I would have ordinarily considered this a pipe dream but I kind of stumbled into a personal break from fossil fuels last month.
Due to the tax incentives, I have been expanding my solar array by investing about 10k every year, and I added a powerwall to distribute the energy better. The result is that last month my electricity bill was $38, despite being an all-EV household that grows 36 food plants hydroponically. I also coincidentally cancelled my gas bill the same month as I replaced the final gas appliance in my house with a really efficient Japanese electric oven.
I'm not fully net zero, but considering I wasn't even considering net zero, let alone trying for it, I have to say it's startling how easy it was compared to the impression I get from talking heads and Twitter warriors.
Considering people spend 10-20k per year on hobbies and I've only been at it for 3 years, i would highly recommend the hobby of self sufficiency.
I think the HN demographic of heavy six figure annual earnings has, uhm, lost sight of being an outlier and what’s ‘normal’ for the _vast_ majority of the population.
Combine average household eating out 3500, a average couple of 2 ordering delivery of 3687, average male and female pair coffee consumption of 4261 and mere lifestyle convenience exceeds 10k.
(Yes I consider unhealthy consumption to be a hobby)
And also consider that Starbucks and doordash don't pay for themselves over 20-30 years like solar panels do and you don't get a 26% refund for them at the end of the year.
Where did these numbers come from? $4261 for coffee? $6/person/day? That’s not a super common amount of Starbucks to get… that would even be counting weekends. I would guess even people who do Starbucks a lot would only get it maybe 2 times a week, which would be $624 for a year for 2 people.
I know people who get a daily Starbucks order, but I only know them from work. There’s a set of people who enjoy the ritual of getting out of the office to go for a coffee run and socializing on the way there and back.
> Let's say you're a baseball fan. The average cost of a season ticket is $4,473.
The average baseball fan is not buying season tickets. The average baseball fan cannot afford season tickets.
The average income in the US is $31,000. There is no way the average person is spending a third of their budget on "hobbies," especially when they're likely spending close to half of that on housing.
The fact is that there are an estimated 3.5 million MLB season ticket holders. These are people who are spending 10k on their hobbies. So it is reasonable for me to say "people spend 10k on hobbies"
English is being used worldwide in the year 2023, so may be it is me but by Considering People in your post means much more closely to median or average people.
There are people who spend 10K on hobbies seems much more reasonable.
I’m curious where your $31,000 annual income figure comes from. I’d had in my mind closer to $70,000 - which a quick confirmatory glance at the census seems to confirm for me [0] - but I should update my assumptions if they’re off by that far or I’m thinking about it wrong.
what you've linked is the median household income, not individual income, i.e., calculated as the combined gross income of all members of a household, so it stands to reason that the individual median/average income is closer to the $31000 posted by the earlier comment than the $70000 you mentioned...
>Let's say you're a baseball fan. The average cost of a season ticket is $4,473.
The average baseball fan is not buying a season ticket, partially because the cost is prohibitive to the average person. In fact, by definition, an extremely small proportion of baseball fans buy season tickets.
We ordered a hybrid heat pump in March '22 and it was finally installed last week. It's 6 degrees C out here out and this thing is chugging along steadily. It's quiet too.
Also adding more insulation as we speak (guys stomping over my WFH office roof now), so as these things happened to get installed in the same months, it's been an expensive month, with about €20k invested, before subsidies.
But already thinking about what to do next. Expand the current set of 12 solar panels (has to happen eventually. Our home is about 200 square meter with mostly flat roof, so ideal for adding lots of solar myself), get a heat pump boiler for hot water for showers etc, better windows in some places, etc. Also got a dynamic energy tariff, busy setting up Home Assistant. I have a huge spreadsheet with potential measures, their potentials savings and estimated cost, iPython notebooks with temperature and energy usage graphs, comparison of a dozen heat pumps.
For comparison, my energy bill also fluctuates between €30-50 a month (usually closer to 30), with an average of €40/mo for heating with inflated wartime prices.
No car (bike only or occasional electric car share), small apartment, city with good transportation, good insulation.
Would the plan be more or less effective if instead of focusing on electric-only vehicles governments had only subsidized plug-in electric vehicles with, say, an electric-only range of the 90th percentile commute in America? I ask because I have the general impression that we are installing 150Kwh batteries in cars when we probably could instead use 25Kwh batteries while still massively reducing carbon emissions. Also I have the impression that Tesla chronically understates the carbon intensiveness of building lithium ion batteries.
I'm not actually arguing for or against the plan detailed here. I'm interested in any further reading materials to help my understanding of the choice between plug-in hybrids and full electrics and why the current (largely political) choices have been made.
There's the theoretical argument against hybrids that while you might think you get the best from both worlds, you also get the worst - two drivetrains you need to buy, maintain, refuel.
In practice, what seems to happen is that surprisingly few people in hybrid cars bother charging the battery. This has been studied since buying hybrid can be a tax evasion scheme in some European countries. And when people actually do have a choice between hybrid and BEV, they don't want the hybrid because driving around with explosion-based engines is simply worse. So while hybrids had some time in the spot light, it looks like maturing markets go to full BEVs.
You could argue that still in the ideal world we should do X. But in the real world, developments take decades to play out. You can't expect everything to be perfect in the mean time. In the future, batteries will be much lighter and cheaper, and mining and manufacturing will be done with fossil-free energy.
> In practice, what seems to happen is that surprisingly few people in hybrid cars bother charging the battery.
That's just because of incentives. Once gasoline is 5x as expensive per mile than electric, people will charge every night. For the twice-a-year long trip, that extra gasolinr cost won't matter much, and give them the freedom they want. Without driving an extra half a ton of battery around the rest of the year.
For your other points, I used to be on the capex team at Tesla, so maybe I can shed some light.
> We probably could instead use 25Kwh batteries while still massively reducing carbon emissions.
Margins are everything in the automotive industry. Tesla has the highest margins in the industry by a considerable margin. If they release a car now with a 25Kwh hour battery, they will cannibalize their sales. Tesla knows that they can consistently beat the other players at cost, so they can transition easily once the other players catch up... which I'm not sure it's entirely possible at this point.
Secondly, the Capital expenditure costs drive, although amortized, much of the cost per car. The battery pack is only a small portion of the entire cost of the line and other material inputs, so dropping the kwH from 150 to 25 doesn't help the price of the vehicle from Tesla's side, but the end user will expect to pay a lot less.
Tesla worked directly with Idra to create one of the biggest presses in the world. The dies underwent hundreds of revisions, with a die CNC onsite. Those presses will revolutionize the way cars are made, and Tesla has Idra occupied for years with multiple press orders.
>Tesla chronically understates the carbon intensiveness of building lithium-ion batteries.
Tesla has been working on brine mining for years. They recently purchased some land in Nevada and have started working on the project. They have an exciting plan of directing an array of mirrors at brine lakes, and using a series of pumps, filters, and solar panels can get close to net zero.
People want extended driving range, irrespective of whether or not they need that range. Just as some people want bigger trucks/SUVs even if there is not a true need for such.
Success is built on selling people what they want.
That said, the new Prius is a welcome improvement. Toyota has the same problem as most EV makers in that it can't produce anywhere near the amount of its popular PHEVs to meet demand.
