Are one of the few things that might reasonably be replaceable that don't sound like they are.
OK - you lose trutone if you replace the display, but you *can* replace it (and it really ought to include faceID)
Battery replacement looks good, display, touchpad, keyboard are the next level of replacements, ports are a fairly obvious replacement.
Fans are pretty much always replaceable - but what else is replaceable - it's a SOC, so you can't exactly deduct marks for not being able to replace memory.
Storage - feel free to deduct points there, the M2 form factor is hardly a space eater...
Aside from putting up signage I think that motion triggering from an area on my property is enough to limit the recording to a suitably small set.
But I'm keeping the audio on, since one of the main reasons for the camera is an instance of someone following me home and then coming back later with "help" to assault me, the audio recording there would be important.
I'm sure it used to be the case that there was no expectation of privacy whilst walking down the street.
That was the quote I had copied as well - I suppose you could have the recording masked...But to be honest... why bother?
My main camera covers a significant amount of road and the front of several houses opposite - it's quite carefully aligned to avoid covering more than the edge of my neighbours driveway - but it does still cover it to some extent.
"From a back of a fag packet estimate based on the cars on my street. "
Lets look a bit wider:
33 million cars, average daily mileage 20 miles, average efficiency 4m/kWh
That's 165GwH/day or a bit under 7GW.
We could reasonable suggest that we expect that demand to be pushed to the middle of the night, so maybe 20GW... But then demand drops by 15GW overnight already, so that's made up the majority of the deficit already...
An additional 5GW is only a 10% increase.
Not actually that much in the grand scheme of things.
"Is that from an ICE car battery or EV? Sorry for saving this until last I just wanted to question, if the loss is approx 1mile a day (assuming you mean EV battery) the average range of an EV is 181mile (quick google search) so on average they should surely be able to sit for about half a year before going completely dead?"
EVs have a conventional car battery as well.
The fun starts because the 12V system runs as with any other vehicle when the car is "off".
The battery doesn't get recharged by an alternator, but from the HV system, and the combination of alarms and other bumpf does use energy, not alot, but it does use it.
The fun starts because some cars will sense that the 12v battery is low and hook up the 400V system to charge it.
Obviously the more smarts your car has the more this will happen.
I haven't noticed any range loss at all over the course of a couple of days between journeys, but I haven't really left it more than that. The mile/day figure is one I have seen from a number of sources, it implies a load of ~8-10W for self discharge as well as things like alarms etc.
A small solar panel would make up for that pretty easily.
""The car can even advise you when it's running low"
I assumed so, petrol cars do too."
Many EVs come with connectivity that can tell you remotely, so you can get warned when the charge is fairly low despite not being in the car or actively checking.
"I am just considering that my car can sit with an almost empty tank outside for considerable time before I drive it to a station and refill in under a minute (not accounting for queues and paying of course). With an EV I guess that would mean plug it in and call a taxi."
You could leave the ev outside for weeks on a low charge - but why would you leave the EV outside virtually empty for any length of time? It takes ten seconds to charge an EV at home/work... If you are reliant on public charging then yes, you would need to consider fuelling differently, but the same would be said moving from feeding horses to pouring petrol.
Put another way... That would be user error, not normal operation.
Yes, it will require a slight change in the way people think about fuel and transport.
I only ever go to a fuelling location on long journeys, and I'm invariably glad of the opportunity to stretch my legs and relax the eyes/brain for a little while.
"The point was that engine efficiency is obviously not at its peak. As fuel is cheap the research hasnt really been worth it."
Look at F1 engines - they are just about breaking 50% thermal efficiency, and are incredibly delicate and high tech, and that efficiency is *including* their hybrid units (both of them) and funky turbo. That has taken a significant amount of R&D funds, and alot of smart people.
A large static engine easily exceeds 60% (turbine generator followed by a steam turbine from the waste heat) or up to 90% if you can use the remaining low grade heat to provide energy to other local buildings. And that is despite running on much less refined fuel.
""since that was your baseline."
Ah cool. Sorry I didnt know if it was range of transmission lines or driving etc (as I said sorry for being dim I just didnt know which). Not sure I mentioned normal daily driving but it is obviously what we compare against."
