Posts by MachDiamond

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?"

That rabbit hole goes even deeper when you realize that not all of the oil extracted in the US can be processed in the US. It's not economic to build refineries so there hasn't been much done since around 1980. When some of them have burned to the ground due to inevitable fires, they don't get rebuilt which is reducing capacity even further. The political aspect of oil can't be ignored either and can be the more scary part.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"The problem in the UK is that a fair % of houses do not have off road parking or you have a shared parking area"

Yeah, well, the automobile has 'only' been around for 100years and it always takes time for the UK to incorporate new things. /sarc

I've lived in flats with roommates where there wasn't assigned parking for more than one car and most of the time I was the one that had to deal with finding a place to park and having a hike back. I'd never do that again and haven't for ages and ages. There's a compatibility mismatch if you want/have to live somewhere with no parking and you also want an EV. In some cases you can ram those parts together, but there's no point arguing that since a bunch of people live somewhere that can't accommodate a vehicle that personal transportation is complete rubbish. I have friends that live in super big cities and don't have their own car. That's one of the trade offs. I don't find what they put up with in a big city worth what I see as very little in return. Yes, they make far more money than I do annually, but I keep more of mine since their cost of living is many times more without even having a car.

Re: But "everyone" won't move to an EV

"Well mine is just over your average at 12.5 here in the (petrol,UK), plan is to replace it with upon retiring just before the "ban" with another one that should (prangs permitting) last another 15 or until they take my licence away !"

Luxury!

Mine's 16yo and still in good nick but has a lot of miles on. A low mileage used engine installed is ~$1,500 and it could use a new coat of paint. That's what's preventing me from getting an EV. The lower operating cost of the EV doesn't get anywhere close enough for there to be any ROI. If my ICEV gets in an accident and isn't economic to repair, that might be the point where I buy an EV if I can afford it.

Re: Not Just Charging Issues, Transport Infrastructure Too

"We should at least charge them road tax"

Many places do and more all of the time. I remember doing a little fast math on what some US states were charging as an EV fee at the annual registration and I'd have to drive 25,000 miles to pay enough in petrol taxes to equal that amount. Don't fash yourself about the taxman demanding his due, that's not a worry.

Re: No shit

"I have a 100A incoming main however I share a 100A fuse on the transformer with 4 other houses."

Is that a 100A fuse on the primary or secondary side of the transformer? If it's on the primary (high voltage) side, no problem. On the secondary would mean that the rating would be hit if each house was drawing 25a.

Re: No shit

"However what people have found is that using the 13A plugin EV chargers have resulted in burnt sockets."

Ideally the socket should be zero ohms impedance and not get warm at all. I'm ignoring all of the really crap product there is out there that people buy "to save money". It's not an issue to dial back most of the EVSE's that get mounted to walls for EV charging. Some granny chargers can be set differently either via a user interface or by changing some DIP switches inside.

Re: No shit

"Remember, kids, a domestic EV charger uses as much power as a typical electric shower. "

That's not true. You can set an EVSE to supply whatever power level you want (or an electrician can). Granny chargers often supply less than a kettle. An electric shower can draw quite a lot of power or it wouldn't get to "warm enough".

Re: Why not check out places that already have many EVs?

"That said, I would love to see a compact high-speed gas turbine range extender / afterburner"

I'm sad that a friend of mine passed away before we could figure out how he could ship me a turbine he had lying about. It was originally from an aircraft "start cart" and rated for about 20kW. A 20kW turbine isn't all that large. My plan was to set it up as a backup generator and run it on used motor oil. Turbines can run on a lot of different fuels similar to what you can do with a diesel engine. I could always go to the airport and fill up some cans with Jet-A, but that's too expensive. I was working with a wrecking yard for a while and they had to drain all of the fluids from the cars they brought in. I could have had all of the used ATF and motor oil that I wanted.

Re: Why not check out places that already have many EVs?

"A vehicle battery has about the same range as a tank of fuel "

It's about half, but that's still very adequate since if you can charge at home, you can have a full charge every morning (or half a tank of petrol if you want to compare it that way).

Re: Not gonna happen

"Solar power is already shifting from new installs to replacing old installs."

Where I am there are large new PV installs being built. The boom is due partially to new high tension line corridors being approved and installed so the energy can be sent off to the big city. The other half is that the land in the area is "dirt" cheap. There isn't the water for agriculture and it's pretty darn flat for miles and miles so there's not much ground work to do.