I fill up at my house overnight (In the United States, the majority of housing units are single-family houses – about 82 million out of the total 129 million occupied units in 2021 [1]), or at my grocery store in 20 min while shopping (250kw Supercharger). This is very convenient! I have a CCS adapter if I need to use an Electrify America station but have yet to use it.
In ~100k miles of US cross country traveling over the last five years, the only place I could not charge fast was middle of nowhere southeast Missouri, and there is a Supercharger there now [2] [3]. The city did let me plug into a dryer outlet to charge for free at the time, thank you Cape Girardeau! My gym has a free destination charger, as does my local brewery and airport parking. I no longer carry a 100ft 120V extension cord in my frunk, which I had to do in 2018.
Yes, we still have much to do to expand EV charging infra, but it’s not an unknown, it’s just more work. Street parking? Street charging [4]. Renters? Mandated EV charging spot quotas with funding for the infra. Workplace charging is important as well. You can even install EV chargers directly on electric poles and tap into the above power lines [5]. Where there is power, there is EV fuel, and what chargers you install where will be the intersection of dwell time and current needed.
If it’s about convenience, EVs win. It’s always at a full charge in your drive way in the morning. In the event of an emergency you can get 50 miles in the “tank” in 5 minutes at a supercharger, which are almost everywhere now.
For example, the management company that manages the apartment building where I rent my apartment has sent out a newsletter that they will convert 2000 parking places in their properties by 2025 with the following caveats:
- except where infrastructure doesn't support it
- except where there's not enough power to draw from the building
- except where it's prohibitively expensive to build the infrastructure
They manage 395 buildings with a total of 20 000 apartments.
Funny how "it's easy and convenient" is actually never easy or convenient.
Make sure you consider that a such a small-battery hybrid only has a zero emissions profile if it can be charged every single day.
A large battery EV can be charged once or twice a week in many cases and cover the commuting needs of someone who lives in a place without home charging.
It would be far more effective if that huge amount of money was invested in bike friendly infrastructure, bikes and public transport.
Also the problem with extend range hybrids is that people often just don't plug them in. This has been shown in many usage studies in Europe. And then these are just inefficient gas cars.
You’re absolutely right that batteries are over allocated. However, no one would buy a 75 mile range electric vehicle. The world is insanely simply when you jump to how it ought to be. How it is, is a lot more complex.
That's not what they're advocating for, they're saying a plugin hybrid with a 75 mile electric range, that uses a fossil fuel engine for more range.
The general idea is, suppose you want a vehicle with a 400 mile range. Once you have that 75 miles of range (battery pack of around 10-20 kWh), is it then better to add on another 40-100 kWh of battery as a "range extender", or to add a combustion engine and fuel tank as the "range extender" to get you to the 400 mile range?
And if you took that reasoning one step further, and replace the ICE with something zero emissions, such as a hydrogen fuel cell or even something running on e-fuels, it is basically a zero emissions car.
In other words we've completely made transportation green, and without ever having to use humongous batteries. This is an obvious conclusion that anyone can make, but unfortunately too many people have been caught up in the "mission" to not realize the existence of intelligent compromises.
I just bought a new car and chose a hybrid with a 1.3 kWh battery in it. According to FuelEconomy.gov:
- Corolla Regular LE: 316 g-CO2/mi (35 MPG)
- Corolla Hybrid LE: 210 g-CO2/mi (50 MPG)
- Tesla Model 3 RWD: 110 g-CO2/mi (134 MPGe w/ avg. US electrical mix)
So as I see it:
- First 1.3 kWh: 33% reduction
- Next 58.7 kWh: 32% additional (total 65% reduction from original 316 g-CO2/mi)
So why haven't we made every vehicle a hybrid first before pushing full EVs? Why aren't there incentives for regular hybrid vehicles. Seems like a terrible waste of resources when everything is so supply constrained.
Supposedly hybrids can't be as efficient overall. They're carrying around double the infrastructure. Still, hoping to get one myself before going all electric.
an EV + home solar = 0g CO2. You can never do that with a hybrid.
Plus that CO2 generation with an EV happens at a power plant and can be contained much easier (or sidelined when enough wind/solar replaces it). Hybrids also still emit other toxic things like NO2, and require maintenance.
Finally, an EV is simply a better product than any ICE (hybrids included). They are faster, quieter, less stinky and require no trips to the gas station or mechanic. I simply can't go back.
Solar is not 0g CO2e.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
says it's 14-73g CO2e. Home solar systems are probably less efficient so it could be even more. Do you have a battery to store the solar as well? You should account for the CO2 from its manufacture and losses from charge/discharge, too. This paper
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8654984/
says that solar+battery produces higher emissions than solar+power from grid
> no one would buy a 75 mile range electric vehicle
My friends bought exactly that - an old leaf with an aging battery that would get max 100km to a charge (60mi). That was more than enough for their daily commute, trips to the local ski resort, kids to school etc. They drove it for 5 years, it's range is now about 50km to a charge, and they just sold it to his sister who drives it to work everyday in Vancouver.
They said it was easily the best car they've ever owned, and they have a Model 3 now, Rivian on order.
When I was commuting daily, the leaf range would last me a full week. The leaf just kind of invites you to slow down and take it easy.
They must be fast charging it or taking it on highways for the range estimate to decay like that. My 2012 leaf still gives me 115km range.
And likewise, I strangely still prefer to drive it for in-town trips over my 2021 model Y. Not worrying about accidents or vandals probably a big part of it, but also it's just chill to drive.
Range anxiety is already a problem: there is no way I would trade in an ICE car for one that I can’t also use for occasional longer distance trips or that must be charged at every opportunity.
Range anxiety is an ICE driver imagined pathology. Once you understand how your vehicle uses electricity, it really is not scary at all.
When I am road tripping I usually try to charge such that I make it to the next charger at 3-5%. It ends up being a faster overall trip because you get faster charging speeds.
It's not like a gas tank where unexpected traffic can run you to zero. Bad traffic improves your range. If you bite off more than you intended, just drop 10kph and let the estimate adjust.
I don’t own an ICE or any car, and I really believe in electric vehicles. Whenever possible I rent electric vehicles, usually teslas, and multiple times and had to plan my vacation around making sure we had time to charge. It’s not imagined, I have almost run out of battery and trips have taken me hours more because of the current lack of high speed charging - the only reason that was possible at all was because of the large battery. I think the only imagined thing here is the demand for smaller battery cars- why would I buy a car that can’t also do these trips? And why would we want to push a heavy ICE and tank around all the time in a hybrid car instead of more batteries for this case?
I have been on many road trips in my Tesla, and have never looked more than 1 charger into the future. the best laid plans etc. Things change when you are on the road. Tesla automatically reroutes you if occupancy changes or you use more energy than it wanted you to.
The "lack of high speed charging" makes me think the incident you describe was not one of the "usually Tesla" trips.. and I agree the EA/CP/etc. charging network never gives you a reliable picture of where you can charge, which chargers are broken or blocked, and how fast and leaves you to do your own homework.
And like I said, the "almost ran out of battery" events are the ideal, not a problem. It is in your mind that these were bad times.
They had real effects where I couldn’t make side excursions traveling partners wanted, and had to stay for extra hours at other stops because the next charger wasn’t high speed. Instead of wandering the open world we needed to stick to the schedule or risk being stranded. Solving for the range of the vehicle became the primary constraint, especially when we got somewhere the Tesla told us had chargers but they weren’t functional. It didn’t run out only because of the anxiety, I don’t understand why because I was able to successfully navigate this at great effort compared to ICE cars that the problem doesn’t exist or the effort isn’t real?
