Posts by MachDiamond

"A Diesel genset is around 28% efficient."

That figure is the latent energy of the diesel as it sits in a tank, but doesn't include all of the energy that went into refining the diesel, all of the transportation and waste reclamation that is a part of petroleum usage.

I see a lot of comments that quote extreme transmission losses for electricity that are way off to one side of the graph. It's not a simple calculation and the dataset is almost never shown so there's no way to correct the inaccuracies. In reality, if losses are hitting 20% and the usage is high, power companies will opt to put in generation closer to where the demand is. Even only cutting that loss in half can add up to serious amounts of money. The talk about SMR's is based on getting generation as close to where it's used to cut down on those loses. Not that I think SMR's are a good idea or will ever happen. Anywhere near where a new power plant will be built also tends to go up in cost to purchase land. A power hungry business might be getting squeezed with cutoffs at their current location or have no way to expand. I had a friend in high school that took over the family iron casting foundry and would have to move shifts to night during the summer or pay crazy electricity prices when the power company asked for a reduction. Most of the workers would prefer to work days but there was no choice. Either they work nights in the summer or look for work elsewhere. The company couldn't pay the premium and remain in business.

"More of course, if the genset is still sat idling away when no EVs are charging."

Besides it being very expensive to use petroleum fuels to generate electricity, no competent engineer would design a system that had a diesel generator just idling away with no load. It's far more efficient to use the generator at ~80% capacity to charge a battery and then shut down until that storage battery was depleted to a certain point. There are EV charging stations that employ a similar tactic where there isn't the infrastructure to charge cars at high power. The station includes a battery that compensates by charging at a slower rate when there is low demand and can also be used to keep from incurring demand charges.

"Right, because gas just magically appears at gas stations. No losses or emissions involved in getting it there at all."

We also need to keep in mind the 7.46kWh per US gallon it took to refine that gasoline as well. (Argonne National Laboratory study on electricity usage in the petroleum industry)

"And then of course there's the UK. Where we've been due snow and -10C or so for the last week. So kind of a perfect storm. Temperatures drop, wind stops, solar stops, heating demand increases, EV ranges drop, and it all goes horribly wrong."

One of the biggest things the National Grid is always looking at is the weather. It impacts a lot of what they do and need to expect on the demand side. People buying an EV and expecting it to be exactly like an ICEV need to relearn personal transportation all over again. An EV isn't exactly like a petrol or diesel car. If I saw a big very cold storm coming and knew charging my EV (when I get one) was going to be an issue, I'd plan ahead and top up early and limit my usage. I'd also have backup plans. When a customer calls to book a job and they need drone photos as part of the service, I look at the weather reports and let them know if there are issues with the time/date they want to book. I don't wait until I arrive at the jobsite and look up or wet a finger to gauge if the wind is too high or not. If I am going on a long trip, I fill up with petrol the day before so I don't have to get up even early to get going before traffic will be an issue. If the local petrol station is closed for repairs, I might top up a day before that while I'm out.

"How could resistive heating be less than 100% efficient?

Any inefficiency would result in... heat."

If you run a fan to move the heat, that detracts from the 100% figure.

Re: random info

"The 18650 cells used by other manufacturers probably have different characteristics."

Most makers use pouch cells rather than cylindrical. Battery conditioning is easier and bigger pouches means fewer cells to strap together in production. The Tesla Model Y made in Germany uses BYD Blade Cells.

"I'd be very surprised if any still-in-production EV used resistive heating for the cabin except when it is too cold to use a heat-pump."

Resistive heating is used a lot. It's cheap and easy to engineer. Seat heaters are going to be resistive unless a maker wants to go to the expensive of using ducted fluids (air being considered a fluid in this case).

Re: Church of Climatology

"If God had wanted us to be warm using electricity, She would have equipped us with plugs, solar panels and wind turbines,"

Who was that again? I don't recognize the name.

"I’ve heard recommendations to turn off the heat and use the seat warmers instead."