You might not have done.... and you're not being dim asking for clarification.
"The most sensible thing to do immediately would be to move to a electric drive with a small battery (~20-50 miles) which would cover the average daily drive if charged from the mains, and then use an onboard generator (not an engine) to back it up in case it's not charged."
That was the start of the discussion, and it was an AC.
The average vehicle does ~20 miles per day, and since vehicle days are vastly more than that and none can be less than zero the typical distance must be somewhat less - I'd suggest that probably 75-80% of vehicles do 20 or fewer miles per day - but certainly the vast majority will be under 50 miles.
The mass of an appropriately sized generator could be used as increased battery, giving 200 additional miles, which would basically cover most of those longer journeys, albeit with a charge stop for the *very* long journeys.
My preference would actually be to add 100 miles in LiIon, and a few modules for 20-30kg AlAir batteries - we're expecting to hit ~2kWh/kg (or 8-10 mile/kg) fairly soon (we're at 1.3 out of a theoretical 8 now, LiIon is at about .26). So a 20kg (hand swappable, storable at any service station or supermarket) unit is 160-200 miles.
200W/kg only gives 4kW though, which isn't sufficient power density - we'd need ~75kg (three 25kg modules, or 4 20kg ones) for extended motorway cruising at current speeds - but that then gives 600-800 miles of *extra* range for half the mass of the undersized generator.
And you wouldn't need to carry the modules all the time, you could have LiIon modules that you used at home, or you could just not lug about the extra mass.
You shouldn't be - vampire drain should only account for ~1 mile a day at worst.
You're probably more likely to put the wrong fuel into the tank than to find the battery dead. The only case I can see where you are likely to "find the car with no charge" is if you leave it abandoned in a car park for several weeks having rushed for a ferry/train/plane/???.
The car can even advise you when it's running low (even if that means adding an ovms kit because the manufacturer is a cheapskate).
Anyone else remember the good old days when parking on a hill would drastically alter the reported amount of fuel in a tank (even taking it from being able to run to being "empty")
" In 2019 Mazda had improved the engine by 30%."
30% of what compared with what? Typical efficiency is still in the 35% range
"When I said I dont know how that would work I ment draining the fuel of some ones vehicle"
Plug it into the charger, and use the invertor in the car to supply up to 32A back to the grid rather than taking it from the grid. A number of cars already have this capability, and I think it will become the norm in the next few years.
"Sorry to be dim but added 200miles to what?"
I took the mass of your range extender and used it for batteries instead - that gave me an extra 200 miles of range - range which by definition is above and beyond "normal daily driving" since that was your baseline.
Petrol is a great energy store, but a small engine is always going to be less efficient than a large one - that's just simple physics and engineering. Additionally the heat can be captured in a secondary system or supplied to local premises, not something that a car can do.
The losses on the grid and through the battery are actually pretty small (<2% in the HV network, ~6% in the LV distribution, 5% going through the battery) so only a very small increase in thermal efficiency is needed to offset those.
The concept of V2G storage is well established, and it is commercialised in part already - Octopus energy users with batteries can already charge overnight and discharge during the day, making profit from their batteries. Extending that to vehicles isn't too hard.
Given that we just added an extra 200 miles of range over what you expected to have to cover all your daily needs we could use all of that and still leave enough for your daily needs - I'd probably cut it down to only using 25-30kwH though.
The cost is artificially low because the cost of using the energy is not just the cost of production, but of cleaning up as well. Ignoring that externalised cost is not unique to the energy sector either.
Even if we burnt the petrol in a power plant we'd still reduce emissions, because we'd need less of it to power the vehicles on the road.
And we could use relatively heavy/bulky equipment to capture the nastiest emissions and reduce the damage further. Additionally those emissions would be made somewhere that wasn't densely populated by people breathing it all in.
If we had an additional 40kWh storage available, maybe across half of the vehicle fleet, that would be a rather substantial battery to cope with the variation in generation from other sources as well.
Our energy prices have been artificially far too low for far too long, we are starting to catch on to the idea that pissing in the drinking water isn't good for us, but are moving the latrine downstream very very slowly.
Actually - we do produce enough energy, or at least we can.