In any case, dismissing this as a pathology when anyone brings it up, even when they want the same electrification that you do, doesn’t help anyone! Longer range batteries are what the market wants. Tesla isn’t crazy here, that’s why they are building their plans around it.
What I do is own a normal size car and rent a bigger one for occasional trips. Eg 4x4 or something with lots of luggage space. I figure paying monthly for a car I use twice a year is irrational, and I get a car suitable to the trip.
Are the costs of solar panel maintenance in the changing climate accounted for? Are the costs of making reliable and scalable storage capacity for temporary disruption of solar power there?
Could an alternative of making reliable nuclear power sources (either fission or fusion) work better? Or maybe focus on making AGI/ASI work and jump to some next levels of technology?
Yes. Nuclear is found to be ~12x more expensive per installed kW and ~9x more expensive to maintain than solar.
Storage of 4-8 hours of generating capacity is found to lower the ratios so that nuclear is only -8x more expensive to install and remains -9x more to maintain.
Does that efficiency figure fit with footprint though?
As in, Solar may be 12x cheaper per kW but requires 20x more spaces so the argument isn't quite so easy to make? I had always heard that the problem with Electricity in general is shipping it from empty spaces where you could build vast solar arrays to populated regions, but I'm not sure if that's just a lie OPEC sold me.
Grid interconnection is a huge problem for the centralized generation of solar. Most plans call for a microgrid strategy where rooftop solar plays a huge part. Microgrids eliminate huge costs in terms of grid maintenance and transmission, which is currently 60-90% of the average electricity bill.
I don’t see where 12x number is coming from and what are the error bars on it. It looks like depending on the source (i.e. France) nuclear energy is considered to be competitive with solar installations.
Most of the conversation about electric conversion relates to climate. But a huge additional benefit will be improved human respiratory health. Our current strategy of burning fuels at point of use - cooking, heating, ICE cars - means that the exhaust goes directly into the populated spaces where most people live!
If heating exhaust (or ICE exhaust) goes into spaces the users breathe, the users will be dead pretty quick. As in minutes, hours at most.
Combustion heaters for occupied spaces use heat exchangers to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Occasionally one cracks or fails and people die from the carbon monoxide poisoning.
ICE cars pipe exhaust away from the passenger compartments. Occasionally someone kills themselves by running their car in their garage.
Cooking, folks need to use fume hoods anyway, as smoke, oil fumes, etc. make massive amounts of air pollution and are unavoidable even with electric with most styles of cooking. Natural gas or propane stovetops if functioning properly only add a moderate amount of pollution, and little/no carbon monoxide.
That said, most of the exhaust fans/fume hoods hoods in most houses or apartments do nearly nothing except make noise. So yeah. Open windows.
The universe does not end at a car’s tailpipe. That exhaust stays in the city. Eventually it dissipates into the atmosphere, but a constant stream of car exhaust is going to change the air quality.
It’s disingenuous however to say they are even close to the same magnitude of impact, or that those impacts are in any meaningful way reduced by the conversion of one’s own usage.
"This is really the main message of today. And I really wanted today to be not just about Tesla investors who own stock, but really anyone who is an investor in Earth.
"What we're trying to convey is a message of hope and optimism. And optimism that is based on actual physics and real calculations, not wishful thinking. Earth can and will move to a sustainable energy economy, and will do so in your lifetime."
The tv show Ted Lasso introduced me the phrase: "It's the hope that kills you."
And in the show they rag on it, because people take it to mean "be hopeless". While I would never want people to be hopeless, I think that it is irresponsible to be hopeful without much more concrete plans to actually get things moving.
Climate Change is a tragedy of the commons, and nothing that Elon is working on fixes that. It still needs action as a tragedy of the commons, and Elon (and Tesla) can't fix that. We need other actions, and it's not enough for people to sit by and do nothing. It's not even enough to buy an electric car. We need people to change the ways in which they consume, and more than that we need them to vote to force companies to change the ways in which companies consume.
Yes, Where is the railroad networks for electric trains as a comparison against freight?
Also, why do they use MPG instead of ton-miles per gallon for freight shipping costs in the doc. Nobody cares about how fuel efficient an unladen class 8 truck is.
Tesla's mission is literally to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy. Tesla will execute on this plan but they obviously can't do it alone.
This is a terrific set of ideals and I think like many great visions, even if it’s not accomplished directly, it will put wheels into motion that will advance the world in the right direction, and might just help save the environment.
I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics
So much this, my god... And politics aside, everything Elon says about public health seems to be pretty dumb too. It's a good reminder that you can be extremely brilliant in your field but still no better than an average schmuck on other topics.
This is why we don't have a choice but to specialize and why we defer to expertise. In the 1600s you could be on top of all science-- that's simply not even remotely possible any longer for any individual.
Even today, you don't have to be an expert all low level details to have a non idiotic opinion on COVID. A little kindness, compassion and common sense is sufficient.
I broadly agree, but careful because IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right. If science teaches us anything, it's to be very wary of that.
Elon is right about one thing: the value of reasoning by first principles! :)
> IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right.
To add more to this, I would argue that our tendency to oversimplify subjects is a large part of many of the issues we face today. Important to remember that first principle reasoning is not the same as first order thinking. Most of the problems we face today are deceptively complex (appear simple on the surface but aren't) and first order approximations aren't good enough and can actually lead you away from a solution rather than towards. First principle thinking does require you to reevaluate your assumptions as well as constantly having serious doubt (challenging your own ideas).
To me, common sense should always be derived from first principles, and there should be legally required that every concept/argument be also decomposable and provable from first principles. Things/concepts should only become common sense after being battle tested socially for 1+ generations. Your parents teach you common sense and there is a paper trail to that common sense's origin. You don't get to create new "common sense" without doing the hard work.
Congratulations on your novel definition of "common sense", however if it takes a generation of socially battle testing a thing to become common sense, you've excluded e.g. "people have smart phones".
Nope, I think the vast majority of opinions on covid have been idiotic, driven by groupthink, and are very much in need of low level knowledge.
Humans are quite bad at evaluating low risks, comparing low risks, and balancing individual freedoms vs group good. The default position of most people was that authorities should use force to make everyone conform to one position.
Truthfulness, knowledge of statistics, and the ability to change positions based on new incoming information were severely lacking. Most people picked a team and fought for it relentlessly.
I agree with this as well, but it's not necessarily mutually exclusive with what the parent comment said. For the average joe, the right opinion for most medical questions is "I'm not sure".
So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of weeks. This thing did not have an outrageously high R_0, and we knew enough in March 2020 to stop the spread.
However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
For people wondering how this could happen, epgui is assuming action happened early on. April 1st 2020 there were 18k new daily cases (<200k cumulative) and <460 deaths (<4k cumulative). The reproduction rate was already in sharp decline (US even had <1 by May 3rd).
To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to.
(we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes)
I used to think this but I don't any longer. Two reasons : 1) asymptomatic, airborne spread makes infection control much harder and 2) your own admission that it would have required "very heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world". This second reason made it impracticable to stop the spread in March 2020. There are countries in the world where you simply cannot apply such heavy-handed action; there is not the level of control of or essential support for the population available.
Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.