There are a couple of panel resellers not too far from me. They get them from large installations and when swaps are being done at the commercial generation places. When I talked with one, he was telling me that due to the economics for the commercial operators, they aren't using the panels for more than half their rated life. They degrade a bit and couple with that small efficiency improvements, larger form factors and higher voltages, it's advantages to change them out. I've held off on buying a full install worth as I need to put on a new roof first and they always seem to have stock so I'm not in a hurry. The upside is the prices are really cheap for the panels and they encourage testing them before you take them away. If the land next door comes up for auction and I get it, I might do a ground mounted install first. I'll have to see if I can cross property lines with the power cables or if they will charge me with terrorism if I do that. For tax reasons, I don't want to combine the properties.

Re: Did you buy or lease an electric car between 2019 and 2025?…

"I firmly believe that we have to cut our usage before the oil runs out"

Oil is just too dang useful for so many things that it isn't going to run out. The price is going to continually go up and up with one of the first things that will have to drop off will be burning it for personal transportation. The last, expensive to suck out oil will be used only for the product with the highest perceived value (likely something medical). It will be too expensive to convert into fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to grow mono-crops of food stock in the US to ship for free to Ethiopia so their population can continue to expand. Growing corn for biofuels will be out as well. When calculating the Earth's carrying capacity, assumptions have to be made about non-renewable sources of energy.

Re: Did you buy or lease an electric car between 2019 and 2025?…

"So 'renewables' are fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and very expensive. The underlying problem cannot be fixed."

Um, the problem is one is trying to match an intermittent power source with a system that wants to see a steady input. That screams "incompatible", but not that something like wind generation is bad. It's a square peg that somebody is trying to pound into a triangular hole. The colors don't even match.

Re: Did you buy or lease an electric car between 2019 and 2025?…

"We have to pay them to turn off."

Most of the time that's not the case. They are just switched off and not paid in order to keep away from over-supply problems. Now, if there were a way to signal EV's that for the next hour, electricity is 3p/kWh with another price update in 50 mins.........

Re: STORAGE STORAGE STORAGE

"There's an awful lot of housing with no off-street parking."

There's also a big need due to city planning for people to have vehicles. Either convenient public transportation can be put in place or planning permission for new homes or extensive remolding has to include off-street parking. The number of vehicles that can be parked tied to the size of the home/number of flats. In some places it's nuts to get around since the roads are effectively one lane with people parked half on the pavements and half in the road.

Re: STORAGE STORAGE STORAGE

"Storage is stupendously expensive. Utterly mind-bogglingly so."

Grid-scale storage is crazy expensive, but it's not an issue with storing the same amount of power in lots of EV's. It's also much more efficient as it removes at least one AC-DC-AC conversion with all of the inherent losses.

Re: rolling blackout on wheels

"And yet US - effectively - encourages monstrosities on wheels"

If you watch the mandated amount of TV each day is does. It a lot about being bombarded by advertising all day, every day that bigger is better. Of course it is for the car companies. The margins they make for giant pickups and SUVs is nuts. All of the geegaws that they glue on add another month's salary yet cost the manufacturer pennies.

Way back when I was in school, the maths requirement for graduation was tiny and dumdum match was good enough. There wasn't then and I don't think there is now a requirement for household budgeting/personal finance in the last couple of years of school when it should be taught. SM and advertising say that one must have a new car at least every 5 years and it has to be expensive. My TV is in the garage taking up space and needs to be sent off to landfill (tube type I can't even give away). With two engineering degrees, I can't help (over) analyzing things so there's no chance I'm going to spend a mint on a car or buy new. I can easily look up that giant vehicles are actually less safe than "common sense" makes them out to be. Amazing that the government is good for something.

Once when my car needed extensive repairs I was able to borrow a one ton pickup from a friend. Good god! Parking was a pain and I was always looking to see if petrol was pouring out from underneath through some hole. I didn't put too many miles on that truck before giving it back. My friend knew what it cost to run which is why it was just sitting around available to be loaned out. He still used it enough to justify keeping, but only just. I expect there are people with monster vehicles that aren't as cost sensitive, but they aren't likely noticing how much they're spending until petrol takes a big jump.

"public transport is frequently too crap for that to be viable outside of large cities (and sometimes within them)."