And every time we add more clean energy generation to the grid everybodies emissions go down.
EV prices are nowhere near double that of their ICE counterparts - you're a couple of decades late with that comment.
"Generator != Engine"
The generator is a motor attached to an ICE - an engine.
Well done, you've just designed the vauxhall ampera.
Also a 3kW generator isn't going to do you much good, you'll want at least 15kW, probably 20kW (70mph at 5m/kWh is 14kW, at 4m/kWh it's 17.5).
And now you have an engine, a fuel tank, and all the servicing that is associated with those.
A 10kW generator (the largest "small" unit I could easily find) masses 150kg.
That's enough for 40+kWh of LiIon (or 160 - 200 miles of additional range)
And battery prices are ~£100/kWh, so that's a £4k battery pack, rather than a £2-3k underpowered generator.
It just doesn't add up in favour of a generator.
Add the opportunity for using vehicles with "oversized" batteries as grid storage - and getting paid for that. Let the grid charge/discharge your vehicle, with a lower limit to ensure you have enough juice to go anywhere you need. Just raise that limit on the day before a long journey.
Or as a domestic UPS for the house...
Or .... plenty of things I haven't thought of.
"Also your 100kW charges ain't going to happen because where has an electric supply that will support that? You'd have to replace the local substations, the cables to the house, and the internal fuseboxes which will no doubt happen at the same time as fibre to the premises (aka; never) due to the absurdly high costs involved for most properties."
Well at home you don't need more than 7kW (and only ~5kWh/day on average).
At service stations, you need a decent power supply - but they already have decent power supplies.
I'd like to see SMR deployment at all 150 motorway services, free heat for the services, locally produced energy for the chargers, export surplus power to the grid, import if you suddenly have a huge number of cars pulling power.
Not really difficult at all - you just have a charger in the meeting point of four spaces - in the same way trees are often found in the middle of four spaces in car parks already.
You *also* need to have some similarly located amongst the accessible parking spaces of course.
And maybe, just maybe, there will be 25 chargers at each service station…
By the time charging is running at 350kW then you need very little time “on a pump”, so there is some validity to the “like a petrol pump” timing thoughts.
Would also be good to have a “car unlocks cable when at 90%” option available, so that you could have four spaces around a charger, and plug in and leave it without blocking the charger.
They didn't like me throwing out 20 years of accumulated PC cases... the electronics had been nicely stripped to go in that bin and the cases were headed to the metal bin... I think I passed as sufficiently geeky that they believed me.
So why are you lugging an engine around all the time - why not just put a little bit more battery in there and have 200 miles of range, and 100kW charging.
Then you need to charge for less than twenty minutes every two hours on a long journey (and that's never really draining the battery (140 miles / 5 m/kWh = 28kWh /100Kw = 17 minutes). That's enough time to go into the service station, relieve yourself of the drink from the previous stop and return to the vehicle. Sit on a grassy bank for a few minutes relaxing the eyes, eat a sandwich, have a tea from your thermos...
But you don't stop like this at the end of the journey, so it's every two hours except the last two. A four hour journey gets one stop, a six hour journey gets two stops...
If you're looking at all but four or five days a year being covered electrically anyway then the additional time for those handful of days is really minor.
I suspect that the availability of AlAir batteries (or similar high density tech) should basically eliminate this need as well - just buy a battery for the journey and trade it back in at the far end... buy another for the return - or just keep two in the car, one part uses and the other on standby - swap out the part used one at a convenient point. They aren't rechargeable, but they are very recyclable - so they basically have a low discharge but relatively low cycle efficiency (comparable with an ICE, except they can be produced at solar/wind farms, or a power station)
I'm not convinced.
There may well be cases that aren't covered by Li-ion batteries, but things like modular AlAir packs make much more sense to me than ICE.
Will those be the last holdouts of the dino juice era? Almost certainly.
Are they replaceable? Yes, just not with the tech we are currently using.
If the battery packs are truly modular then you could also reasonably switch out the proportions of which battery type you used.
One of the other issues is that alot of services are in unknown locations..