Not to mention that we massively underestimated the spread of COVID in other species. It’s all well and good to pretend that we could lock down humans, but good luck getting wild animals to socially distance.
I'm gonna guess that there was significant silent transmission. I.e. people who were asymptomatic were spreading the disease. If that's the case, then there is no stopping once it went beyond a few dozen people. The last date that we could've stopped it was probably in 2019, before anyone even knew there was a problem. The Covid-19 might have been one of those few examples of the future being totally ordained and completely unchangeable.
That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No.
Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
You need to keep it low enough, for long enough, with no reservoir. It's the last part that's the problem. You'd either need to prevent all travel for years, or arrange for everywhere in the world to take action at the same time. The latter is basically impossible.
I'm sorry, but no. Yes, this might work at an academic level, but dealing with the politics of the world and human nature, this thing that you ask cannot happen given the diversity of the politics and cultures of the world.
It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.
But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.
Not to mention what was done, when it was done well, took pressure off the health care system (which was, and is, extremely stressed by the pandemic) which ultimately saved so many lives.
The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.
Australian here. It didn’t “ultimately fail”, it partially succeeded. The practical point of lockdown wasn’t a vain attempt to eradicate the virus. It was to buy the population time for vaccines to get tested, manufactured and injected. The statistics leave no room for doubt that thousands of deaths were avoided as a result. The only question is whether the lives saved was sufficient to justify the economic, social, and psychological consequences. Good arguments be made both ways.
If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.
This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone.
It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case…
And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
It's a mistake to think "authoritarian" means "effective". It doesn't. Authoritarian governments derive their power from the appearance of power, and that amongst other things means being brutal and never admitting that you're wrong.
In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.
I'm sorry, but this just bolsters my position. There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible. You have to tend to the infirm, you have to run critical systems, people need to eat (not even 50% people have ten days worth of rations stocked up; who is going to distribute more food, water and meds as they run out, etc?)
> There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible.
It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.
i think the last two years shown that nothing acceptable from a human rights pov could have been done to stop the pandemic from spreading once it was out of the bag.
i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.
Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.
We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?
Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?
We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.
Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?
Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.
I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.
Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.
Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.
Those people were then transferred into a quarantine facility for two weeks where they weren’t isolated from each other, and then sent home on planes all over America without even being tested for COVID on exit from quarantine.
> keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!
That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.
If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.
The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise.
After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations.
We can't look at complex issues as black and white.
Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task.
The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.
You can't stop the spread because a large percentage of the workforce simply has to keep working to keep society functioning. Electricity, water, garbage pickup, supermarkets, hospitals, fire department, etc. You can't do without those. And people who work in those vital industries need to bring their kids to daycare/school, otherwise they can't work.
If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.
The lockdown idea is appealing but the devil is in the details, you have to limit group sizes. If the transmissible window is say 3 days, and the group size limit is 5, that's a 15 day lockdown. In practice big households are impossible to limit so in theory if you don't lock down for O(household members) you waste time.
That seems very implausible and needs a better argument than an "area of expertise". By March 2020 there were cases popping up everywhere [0] and it wasn't just travellers from China. It'd take a handful of undetected cases in India and Africa and then how exactly would you plan on stopping COVID spread?
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world.
This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse.
It's a very simple argument. If you hold R_t under 1, the number of cases decreases exponentially. Eventually, you can unlock localities while restricting movement, and after some time the whole thing is dead in its tracks. This is something that almost every country eventually got around to doing anyways for probably longer on aggregate than it would have taken, it just wasn't timed right.
There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
Ooh! Oh we have to keep R_t under 1! Nobody thought of that. I wish the experts had spelled that out for us. Sorry to drip sarcasm but that is upsetting me.
How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.
COVID spread is an exponential process - you can't possibly do anything to stop R_t dropping below 1 from time to time. It saturates then recedes until a new variant appears. It it could possibly stay above one, we'd literally all have multiple cases of COVID right now. And I bet it does that fractally, so particular populations are all saturating and then seeing cases recede all the time.
The thing you're avoiding talking about seriously is the part that isn't already a certainty. Ie, the entire question.
R_t fell under 1 when the population was still naive. If you don't let the virus proliferate massively to begin with you won't have variants that are adapted to human immunity.
It's a certainty because it happened. R_t fell under one as a result of NPIs, not immunity.
You don't have to keep R_t under 1 forever. Just for long enough that the virus fizzles out. It's possible and in fact it has been done repeatedly.
> . It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of week
You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts
A stronger example would probably be New Zealand, just because stats from China are very difficult to ascertain. (China did a lot of things right, but they also did a lot of things very wrong.)
> So this is pretty close to my area of expertise.
Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right?
I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..).
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.
Vaccines do prevent infections at the population scale.
(cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)
Of course! Just give up a little freedom here, and a little freedom there, and once we're all in prison cells we will have all the security we need! Common sense.
"The vaccine is 100% effective and will keep you from getting or transmitting COVID." You mean that kind of common sense? The difference between Elon and most people on here is he has a long enough memory to realize he's being gaslit. With regards to politics, he has a memory long enough to remember when the left was pro-free speech and anti-war and how quickly that all changed over the last few years.
And on, and on, and on. Oh yeah there was also this fun one:
“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.
Donald Trump is the last person you should take medical advice from. He was criticized nonstop by medical professionals, scientists and even scientific journals for saying all kinds of crazy things, and this is the least of it. My 12 years of postsecondary education have not prepared me to articulate exactly how stupid this person is. It's indescribable.
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Link 2
That study has a confidence interval that is not reported in the news article. CNN is not a great authority for health advice. It's okay to watch/read it, but then it's incumbent upon you to verify the technical details. They get science stuff wrong all the time, and so do all other non-specialist news organizations.
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Link 3
Despite the super misleading name, this is a pro-industry lobbying organization. This website is not where you go to find health advice. Notwithstanding, the web page says the data shows 100% effectiveness (n = approx 30,000) against "severe covid" (which is defined in very precise terms), but again this will have a confidence interval which is not reported here.
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Link 4 / Biden quote
"you’re protected from severe illness and death" is accurate. No mention of 100%.
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Link 5 / last quote
Also seems accurate, at a glance. No mention of 100%.
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Bottom line: politicians are not who you need to listen to for medical advice (yes that sucks, and yes they should do better). Also you can't blame scientists, doctors and public health experts for your own misunderstanding, for the fact that you get your information from dubious places, and for your inability to grasp nuance. Also, public health messaging is insanely difficult even in the best of conditions: even when the message is 100% accurate there will be second-hand reports that get it wrong, and people who understand the complete opposite of what is said. You need to understand this if you want to hope to understand what's happening.
Go to nature.com or science.org if you want science news.
Some columnists can’t figure him out either, but his motives are clear, I’m going by not subtle actions.
He promotes GOP candidates and favors right wing journalists. He engages in QAanon conspiracies on his network. He’s one of many right wing operators who started or bought social media sites.
Donating the personal maximum to both parties is nothing compared to what is essentially $44B in-kind campaign contribution.
Isn't it too late for that given the exorbitant tax bill he already paid? [1]
Short of Democrats passing one of those economy-destroying net wealth taxes, or a truly-absurd unrealized capital gains tax; the damage is done for Musk. Granted, taxes of this nature being what they are, he will likely be able to recover some of that amount in future years.