Taking the bus across some large cities can be very painful with having to stop every couple of blocks and traffic signals timed to be missed at each one.

"Personal, long distance transportation is set to become a thing of the past for anyone outside of the 1% in the West."

It depends a lot on where you want to go. I was hoping to do a trip to The Fully Charged Live show in Texas a few years back. I thought it would be good to take the train rather than drive. To take the train I would have had to arrive a day earlier than I would have liked and to be able to attend the whole time, I'd have to wait another day to take the train back. Two extra nights of hotels and meals eaten out made driving massively cheaper. All of that and Helen Czerski wasn't going to be there. Total bust.

Re: Mind you...

"8:15 - eat your insect meal allowance"

No need to worry about that. Check out the prices for edible bugs on Amazon and compare that with the price of mince. Cow for the win!

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"Law no.XXXX

Article 1. Operating a combustion engine equipped vehicle on public roads is forbidden. The penalty shall be a fine no less than the value of the vehicle payable in cash in 24 hours, confiscation of said vehicle and no less than 10 years in a state controlled penitentiary.

See, we don't force you to buy one."

When oil shot up to $140/bbl some years ago, the shift from driving a Hummer to taking the bus in the US was nearly overnight. The issue became that in places that had public transportation, they got slammed AND had to pay going rates for fuel months faster than it would take to go through the process to increase fares. People also got mad when busses bypassed stops where nobody was getting off as there was no more room to let more people on. No spare drivers and few spare busses.

It also impacted businesses that pay the least amount whose employees often drive land yachts that get really crap mileage but can be purchased for pocket change.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"but has since sold it and gone back to petrol, citing lack of infrastructure, needing to plan long journeys around charging stations"

Sounds like they were a poor candidate to begin with. There's also a learning curve that can't be ignored. I just watched a show where a person in an MG4 and another in a Tesla Model 3 did a trip from London to Land's end and back. Of course the Tesla driver was using Tesla stations (Exeter mainly) and using the onboard nav app. The driver of the MG didn't seem to know of a good EV nav app so was using Waze and not something like A Better Route Planner and charged up using some of the most expensive public charging on the planet. He also nearly got caught out as he had planned a charge stop near the limit of the car's range without having much experience with the car (and crap weather). To me, they nullified most of their talking points as they had also took different routes so comparisons weren't valid for the trip. The trip was also an extreme case rather than getting the cars for a week and using them in a more normal way. Do lots of people drive from London to Land's end and back over two days? Not choosing a hotel with EV charging was also sort of crazy.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"Episode 1 starts off with how the electric grid can fail catastrophically and what that implies, and it goes on to ask if anyone really knows how to use a Plough anymore"

That's a great series. I recall it often when I hear about local power grids shutting down their original base-load power plants and substituting lots of dodgy renewable sources. As James points out, the cause the NY blackout was a part that hadn't been upgraded when other parts of the network were expanded. The relay contact opens and causes a cascade of other things to protect themselves or, alternatively, go bang. A complex network can't "simply" be changed willy nilly without breaking of leaving a ticking bomb somewhere. The power issues in Texas are another good example. Can the wind turbines work well enough in freezing temperatures? Will they start turning if they have been idle and have been hit with freezing rain? What's the backup plan? Anybody? If I were living there, I'd have put some money into my own backups. A wood burning stove and a generator would be minimum.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"A Chinese company proposed a flow battery EV but the range was dismal. Refuelling was quick."

People get hung up on charging times on EV's, but most owners know that aside from long trips it's only about 30 seconds. The only time is what it takes to plug the car in. It can charge without you having to stand there holding the plug. I don't like spending the 5-10 minutes at the petrol station standing in the wind and inhaling fumes. Part of that is having to go to the petrol station in the first place. It's just one more thing on my list of things to do since the number of times a month I'd need to visit a public charging station can be counted on one hand, and not all of the fingers either. This last month I didn't have any trips longer than 150 miles in a single day.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"In a fleeting attempt to dispel some of my own negativity and cynicism: Flow batteries are apparently promising. But they do require a rather large amount of exceedingly hazardous chemicals, and portable they are not."