Heated seats and steering wheels should be standard, but if it's an option, it's worth getting if you live someplace cold. I have driving gloves, in the glove box of all places, in my ICEV for really cold days which are infrequent. I'd love to have heated seats even though I get heat for free. It's that period between getting in the car and hot water getting to the heat exchanger where I hate life.

Re: Norway

"you do realise the problem is the car not the charger!"

Nope, it's the owners. Did you see the bit about people returning to the same station the next day to find a long line again?. What was that definition of insanity?

I don't see buying a super expensive car and renting a flat being a good combination, but I suppose people find it better to virtue signal than build wealth. This is yet another argument for not buying an EV if you can't charge at home or work. There's also the age old saying of "any port in a storm" which applies to EV's (aside from Tesla as they have high parasitic draw). If all you can plug into is a bog standard outlet, do that. The battery will charge down to the point where the electrolyte is frozen solid if the BMS allows it. The battery being at an optimum temp is more important for fast charging at the best speeds. Hardcore EV drivers that do a lot of traveling will have a connector kit tucked away so they can plug into just about anything from the outlet at an RV camp site to an electric clothes dryer outlet or whatever. Everybody showing up and waiting at a Supercharger station in the freezing cold shows how unprepared they are and how little they understand their EV.

Re: Norway

"but at the moment there seems to be a big dependency on having the right app for the charger, rather than just a credit card or cash like for fuelling ICEs."

At the moment there is Tesla and then everybody else. If you have a Tesla and are using a Supercharger, you need to be registered with Tesla and have a payment card attached to your account. The car sends it's VIN to the mothership, possibly more data as well and you get a yea or nay for charging. Everybody else pretty much has a payment point right at the charging stand. You can sign up and use an app (if you trust them) which could gain you a discount and also bill whatever account you designated for payment. What's missing is a way to go into a local business next to a charger and pay cash. If the network is down, you may want to find a motel if it looks like it will be a while. Maybe you can unplug the HVAC unit and run a lead out to the car so get a room in the back where they might not catch you.

Re: block heaters

"What's gonna happen when everybody plugs their EV in every night as they phase out ICE vehicles."

You have to combine that with what will happen when refineries aren't drawing as much power to turn crude into transportation fuels.

There's quite a long way to go until the 'bathtub' is filled up in the wee hours according the the National Grid. Wind turbines have to be shut off due to over supply at night. If the electricity companies have more business at the times when there has been traditionally very little, that's more money in their pockets using infrastructure they've already built out to handle peak demand during the business day. More money to add and improve infrastructure to stay ahead of increasing demand that we are going to have anyway due to all of the procreation going on. Most EV's can be charged with less draw than a kettle (Tesla's can be the exception as they have a high parasitic overhead). Nobody I know stops to have a think about boiling some water when they want a cuppa. Given the 10 hours or so that most people are parked up at home, there isn't a need to have high power charging to top up an EV each night. 3kW can often be just fine. (3.5 miles/kWh times 3kW is 10.5 miles for every hour plugged in (assuming all of that energy is going into the battery) giving the possibility of replacing 105 miles of use overnight with a very basic charger (EVSE) install. Many people do just fine with the supplied granny charger. If you don't have a place to plug in, move or don't get an EV yet. I understand that there are plenty of people happy to piss away the high salary they make in a big city on the much higher cost of living that has no off-street parking.

Re: Hyperbole

"also the solar roof tiles scam"

They are selling solar roof tiles. Not the really pretty ones that didn't work he used to get the Tesla board to bail out Solar City, but ones made mostly of plastic from a supplier in China.

Re: Hyperbole

"Basically kick started the EV industry, has revolutionised space access..."

A good book to read (between the lines) is Steam by Terry Pratchett. You can't railroad until it's time to railroad. More variations that James Burke was showing with the "Connections" series and another reboot presented by Richard Hammond. EV's have been around for ages. There's been a big DIY community and it was Martin and Marc that were poised to take EV's to the masses (at least those with a spare $100k). Elon contribution of funding came with a giant bag of delays and petty demands. Despite his ineptitude, there were enough good engineers brought onboard to produce a product and get it to market, eventually. The only contribution by Elon is mystique, nothing technical or ground breaking.