In your mind, would it be "truly absurd" to redefine what counts as a realized capital gain? [1]
In my mind, if you take a loan against your equity, you are realizing the current market value. This would be difficult to implement (especially with private companies and options), but it would close a big gap in the tax system that is primarily used for tax avoidance. [2]
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[1] I completely agree that taxing unrealized gains in the current system would be a terrible idea.
[2] The main non-tax reasons I can think of are retaining voting power and cashing out on pre-ipo stock.
I agree and would support changing the tax code so that using an asset as collateral triggers a tax event. Until then I don’t begrudge Musk’s accountants for doing what the system permits. Borrowing against unrealised gains is common accounting practice; almost certainly done by many wealthy politicians and nearly all super-wealthy people.
Hang on, you lost me when you implied that tax would be forever avoided. Either the asset’s value is never realised, in which case they never really did have the wealth, or it is eventually realised and they pay a large tax bill.
Simply put there will never be enough for the anti-tax movement. Funders of the movement through cash or in-kind propaganda activity want lower taxes and would gladly support a zero taxes.
I completely agree. I also don't think it is hypocritical to take advantage of tax "loopholes" at the same time as arguing they should be closed. That is just good financial practice.
I doubt it, but why wouldn't it be close to market value for public companies?
I don't know how it works for the ultra-wealthy, but regular investors can draw a loan against their deposits with securities-based lines of credit (SBLOCs). SBLOCs have a limit smaller than the total value of your portfolio, but your collateral is still the current securities.
I'm mainly spitballing here, but I agree it would be extremely difficult to implement fairly. I just think it is worth investigating.
> I doubt it, but why wouldn't it be close to market value for public companies?
If it's a large amount of shares, there should still be a liquidity discount (not exactly a DLOM, but something like that, because when you try to sell a large amount quickly, you can't get your order filled at the market rates without depressing the market rates).
Plus, as we have just discussed, you can presume that even if the shares are fully liquid, part of the gains (if there are gains) will be taxed, and that's money that might not be available to pay off the creditor.
On top of that, I'd wager that lenders would subtract an additional safety margin for volatility/risk.
I have absolutely no idea, and please don't quote me on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if creditors applied a ratio of at least 1:2.
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Edit: this random website I stumbled upon on the first page of Google search results for the query "using share equity as collateral" (no idea how reliable or representative this is) seems to indicate that a ratio of 1:2 (they say "50%") is applied. They also say that you could expect to pay about 1% in interest annually.
https://www.ennessglobal.com/portfolio-finance/securities-ba...
They also mention that there may be qualitative factors that come into play:
The key points a lender will look at are:
- The value of your securities
- What the security is made up of
- The liquidity of the security
- If the security is listed, which exchange it is listed on
- How concentrated the shares are
- The industry or field the company trades in
- The management team
If anything the opposite is true. Being a true generalist is the antidote to specialists who have done so well in a field that they believe they can command other (usually soft skill) domains they see as inferior.
I think the only way to honestly hold this opinion is to have no idea how mind-bogglingly immense current scientific knowledge is (nevermind the scope of everything we don't know and the magnitude of the task of figuring out where the boundary between the two is).
It's amazing to me that anyone can still hold a "defer to experts" opinion after all the hysteria is over. It only works in apolitical situations, otherwise "experts" are just partisan mouthpieces.
The geopolitics of energy and resource scarcity are a primary driver of political toxicity and state sponsored murder and oppression. Transitioning to renewable regional and local energy generation and storage will reduce political risk to humanity dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
On another note, here's an interview with a crazy narcissist who bought twitter on a lark discussing the vision for reducing political toxicity on social media at a Morgan Stanley conference. Have you ever listened to an actual primary interview on the plan for twitter rather than a clickbait article on the topic? https://www.youtube.com/live/zpcgHK_fXRo?feature=share
> Transitioning to renewable regional and local energy generation and storage will reduce political risk to humanity dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
We had geopolitics before oil. Just ask the Athenians and Spartans or Romans and Carthaginians. The Mongols didn't go running around Eurasia for oil, and neither did Napoleon around Europe.
Oil may be less thing, but there are others. Per Thucydides, three fundamental motives are: fear, honour, interest.
> dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
I can't help thinking that oil and combustion engines are here for a long time. The energy density is unbeatable. As renewables succeed, oil's utility doesn't disappear. So it seems like we would find some new equilibrium.
60% of new generation capacity in the US was renewable last year, not for environmental reasons, but because it's the cheapest option. The reason this will continue is because renewables rely on highly scalable technologies that are nowhere close to optimized.
EVs benefit from cost scaling too. In Norway >80% of new cars sold are EVs 5 years ago it was -10%. Last year 20% of the Chinese market was EVs. As costs scale (Tesla has a 25k$ car in development) the same process will happen faster than you think across most markets.
Equilibrium will be established when renewable costs stop declining, this is likely to be after battery costs decline another -70% and solar declines -75%. At that equilibrium price oil will be relegated to use in plastics, lubricants, and other industrial/durable goods applications. If those cost declines are realized oil will not compete on costs with renewables and you literally will not be able to give away an old ICE car.
We can just directly convert green energy into hydrogen. For a lot of cases that is already more than good enough. Synthetic fuels may be needed, but possibly only in specific situations.
Yes and: H2, ammonia, methane, direct carbon capture, heat. Probably a few more.
Being a long time climate fatalist, I'm now guardedly optimistic about our eminent surplus energy future. If we can somehow keep warming to 1.5, we just might squeak thru this.
The latest master plan ironically admits the need for green hydrogen for green energy to be viable. A big deal, because it is one of the ideas that can match or exceed fossil fuels for energy density. It is perhaps the only thing in the whole plan that is the result of clear thinking. It unfortunately has not admitted the need for nuclear, but I guess we'll have to wait for master plan 4.
The people I follow are onboard with renewable hydrogen. The food fights are over automobiles and greenwashing.
This plans makes the case that we can get off fossil fuels with batteries, solar, and wind alone. Nuclear, hydro, geothermal, etc, are simply out of scope.
This plan also carefully omits any mention of climate change or time lines. Smart.
FWIW, Saul Griffith and others anticipate future fission and maybe even fusion, but they won't arrive in time to save us. They'll still be needed. To help with the cool down. For capacity as our current solar and wind build out is retired. Etc.
The power density of gas turbine engines is way better than internal combustion.
But we haven’t bothered with gas turbine cars and trucks because internal combustion has good enough power density and other relevant advantages (better energy efficiency chief amongst them).
Batteries aren’t good enough for long-haul aircraft, long-haul shipping, small boats and a few other sundry applications, but they’re good enough for road transport.
A gas turbine is a really bad idea for a car. They take a long time to get up to speed and spew a lot of hot exhaust in the meanwhile. Gas turbine cars weren't practical cars at all.
I will argue that the finite nature of battery related materials, plus their weight, is a major impediment against all-battery powered cars in road transport. They are not "good enough" except as a stopgap until the next idea comes around. Which ironically could just be synthetic fuels, but more likely something like a hydrogen fuel cell car.
They don't actually require platinum. Only some types. And even then, it is basically the catalytic converter in terms of platinum needed. It is also 100% recyclable already.
No, since sometimes it is also just iron or whatever. Not to mention that a catalyst is a surface, not a volume. You can get away with atom-thick layers of catalysts. Which is why even with platinum you only need a few grams of it. Cost of that is significantly less than a large mass of other materials.