Out local power company managed to "not be sure" that the farmers field wasn't being powered by the cable they had laid a mere 18 months earlier, despite it being the same person on site (who did remember putting the cable in, and knew we were the only property supplied by it) - computer said "don't know"... farmers fields aren't known for using a lot of power, and it's a good half mile to the nearest roundabout (which probably takes power from the power lines along the main roads feeding it)
To be fair we have a *very* small sample size (both in terms of mass and in terms of locations on the lunar surface).
Many of those sample locations were chosen to be easy landing sites as well...
We did have one gap, now we have two gaps of just under a billion years each...
I'd be quite happy with DNSSEC protected text records providing the public key for any service.
It's completely out of band and of all the groups in the world we have come to trust... those looking after the DNS root are pretty high on the list, and actually so are the major TLD bodies (theiving scum they might be, but they have historically provided a pretty good technical service in terms of DNS at any rate)
The bigger thing is that I bet it doesn't work with masks - you know like the ones that we know reduce transmission.
I switched to a phone with facial recognition over a fingerprint scanner because I wear gloves alot of the time (wheelchair is much easier to push, and you get through gloves at a serious rate so I use cheap builder's gloves), so it was massively more convenient.
Then came covid and the associated mask wearing.
Good thing the pin still works.
I wonder what happened to the days when the lunch staff knew all the pupils?
But with a hundred uninterested parties... they'd have a much harder time.
A simple digital signature could be effective.
Or of course the option that Bob and Carol don't need copies of Alice's posts... They can cache them sure, but they don't need copies.
Carol's device is the only one that needs to know what Carol has said.
"most of the "project fear" doomsday predictions were well wide of the mark"
Really?
We have no shortages on the shelves, no queues at our ports, the unicorn stables are full and there's no british unemployment any more...
You can claim that project reality was fear mongering, but you might want to look at what is actually happening.
We are the only people with critical shortages, it's not even just the UK, it's just Britain... you know the only place that left the single market.
Actually Remain has a very good description of what there was - the EU was, and is, well defined. And we had significant input into any future directions.
And frankly the amount of double think required to continue this conversation (or in fact encountering reality) must hurt, sorry about that.
"Had people willing to leave been allowed to get on with it we would have been fine,"
You were always welcome to leave...
No need to stay in the UK if you don't like it.
The biggest problem was there was never a clear idea of what leaving was, there was never a majority for any sort of brexit. There was a general disgruntlement, and now we've left... everything is apparently still the fault of the EU.
There is some serious doublethink going on.
That's why a second referendum was important:
"Do you want a chocolate cake"?
"Meh, ok"
"Here's one laced with cyanide"
"... erm"
"You said you wanted cake, now eat it, all of it...."
It's not even marketing that worries me, it's being denied treatment.
But there is no reason not to have a setup whereby GPs get a request in standardised form to select patient data, and for that to get sent out to patients with a standardised cover form (so that I can say "always say yes to a university that is looking for data on <insert rare condition>" and "always say no to insurance companies"). Then I can get a weekly/monthly list of places that want access, and what to and I can say yes/no to each.
The risk depends on your countries health system, and how much you think you can rely on it staying as it is.
Consent for a university to look at drug/condition correlation - fine.
Consent for insurance company to do the same - not ok. Healthcare should not cost more because you have been unlucky… the ill health is cost enough.
[And talking of rare conditions, my consultants reckon I was probably case ~22 globally, of course I don’t count in those stats since the test wasn’t administered early enough to be convincing, but it’s still going to be a pretty small number]
Ok - I'll not buy the blood test bottles that I need to get blood tests done. Those blood tests are required to monitor the health of my liver since one of the drugs I am on is known to be liver toxic.
The GP can't prescribe a shared care drug without the blood test, but the consultant can' issue the blood test.
Nothing bad could happen, after all last time I stopped taking the drug I only ended up in hospital for three weeks and permanently disabled.
Fortunately the consultant did issue a direct hospital prescription, but that was alot more stress than I needed.
Shortages are not an "oh well buy the next brand" issue. They are life and death for various people.
Additionally the shortages are of greatest effect for those who are already in, or on the edge of, food poverty. If you struggle to put food on the table each day then the increase in cost, and the secondary increase in cost because the closest alternative is a more expensive brand doesn't make it any easier.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