I could revolutionize the dairy industry by selling supermarkets milk for $.25/gallon. I'd be a huge "disruptor' until the point I ran out of my initial funding and couldn't get any more OPM. There's no revolution. It's the same as the Chinese companies with government subsidies dumping products on the market below cost until they drive the competition into bankruptcy whereupon they raise their prices to something sustainable with them as the world's sole supplier. SpaceX has to raise money several times a year in the private markets to keep the doors open. They aren't selling their services at a sustainable price and are getting more and more distracted with projects that may never be cash positive. The day may come, and likely quite abruptly, that investors are no longer interested in supplying Elon with billions per year to out Buck Rogers everybody else with his explody rockets. There's nothing on the Falcon 9 that isn't straight out of Gary Sutton's "Rocket Propulsion Elements" and a stack of free NASA publications.

Re: Hyperbole

"BTW: There are plenty still working on the idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop"

Hyperloop One, formerly Virgin Hyperloop is gone. They were supposed to have liquidated the assets by the end of 2023. Hyperloop TT has built a full-scale vacuum door, but everything else is still nothing more than CGI. Everybody else seems to be offices full of highly compensated management types filling out grant applications to get free government money.

It's dead... again.

"The biggest delay for IFT2 was regulatory approval for the deluge."

Elon never got any approval for the "not-a-deluge-system". SpaceX abandoned the application they filed with the Army Corp of Engineers when a list of questions were sent to SpaceX to address some concerns. The ACoE subsequently closed the application when the time expired for a response.

Re: Give us a payload

" If they do go boom the loss of a mass production factory's first batch will be small compared to a big artisan built satellite."

With somebody else's satellite, the customer would be the one on the hook for buying insurance. A Starship going boom with a load of Starlink satellites is SpaceX losing several more hundreds of millions in a greasy cloud of boom.

Re: Eyes on the prize

"Musk learned some lessons from being kicked out of Paypal "

Elon got tossed from Cofinity before the company rebranded to what they called their principal product. IIRC, it wasn't all that long after Cofinity bought one of Elon's companies that Elon got the sack, while on the way Down Under for a honeymoon which he was told about when he arrived. Delete one honeymoon. I'm being pedantic as too many people think Elon was the founder or at least the guiding force of Paypal. The reality is that through acquisitions, he held a bunch of stock that made him very wealthy when PayPal was purchased by eBay. That success wasn't due to anything Elon did. After the big payday he went out and bought a fancy new Mclaren sports car. Shortly after that, delete one sports car.

Re: Eyes on the prize

"Shouldn't he be running Xitter?"

Given what's gone on thus far, the company might do better in his absence. With nobody going on TV and telling the customers to .......... Linda might have more luck bringing in some revenue.

Re: Its a Test

"Seems a bit lie trying to test the fuel economy of a tractor trailer rig by running just the cab or a cab with an empty trailer."

It might be good to test the rig with an empty trailer and then increasing the load up to maximum allowable to generate a curve as it's unlikely to be linear. It's also a good real world piece of information to have since truck will often deadhead and the question comes up about whether it's better to run empty or pick up a low paying load if that will cover some expenses that outweighs the time and extra distance to take on the job.

There is no such thing as "no payload". All of the structure and gubbins are payload, just parasitic weight that a customer isn't paying for by the kilo. It's not just mass that's being taken to orbit, it's volume as well. Just like with the truck, it's not going to be a linear relationship and having the data might point to doing things like removing engines which will save mass and lead to removing another or a couple more if the paying payload is a light but bulky structure.

Re: Its a Test

"But towards the end, if you don’t have a mass dummy, it would accelerate too hard (a = F/m), exceeding design, so you need to dump propellant."

This would be where you'd throttle back the engines. Throwing loads of propellents overboard begs the question why you'd load them in the first place or fire up and keep running as many engines. NASA throttled the Shuttle main engines way back through MaxQ and once clear, ramped them back up again. They didn't unload propellents if they had a light payload.