Moving from fossil fuel to renewables doesn't eliminate geopolitics. It only shifts power. For example, here was some other news of the day[1]. Shifting power from Saudi Arabia to China probably won't be much of an improvement if it even is one.
> If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.
What's your basis for thinking that? If anything I'd say the weaponisation of "kindness and tolerance" to the point that it drowns out speaking the truth and calling out bad behaviour is the biggest problem with our politics.
(And as far as I can see Musk has removed the single most toxic influence on our politics by buying Twitter; even if the discourse on there is now worse than it was before, the benefit from real politicians no longer taking it seriously vastly outweighs any possible costs)
Refraining from ever saying anything against a person's political views is genuinely kindness, or at least it's hard to argue that it isn't. It just does more harm in other ways.
The redefinition of tolerance to mean deference to other people's absurd views is a travesty IMO, but that battle has already been lost.
In any case this "easy answer" is useless in practice; arguing that these policies are unkind or intolerant at best gets you debating semantics, and is usually even less effective than that.
- Refraining from ever saying anything against a person's political views is not kindness. It's possible to disagree kindly, which is indeed the point at issue here
- "The redefinition of tolerance" that you mention is not tolerance, but a convenient misdirection for politicians and other talking heads to use when justifying their demonisation of whichever outgroup is currently the target. The choice is presented as either maintaining the status quo at the expense of the minority, or this twisted phantom version of tolerance that is worse for everyone, thereby shutting down honest respectful discussion.
Weaponized “kindness” sounds a little bit oxymoronic to me, would what’s being weaponized not be closer to “niceness”?
Unless it’s second-order / indirect through people meaning well.
People thought he was in their tribe. Maybe he was. But now he's tribeless. So he's the outgroup and thus bad. That's literally the basis. I wish it were deeper, but it's not.
I mean Obama was just a strong choice, and what exactly was the alternative when Clinton and Biden ran? Honestly, not casting a completely insane vote doesn't mean much.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. A hardcore Republican votes for Republican candidates, of which there was reasonably popular versions of for each election. I wasn’t claiming he was a Democrat, just that he wasn’t a “hardcore Republican”.
I was just assuming you could be "hardcore" and still somewhat pragmatic or reasonable, but I'm with ya. (eg.: I'm "hardcore pro-science", but I wouldn't vote for someone I thought was a pro-science evil person. This example doesn't compare to what we're talking about, it's just to illustrate my own point in this comment.)
I'd argue that most people don't think, period... haha.
I totally know what you mean, and the key is whether someone has the ability to be critical about and vary their own default position, if you will. This can be very difficult to ascertain, because it's often a matter of counter-factuals.
Playing devil’s advocate because I agree with you, but there are plenty of people who would have said:
“I mean McCain/Romney was just a strong choice, and what was the alternative (to voting for Trump) when Clinton and Biden ran? Honestly, not casting a completely insane vote (for Clinton or Biden) doesn’t mean much”.
Granted there does seem to have been a division between McCain/Romney voters and Trump voters.
McCain and Romney would not be my preference, but they're not even remotely in the same universe/category/crazy-league/game as Trump. For me it has little to do with affiliation to any of your political parties in the US (not my fight, I'm Canadian). I cannot see a reasonable and/or decent person of moral competence casting a vote for Trump.
> I cannot see a reasonable and/or decent person of moral competence casting a vote for Trump.
This is an extremely bigoted statement. It's highly ironic, given the morally superior position you are assuming for yourself, that you don't appear able to see that.
I'm very comfortable staying on this side of History.
It's a fallacy to think that every choice in every situation is reasonable. More than one choice can be reasonable at the same time, but some choices are patently unreasonable.
You are saying that every person who voted for Trump is an unreasonable and/or morally deficient person. It is highly arrogant to put yourself in the position to make that call and, as I've already said, only demonstrates a bigoted mindset on your part (that you think you can universally define such a large group of people as inferior based on a single, and very shallow determinant).
> It is highly arrogant to put yourself in the position to make that call
I don't disagree, but it is my position in this case.
There are only a small handful of politicians around the whole world for which I would make this judgment. I feel the need to emphatically highlight that I would not make this judgment for >90% of conservative politicians in the world, and that my view on this is not centred on America or any of its parties.
Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Furthermore what one country’s liberals can see as unreasonable can be considered quite reasonable by another country’a liberals.
It’s really nuanced. For what it’s worth I think Trump is the worst and most embarrassing President in the history of the US. I have friends and family on the conservative side who voted for McCain and Romney who likewise think so and held their noses to vote for Clinton and Biden.
But at the same time I can see why someone would have reasonably voted for Trump. I completely disagree with them. Very little parts of my life, desires, and visions for the future of this country (or the world in general) intersects with theirs. I hope the vast majority of their vision for humanity never comes to pass. But I can still see their reasons.
Just to clarify what I mean when I use words like "reasonable", "patently unreasonable", or "correct"...
- "correct" / "incorrect": for objective questions with no wiggle room. 2+2=4 is correct. Correctness, when applicable, only allows one answer.
- "patently unreasonable": for something to be "patently unreasonable", there has to be no apparent or articulated line of reasoning which can lead to the conclusion. It may not be possible or feasible to prove incorrectness. It is patently unreasonable to vote for anyone for no reason, but it cannot be said to be incorrect. It is patently unreasonable to vote for a political party just because that's what your family does, or to engage with politics as if it were a mere spectator sport, but it cannot be said to be incorrect.
- "reasonable": without any regard for whether you would come to the same conclusion, something is reasonable if there exists at least one line of reasoning which can justify the conclusion. Reasonableness, when applicable, allows for multiple answers. Even when a better answer exists, an inferior answer can be reasonable.
I am able to say things like "it is reasonable to vote for a political party I do not like", and "it is patently unreasonable to vote for my favourite party in a given situation".
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> Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Given the definitions above (which are roughly the same as used by judges in admin law, I'm not just making stuff up here), the liberal person in your example is not being reasonable, and the conservative person is probably failing to distinguish between reasonableness and correctness.
Worth noting these aren't ideals or visions, nor are they really specific to Telsa or Musk. This is a summary of the common consensus that the entire world is working towards and has been for a while.
This is just putting a set of numbers to it and summarising why the experts believe it's possible.
Entire countries have adopted national economic strategies based on this stuff. It's not coming out of leftfield as a big surprise to anyone paying attention.
yes. there is environmental sustainability and then there is social sustainability.
nobody wants to live in a carbon free world if every company is as abusive as Tesla to its employees. and that culture came from Musk himself. the way he treats people does not make for sustainable relationships.
I don't think Tesla anything so particularly bad, globally, in terms of employee treatment that it would prevent it from playing a large role in a carbon-free transformation... look at the stuff we'd be replacing in this.
Tesla the org will outlive Elon. We thank him for his exceptional efforts to accelerate the transition to clean energy and mobility, personal issues and poor behavior aside that need no mention. Just as people like him squeeze others to get as much as they can, we should hope for the same: the largest amount of progress delivered at the lowest amount of harm caused until he’s moved on. “The impossible delivered merely late.”
It’s about maintaining everything in tension sustainably. No excuses, there are no heroes.