They might be a good storage option for solar/wind energy along side rail road tracks. In the US there are vast swaths of land that's not even very good for growing cactus along side motorways. A large solar PV field adjacent to a highway rest area (almost like motorway services but without any services) could power a row of EV chargers. A flow battery with better cost and maintenance requirements than a lithium based battery could be a good. The land nearby is useless for anything else so crop some solar power and sell it to EV owners on long trips that need a break to visit the loo and power lighting at the rest area without needing to string miles and miles of power lines. I'm visualizing the last time I did a trip from LA to Las Vegas. Endless miles of scrub begging for some way to use it for something. There's one town sort of middleish that's a big stopping point. It has EV charging, but there's a need for much more as EV's get more popular. I don't think that train service will ever come back. Every time there is talk, somebody turns it into an HSR project and it's gets dropped for being too expensive.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"Yes we ought to think about an alternative to petrol/diesel. But electric vehicles in their current form are so far off the mark."

If you are looking for the silver bullet drop-in replacement, don't hold your breath. For many people, an EV can work just fine. I'm one, but I don't have the upfront money needed for a purchase right now. They won't work for everybody anymore than a mandate that all cars are small hatchbacks and everything else is banned. While plenty of people could get by with a small car, plenty more need something bigger.

Re: But "everyone" won't move to an EV

"So even if EVs were mandated for all new vehicle purchases tomorrow it would be 2035 before we reached the point where HALF of all cars on the road were EVs! "

Change isn't the problem, it's the rate of change. The worst thing a government can do is mandate rapid change. There's just too many moving parts that will never coordinate properly for there to not be huge numbers of problems. Some local electrical grids are going off bang after the inputs have been switched to a bunch of "renewables" where they were never designed to handle many discrete sources. One day the combination of inputs and outputs melts down something that nobody saw as being a problem. With a slower approach, engineers have the time to do the calculations from end to end and also verify that what's in the plans and what is sitting at the substation match up.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

""What's not to like?"

Your garage burning down?"

So you're better off buying a well made name-brand eBike over a cheap Chinese import that clipped corners by deleting battery cell protection devices to save money.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"Oh yes, a Diesel powered van because even the greenwash-happy corporates have started to realise that their electric vans don't last very long before they conk out and take ages to charge, and time is money"

It's because the Amazons and Walmarts have outsourced their deliveries to the lowest bidder that has no chance at all of affording an electric van to use for deliveries. The deliver companies have often in their turn outsourced the actual delivery work to some gig driver who is in an even worse position to afford an EV.

There are company owned Amazon electric delivery vans that have been working out very well. For a fleet, the lowered maintenance and fuel costs really add up fast and they can afford it (Rivian made and Amazon owns a big chunk). They can also tack on a premium surcharge for delivering in zero emissions zones. There's also that big bucket of corporate greenwash they can advertise.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"Climate Change Act with it's 'legally binding' carbon reduction targets. "

That's very simple to deal with, just start banning businesses that output CO2. Too bad that a lot of that has to do with food, but compliance to meet any binding obligations can be done. What happens on the other side of the ledger has to be ignored. Still, fantastic opportunities in the mortuary and funeral industry to be had.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"those same scumbags have been telling us windmills have been getting cheaper, and will continue to be cheap."

The problem with wind turbines is there isn't a match between when they are generating and when there's demand. Hooking them into the grid is hopeless the way things work now. They either need to power things that don't have a problem with the intermittency or the grid needs to be able to signal when the wind is blowing and power can be had on the cheap. The turbines are getting cheaper, but that's not the issue, it's a utilization problem.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"rely on technology that doesnt exist to solve a problem not understood but also by the claims of the 'problem' we have planned solutions such as Drax burning wood chips."

Yes, but you left out that those wood chips are imported since the Greens would lose their minds if they were sourced locally. Burning tons of bunker fuel is perfectly fine, apparently.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

" It's total fucking madness, and all parties you can vote for are committed to the same madness."

So, pretty much everything we expect from government already. There are no parties, just different patterns on the neckties and BS that's exactly the same once you get past the smell.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"Or was that a conspiracy theory? Hard to remember which ones are real."

Some from column A, some from column B.

Politics is a big problem. There's lots of fanfare for a new rail line, but no so much for ongoing maintenance and upgrades. After some time the current system gets worn out and unreliable and people move into their cars long before anybody in government notices (being driven everywhere or having been allocated a nice car to drive themselves). The level of red tape can be overwhelming too so private companies aren't interested in transportation projects unless a government is handing them a cost-plus contract so there's a guarantee that they will make stacks of money whether they build it efficiently or not.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"Electric trams seem to work quite well in Europe.."