"Liquid oxygen going boom (ok, probably more whoosh) is all fine and well, but they knew the rocket wouldn't have a payload well in advance, so why was the liquid oxygen fuel there in the first place?"

The LOX is properly not a fuel, it's the oxidizer. The LOX is used to burn the Methane fuel, so they need it. I am a rocket engineer so I know a few things about it. Keeping tanks at an optimal pressure is important and cryogenic liquids not in a very well insulated container will turn to gas and increase the pressure so it can be important to vent the tank periodically with a back up mechanical vent that will actuate regardless of any control electronics to the tank doesn't burst. As a rocket rises out of the atmosphere, there become nothing to replace the propellents in the tanks as they are used so there are two ways to keep the tanks from imploding. The first is to expand a bit of the cryogenic liquid and the other is to use a gas stored onboard in high pressure tanks, usually Helium since it's light and doesn't react with anything. The former is the easiest thing to do, but you want to convert the liquid to a gas a bit faster than the space you need to fill and just vent any excess since doing the opposite won't work. Getting the balance can be tricky. In humid areas along coastlines, the vent exhaust ports will often ice up if they aren't designed properly and can shed ice build up. This is a rookie mistake, but happens a lot.

The trick is to not vent fuel and oxidizer where they will mix and go boom. If SpaceX was venting LOX into a space where Methane was leaking, that's a really good way to make a boom just like what happened at Fukushima. The booster on the second flight looks a lot like the common bulkhead between the LOX and Methane tanks was damaged from an engine explosion, the two components mixed, and there was a spark that initiated the explosion (not FTS). The weather was so bad that what happened to the upper stage is going to be a guess, but there was good evidence that it went boom minutes before anybody in the control room started to worry which speaks to the inadequacy of their telemetry. If a guy in Florida was able to get video with his telescope, there was no reason why SpaceX couldn't have been able to receive data if they were set up to get it.

Re: Re:Musk being on the left?

"despite the blatantly anti-LGBTQ+ work of the DeSantis governorship of Florida"

What I see is that Gov. DeSantis is very much against the grooming of children into a gay lifestyle at 6-7 years old and further against school libraries stocking explicit sex manuals. There's a big difference in not supporting the gay agenda and actively working against that community. I'm not gay, I don't have gay friends and I am firmly against special dispensation for people that identify that way. Not restrictions, but no carve outs that put me in jail for calling somebody with male apparatus a He. It took a while, but I did learn the underlying meme of Animal Farm. If everybody is to be equal, making anybody "more equal" does not compute.

Re: Re:Musk being on the left?

"I'm sure he'll come out an approve the Donald for POTUS very soon."

Unless Kanye or Madonna throw their hat in the ring.

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

"The rose coloured glasses are fine when you are 20, the tint changes a lot when you are 60."

At some point you start to realize there is a vast gulf between "wouldn't it be nice" and reality. Yes, most people are decent, but just like that proverbial one bad apple in the barrel, it takes very few with no morals, no responsibility and a "meeee first" attitude to make those utopian plans come tumbling down.

The US politicians got together and decided that durning lockdowns that sending people money (not everybody, only the ones they liked) would help ease the pain. They also decided that the money needed to be sent out immediately and there was no time to implement a wee bit of process to curb fraud. People in prison for life were getting small business payroll support checks. Companies that were no more than a shell were getting millions that their owners used to run right out and buy expensive things. In a perfect world, nobody would be gaming the system like that and would be saying a heartfelt "thank you" for the money.

Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

""The average cost for each launch using rockets from Boeing and Lockheed has soared to $420 million, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office.", a Falcon 9 launch is conservatively in the $150 mill range, there's been over 60 government launches by SpaceX, if you're saving $200m a launch that's not bad."