(early Tesla investor because climate change is existential, no current exposure, none planned)
Actually Musk was not the founder of Tesla, nor is Tesla likely to be a major car maker in the future. It is basically a terrible car maker know for its poor quality, on par with Chrysler and the like. It is likely destined to be own by some other car company eventually.
> nobody wants to live in a carbon free world if every company is as abusive as Tesla to its employees.
I don't see that at all. I mean, by any reasonable standard Tesla is... just another employer. It's true that the tenor of the discussion around them is quite frankly batshit. But... they're just a company. Every big corporation has a laundry list of terrible accusations, that's just the way capitalism works.
I mean, take Musk and all his nonsense off the board and tell me if you really believe Tesla is a worse place to work at than Walmart or FedEx or UnitedHealth or wherever. I just don't see it.
So... yeah. Bring on the carbon-free world of occasionally abusive capitalist overlords, please.
I thought HN of all place is free of faked outrage or ignorance?
Even if Starship was the dirtiest of a rocket (it isn’t), a rocket flight is only as dirty as a B777 flight, thousands of them happening everyday.
Try this exercise. Measure how much carbon incurred by an activity that you absolutely love, such as playing video game, and see how much you could contribute by not doing it. A lot of activities is worth doing, even if there is inevitably carbon cost, even if you don’t think it’s worth it.
Fuel is one of the cheapest portions of launching a rocket. There’s much bigger problems to solve on that front until they start launching commonly. Once they do then moving to sustainable methane won’t be an issue.
Also what’s the alternative right now? Hydrogen made from the same methane by steam reformation? We don’t even have long range aircraft running on anything but jet fuel, which is more polluting than methane.
Nothing about Starship is incompatible with carbon neutral fuels.
The point of Starship is Mars; Mars cannot be done with Starship in the absence of a box that fits in its own cargo bay, and which takes in sunlight, CO2, and water, and outputs methane and oxygen.
Fortunately some French scientists figured that out how to do that 126 years ago.
They are spooling up commercial passenger rocket flights (for cross-continent travel) in 5 years and won't likely have renewable sources by then, they have already put in or filed to put it pipelines for petro industry gas sources in Texas.
They gave the timeline for entering passenger service competing with long haul aviation back in 2018, sayijg within a decade. Years later they reconfirmed that timeline.
You're willing to buy his estimate for a timeline about a thing you don't like (I've seen him talk, even he knows his timelines are optimistic, and he shows much the same optimism about FSD) while totally ignoring the thing invented before any living human was born and which is already deployed in various places?
Well first off, that's Elon time dates, and secondly even if you take it at face value, 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
> , 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
Like this?
> All Tesla Supercharger stations in regions affected by California power outages will have Tesla Powerpacks within next few weeks. Just waiting on permits.
And:
> Over time, almost all [superchargers] will disconnect from the electricity grid.
> Tesla Supercharger will over time allow you to travel anywhere on pure sunlight for free
It really doesn't make sense to disconnect them from the grid if they aren't next to tons of solar, their physical footprint often isn't big enough to capture enough.
Other than a few very high profile lawsuits I don’t get where the idea comes from that Tesla is “abusive” to its employees. I have friends who work there and they never mention any issue or are trying to leave. I think it’s a combination of: 1. Europeans not familiar with US labor laws and seeing common things in the US, but only seeing them reported from Tesla, and 2. Reporters pouncing on any labor claim against Tesla as if it’s already certain it’s true. For example the well known “Tesla whistleblower” that was widely reported was found by the judge to have lied about many things and was ordered to pay Tesla.
Even the notable labor relations board case that Tesla lost was about employees attacking other employees with racial slurs (usually Hispanics on blacks which is common in California) and low level management not doing anything about it. Yes it’s bad but it’s not “Tesla is abusing it’s employees” and Tesla long ago took corrective action as the lawsuit has been going on many years.
So I’m still struggling if the perception I’ve seen on the internet about Tesla is just people misinformed of the US or if it’s something else.
No, but they're forced to work at other companies that are inspired by Tesla, or outright coerced into adopting the same practices or perish due to market forces.
Toxic politics being what? Seems like he’s on the right side of climate change, abortion rights.
Is it just the freedom of speech thing? What’s wrong with being pro first amendment? That right, and absolutists who support it, are the biggest reason why the left has been able to gain so much power and make so much progress.
He also seems to think that "woke" requires dishonesty, which makes me a bit sad. But then, I'm still using the term as it was ages ago, I'm not actually sure what it's supposed to mean these days — modern usage pattern matches to Tories yelling "political correctness gone mad" in the 90s, and that phrase meant everything and nothing all at the same time.
(I've also heard people call him transphobic, but the evidence they link to is a dog whistle that I'm — continuing the metaphor — unable to hear).
It would be really great if one day hackernews could have a political conversation that isn't just strawman tennis.
"Conservatives think ... obviously dumb and bad thing" and "Liberals think .... obviously dumb and bad thing" being shouted back and forth is extremely unenlightening.
Please don't straw man the other camp's political views and if you aren't 100% sure you can represent them accurately, just say the thing you believe in and give some basis for why you think that's correct rather than misrepresenting the other side and saying why you think that's wrong.
> Ever since Musk turned Twitter into a more open platform
That didn’t happen, though.
> Reducing censorship became “toxic politics”
Musk hasn’t reduced censorship. In fact, he very quickly stepped back from even claiming that, claiming instead that he was maintaining Twitter’s content policies (which, in fact, he never retracted) and even embracing artificial reach limitation (the same “shadowbanning” practice he had early complained of) as a means of enforcing it. It’s true that outside observers that have been tracking content on Twitter since long before Musk took over found that particular forms of hate and abuse (most banned by the written policy) took off under Musk, while other viewpoints (while not engaging in nominally banned conduct) were suppressed, but this shift in bias in content moderation is very much not the same as making it a “more open” platform.
> Musk is now flagged as “not a real leftist”
Musk was never considered even loosely a leftist. It’s very hard to see how a hypercapitalst (in class terms) could remain such while also being a leftist in ideological terms, but if such a contradictory character has ever existed, Musk was never it, and no one ever thought he was. Before he played footsie with Trump, Musk might have been pegged for a center-right neoliberal pro-weed capitalist with a horrible record on race relations that might manage to fit in with the right wing of the Demcocratic Party, but…that’s about as far left as anyone ever thought he was.
> but a right winger,
I mean, race and class issues aside, he’s been endorsing right-wing culture war positions on all the hot issues, so, yeah, that’s kind of how he’s asked to be seen, I don’t think he’s actually ideologically a right-wing culture war extremists, I think he’s just virtue-signalling to that camp because that faction has made naked its willingness to punish enemies and reward allies in industry, whereas the opposing political camp has generally been loathe to do so, at least openly and overtly. But, whatever the motive is, Musk has clearly made a conscious decision about how he wants to be seen, and how he is seen reflects that.
> he’s probably done more for liberal causes than any of these authoritarian phonies.
this is all just a plot to take over the world. he clearly believes that he has the best ideas and therefore if everyone could just fall inline then things would run more smoothly. i mean think about it, he has a space based internet service that he can broadcast his ideas and control information flow any way he wants (especially when other sources of internet disappear). He now has a plan to control the energy distribution to the entire planet. This is lex luthor kind of plotting. or maybe im just letting my imagination run away with itself.