Just moving the diesel power plants from the rolling stock to trackside and running from overhead lines could be a net positive.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"What!? You can't just stamp your feet and demand something, and mummy and daddy will sort it out for you?"

There's seems to be far fewer "mummy and daddy's" as time goes by. Not as many are maturing into those roles.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"The power grid very obviously can't handle everyone moving to an EV"

Why not if it can provide refineries with enough energy to turn crude into transportation fuels for ICEV's? There will be some issues with distribution, but that can be handled over time if government doesn't insist on a super fast conversion from ICE to EV.

Re: Electric HGV

"The Tesla Semi with its 500kWh battery would be unable to carry a full load in Europe without exceeding the 40/44 tonne MGW limits."

That's what I thought, but Tesla's (only) customer right now is Pepsi's Frito-Lay division. Packets of crisps aren't very dense. As it turns out, most of the time large trucks "cube out", in other words, the trailer is full up before the weight limit is hit. A company shipping steel and other dense items isn't going to do well with an electric truck. Range and charging time will be super important too. Passenger cars sit a lot, but commercial vehicles don't.

Re: What a

"What a

Cunt."

A member of the "Combined Union of Non-Theatrical Stagehands"?

Re: Not Holding Junk Debt

"judging from the interview,

See seemed to be a psycho like muskytwat"

I've appeared to be a very different person when interviewing for a job depending on what it seemed like the employer was looking for. The break point will be when stock options vest or some other date is reached. At that point she can tell Elon to take is job and shovel it with fat payout in hand.

Re: The religion of confirmation bias

"Many people who argue like anonymous coward believe "picking confirmatory _literally anything in print_ is equivalent to doing research"

It's not doing research at all. There was a sub-story in one of the Foundation books about a character doing research by reading the studies other people have done and then deciding which one of them was most convincing or just cherry picking conclusions.

To do research, you need data. If you aren't developing the data yourself, you need to know a lot about who did the collecting and their methodology before you can use it to make any conclusions on your own. So much of what we are presented with are just the conclusions with a preface like "official sources say" which has zero value. The difference between CNN and the CIA's (or MI6's) own people reporting on something is the veracity of the source rather than the data itself. The data can be exactly the same. Two artworks by a famous author can be worth vastly different amounts of money if one has provenance and the other doesn't.

I've seen so much sloppy lab work in my days that I'm suspicious of everything.

"I tried my hand at building a simple computer model of how many people it would kill without lockdowns. The numbers it spat out were so unbelievably bad, something like a hundred thousand by the end of April, that I chuckled and assumed I just wasn't good enough to build an epidemic model that was worth anything."

There are too many variables to consider for a simple model to be useful.

One of the problems with a lockdown are the exceptions. Not everybody can be locked down as people are needed to keep doing crucial tasks. What's the 'leakage' rate as those people WILL be transmission paths. 2m was considered a good separation to maintain between people when they would go out, but that measure was arbitrary and not appropriate for every situation. The whole "you can have sex, but kissing should be out" was one of the most incredibly stupid things I ever saw. Too bad I didn't keep a reference but I haven't done a research paper in years and I'm out of the need or habit.

A big problem with wearing masks is they aren't used properly since people aren't trained to use them and will constantly grab them from the front as they irritate their face thereby transferring anything on their hands to the front of the mask and vice versa. I made some observations, but didn't make counts. I can say that the vast majority of people were touching their masks frequently and it would be very hard to model that and the effects without a lot of detailed studies.

"The last 4 years has shown that 'experts' spout what they have been told to say by their paymasters and 'consensus' can have zero basis in logic, fact or science and is all about feelings and pandering to the baying mob."

We have also seen that people with the qualifications to be considered experts in the relevant field are being canceled/called out because what they are saying doesn't follow the "official" narrative that might have been conceived via a vote by a bunch of failed lawyers (aka, politicians).

"Sadly, technical means now exist to pose effectively as someone you know, so I may have to revise this to anyone who contacts you via untraceable means, period."

You have to look at how those friends are contacting you. Why would a friend or family member "text" you if they suddenly needed money? Why wouldn't they call?

A text from somebody you don't know is a scam. Anybody that "voted" for Hillary via SMS should be signed up for a full evaluation and not be allowed to vote until they are cleared. Obviously, they don't understand how it works and they are a danger to the rest of society.