Most people don't have experience running a high tech business and don't realized that a race to the bottom on prices is highly detrimental to long term success. SpaceX has to raise fund several times each year to do the things they are doing. The HLS program is massively underwater as Elon has spent more money on Starship development than the contract pays. Needing Starship for their own in-house Starlink system is an internal expense, not revenue and there isn't a market for 100t to LEO launch services that don't need a much more specialized vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy would be launching far more often if there were more of a need for getting heavy payloads to orbit and beyond. The electronics industry has been reducing the size and weight of the gubbins inside satellites for decades to the point where the size and weight can be managed by much small rockets.

ULA charges what they do since they have professional management and understand that given the enormous cost of improving existing rockets and developing new ones, they need to charge enough to pay for that R&D from profits rather than constantly going to the private investment community over and over who demand a premium return and to have investments pay back. SpaceX has had ONE Starship prototype (SN15) not explode. It also got scrapped rather than flown again which is interesting for a rocket supposedly designed to be reusable. That's it, everything else has gone off bang. The first full stack launch was one big failure and the second could be described as two for an increase in failures, not a reduction.

Beyond the space hardware, Elon is notable for thumbing his nose at authority. The "not-a-deluge-system" was required to be designed and built in coordination with the Army Corp of Engineers. Elon let the application lapse through non-response and went ahead anyway. Elon called the current 'launch' tower nothing more than an 'integration' tower and failed to secure planning and permits for it. He's rumored to be constructing another on the other side of the too small launch area in addtion to replacing and adding more tanks that are far too close. It seems that, at least, he understands that if he encroaches into the wildlife refuges anymore than they already have without permission, that could spell the end of that facility as the agencies responsible for them want him out in a bad way already.

The comment that a payload would have mitigated the problems is a joke. The only payload he could get right now is Starlink. Nobody else is going to risk a multi-million dollar spacecraft by letting go anywhere near Startship. New companies can get payloads for an inaugural flight where there's an expectation of succes, but Elon's approach is a little different. Virgin Orbit went TU after their last failed launch. The first one they tried had an issue, but they then did several that worked fine. The 747 they used is now repainted and at Stratolaunch at the Mojave Airport, the home of airplane lauched space vehicles.

"Affinity Photo replaced Adobe Photoshop,"

For me, it's Lightroom that is the key element and that works very well with PS to hand files back and forth. I could edit with anything, but managing all of my photos is a big key to making money. I've licensed photos for use in a couple of books by being able to find what they wanted and send them a contact sheet in the shortest amount of time. They admitted that another photographer finally came up with some photos they liked better, but it took too long to get them and the licensing got too bogged down. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. My photos were good enough, but the business was better than the other guy. It also takes me very little time to find images and get sample back to other potential customers. The sales rate is often very low so minimizing the time it takes for me to submit is very important.

Re: "only five percent believe this surveillance should be unrestricted"

"Why isn't this zero percent? "

You get weirdos in every breed.

Re: Big brother is creeping up behind you.

"I wonder when "authorities" will start demanding car data to evidence basic driving violations"

In the US, it wouldn't be useful. If the officer says you were speeding, the judge is going to side with them if you fight the ticket unless you can show certified documentation that you weren't. They don't need your car to rat you out for simple things. Where there could be an issue is if the data in your car is subpoenaed so they® have a record of where you were at a given date time, moving/stopped, on the phone, driving aggressively, number of people in the car, change in the number of people, etc, etc. That same data might not be admissible in your favor in the same way that a cop can't testify in your favor.

"We don't have flying cars, do we?"

Underground homes are rare too so I'm happy that cars don't fly.

Re: Peripherals

"The top sheets were kept as a strip for the required period then a year's worth would be shredded in one go,"

If your company is purging paper records, it might just be cheaper to hire a shredding company to come around with their truck and have it all done in a few minutes while you watch. I'd only use my shredder for casual stuff, like junk mail. I kept a load of junk mail around to shred with things I wanted to make sure were destroyed. Hiding the tree in the forest.

Re: But why?

"His idea for X as an "everything" app failed and exploded in his face when he was at Paypal "

Technically, he got bought out by Cofinity and demanded the CEO chair there which he was removed from as soon as he left the US on a flight to Oz for a honeymoon (first wife, I think). Cofinity developed a service they called "Paypal" and Elon was gone before the company rebranded to "Paypal" although he still had a large amount of stock and made out when PP sold to eBay. What is known as Paypal doesn't have much to do with Elon. He couldn't code, knew nothing about banking and just pissed everybody off in the office so they sacked him as soon as his back was turned.

"Jesting aside, not sure he'd necessarily go to jail, but having another government agency in a different part of the world putting on the elbow length exam gloves as part of a very invasive thorough body cavity search investigation of Xitter's operations is a very distinct possibility. If he thinks he's in the shit now with the SEC and NLRB in the US, he likely hasn't seen anything yet."

X is a privately held company with Elon at the helm. He's much more exposed than with his part-time job at Tesla since that's a publicly traded company with more executives/directors.

"We believe SATCOM will unlock significant opportunities in agriculture by enabling farmers to take advantage of innovative technologies that rely on real-time information and communication,"

How "real time" does your data need to be when growing plants? It would mean that those JD tractors would need to be in the fields gathering that data often enough rather than an experienced farmer using Mk1 eyeballs and their hands for a read of the soil.

Re: Who does this benefit ?

"Or how the government can run the equipment without a farmer. Precursor to robotic farming."

The US government is so inept it couldn't run a brothel at even a break-even. There is more and more automation going into the fields, but there are still many variable to account for with growing plants with many more that nobody has come up with a good way to quantify. I've seen some very novel concepts for harvesting that mean a field can be picked a few times rather than just once with humans since the machines are less labor intensive to start and stop. This will lead to better yields per field. Many times 'ugly veg' gets left to rot, but with automated picking and sorting, the good looking stuff goes in one hopper and the ugly in another where it can be processed for food banks and commercial processes where it's going to be chopped up into bits anyway so nobody will ever see it was wonky. I just did a batch of pickles chips and I would have grabbed oddly shaped cucumbers if it saved me money. I might make more pickles just because I could get "non-conforming' cucumbers on the cheap.

Re: "Great for Farmers"

'GPS is also mostly a cost thing. It lets farmers automatically regulate their equipment, planting less crop on less fertile or less well irrigated soil, applying more fertilizer or other products exactly where it's needed, etc."

That's taking the skill from the farmer and turning it into a subscription. The big downside is if the tech goes off-line, a whole tractor is kaput and it's often the tractor that's collecting the data from the fields in the first place. Ag production can be a game of hours, so if you tractor is laid up and it will be 4 weeks until a factory tech can come out, that could be a large portion of the crop that can't be harvested at optimum. This is a huge problem with outsourcing anything, you lose control so you have to plan for that risk.

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

"Calling in sick when people have the flu or a bad cold should always be required, especially if people can work from home. Some things just aren't good to share around the office."

There was a tv program about meat packing plants that were having issues since it's an industry with low wages, mostly immigrant labor and hard physical work. The immigrants weren't very highly educated so pamphlets and posters at the workplace didn't do much and they might have had no sick days remaining so had to come in to work regardless of their health or risk not being able to pay rent and meet their other bills. This is often called "presentism".

I don't often get sick but, I get my money's worth when I do. I've learned that regardless of how much I need to get done at work, I'd call in sick until I was well enough to come back in. Since I'm self-employed now, I'll tell my customers that I'm unavailable for field work and might be able to accomplish some office work if I felt up to it. When I've tried to push through, my colleagues got what I had and I tacked on another week of being miserable. Rest, chicken soup and listening to what my body is demanding is what shortens how long I'm down. As far as Covid goes, my doctor doesn't even test for it anymore. Just about everybody is testing positive and it rarely makes any difference in the care he provides or recommends so he doesn't see any point.

Re: Yet....

"Why not just a few lawyers who can determine if the speech is legal, or not."

A few lawyers? At $1,500/hour? or 1,000 local workers at $15/hr trained to look out for particular things that get up local regulators noses?