Advertising before a democracy's election is hot garbage on fire meandering down a flooded road and floating with old fossil fueled automobiles in the rain. The Master Plan 3 could have an annex to apply Super A.I. to subj/objective positioning of voter options summarising candidate's pro/cons in six paired bullet points addressing the advertised-to audience along the I.Q. bell-curve. There could be a 400-word GoogleGPT blurb extra to make the persuasive case either way for audiences unable to watch scifi movies like Solaris bu able to watch Spaceballs.
It's honestly more of a grand vision of what a future society could look like, not anything any one company could accomplish. You read papers like this from many a futurist.
How about we discuss the actual plan and you don’t bring your politics into this discussion? Wouldn’t that be nice for a place like HN for once.
You really can’t stomach someone you disagree with politically creating an amazing vision and product that actually improves the world? Is politics that important?
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics.
What if his political tweets is the result of systematic thinking? If someone holds a viewpoint that differs from ours, does it necessarily imply that their perspective is outrageous and incorrect?
It's not just his political tweets though. It's also the treatment of employees at Tesla and Twitter. Pedo guy. The private detectives. Selling stuff that doesn't work. All that stuff.
Maybe, like most of us, he sometimes fails to meet his personal standards, and regrets some of the things he does, but I've personally lost confidence that this is the case.
You don't call someone "pedo guy" without evidence if you are trying to avoid toxic politics.
You don’t think there’s a problem with the worlds richest man, with a following of millions, calling some effectively random British guy in Thailand a pedophile?
You think that was a fair exchange? That these insults were equivalent?
That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
> You don’t think there’s a problem with the worlds richest man, with a following of millions, calling some effectively random British guy in Thailand a pedophile?
I think it's a dick move for sure. However if we follow your line of reasoning, we end up on a world where everyone is free to insult people more powerful than them with no repercussions.
This sounds like a recipe for creating a lot of bullies. Bullies tend to continue their behavior and continue to escalate as long as they feel like they're the most powerful person in the room. It's generally only when they pick on someone bigger than them (metaphorically) and get rightly smacked down do they learn the error of those ways. Note that this is a generalization: don't take that to mean that a smackdown is the only way they learn, or that they are guaranteed to learn from it!
I'm more of the opinion that if you're going to hurl insults/fists, you deserve whatever happens when someone fights back. It's not like smaller/weaker/less privileged targets are going to have much ability to fight back, so it seems important that the ones who have the ability to retaliate are able to do so, in order to keep bullies in check.
> That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
I find this very hard to believe. This sounds more like the kind of thing someone says when pursuing a lawsuit, because they (strategically) have to.
The erraticness of his behavior makes it hard to believe he is thinking systematically. Just look at his leadership of Twitter and you can see him changing his mind constantly about strategic decisions, sometimes daily.
> If someone holds a viewpoint that differs from ours, does it necessarily imply that their perspective is outrageous and incorrect?
Ironically, in the context of GP's comment, this is a large cause of toxic politics. The demonization of people with different viewpoints and refusal to engage in genuine discourse brews the toxicity.
I think Elon is pretty much where he was years ago. Progressives have abandoned classical liberalism. I feel same way. And so do many people (Tobi Lutke, Tim Urban, etc.). Berkeley's free speech movement stands in stark contrast with the DEI marxism going on today on campus.
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics.
I actually think he is smarter than people give him credit for, politically.
One of the major problems right now is conservatives, who are about half the country, aren't into supporting renewable energy anything (but liberals will continue to buy Tesla products even if you piss them off a little). A lot of what's he's been upto lately is attempting to socially engineer renewable energy into the conservative world, which is a tough problem to crack to begin with.
There are many ways to increase adoption of renewable energy that don't involve putting down minorities, being racist, sexist and all around offensive and acting with the maturity of a spoilt teenager.
Two of them being through government regulation and incentives which are major contributors to Tesla's success.
It's possible to agree with both your comment and the parent comment, so I feel like you could be a bit more charitable in how you interpret the parent comment.
Ad hominems aside. I am guessing you are working in the renewable energy industry since you are pretty confident in other ways of increasing adoption. I'm not familiar on the topic, so I would like to hear from an expert like yourself. Could you elaborate how?
That's not really an ad hominem, it's a criticism of the manner by which Elon (according to the commenter) goes about trying to achieve his objectives.
You can disagree with that characterization or interpretation, but it's not an ad hominem because it's the main subject matter in this context.
Ok, but is there actual evidence of Elon Musk behaving in a racist or sexist way? Because if not then this is just a generic attack on the man, not an attack on his ideas.
There are allegations (probably in the form of guilt by association), vaguely suggestive tweets (or tweets that have obvious potential for misinterpretation), and things like that.
I think you could make a very good case against that comment, but "ad hominem" isn't it IMO. I'd argue {{citation needed}}, "lacks substantiation", "slightly hyperbolic", or something like that.
Gish Gallop isn’t a logical fallacy, it is a debate tactic. Seriously people, if you’re going to call out misuse of logical fallacies, make sure it is one.
These blanket judgements and accusations at a good half of the population of the United States is why we’re in the social mess we’re in now. You’re contributing to the problem, the divisive rhetoric that isn’t useful for anyone on any side if we wish to come to common ground across the aisle. If either side wishes to make impactful change.
Already the world is moving away from the US dollar hegemony, a move that will impact our children, and children’s children if we as a country don’t participate in these evolving times. There’s numerous other examples of the world making decades-long plans that the US is not positioning ourselves appropriately for. We’re distracted by such tribalism on both sides.
The United States won’t be taken over by an outside power, no, we’re doing well enough eating ourselves from the inside.
It suggests the behaviour is motivated by the desire to trick a bunch of unsophisticated rubes into doing something they are too stupid to realize is a good idea for ideological reasons. Seems pretty insulting to me.
No more unsophisticated than the rubes that spend 20 minutes washing their zip lock bags "to do their part for the environment" and then hop on an airplane an generate more emissions than throwing out a lifetime's worth of plastic bags in a couple of hours.
I have had the exact same thought, because I really want to believe that Elon is not as dumb as he seems on Twitter... But if I'm being honest with myself, I don't think it's that plausible.
More likely is that he doesn't sleep enough and/or is getting older and/or is under a lot of stress and/or is in a crazy trump-news-cycle-like feedback loop, and that he's just developed some pretty big blind spots, like any other mere mortal.
The country isn’t really 50/50 conservative and not conservative. The voting public is at some closer ratio to parity, but half the population doesn’t vote.
I think ford rolling out the electric F-150 will do way way more to move the conservative world toward electric vehicles than Elon posting memes on Twitter. Eventually someone they know will be talking about the low maintenance and good features, and no one likes high gas prices.
As a Tesla owner, I’m not buying a second one, but it has nothing to do with politics. The promised features of the car haven’t materialized and other manufacturers are much closer to the type of self driving that matters to me, hands off the wheel, I can do something else when I’m in traffic jams. That said, none of my friends who are proud conservatives would ever buy a Tesla, they revile the brand. Someone (liberal) in my family pointed to Elon’s antics as the reason they chose a mustang e. If he’s a genius at social engineering Tesla into the conservative brain, I haven’t seen any results in my little slice of the world. Not sure what’s happening in the rest.
Strange. Where are you all located? I'm in a conservative state, and I don't hear any anymosity against Tesla vehicles. The only gripes I get from all the conservatives I know about Tesla vehicles is that they cost too much for them.
FWIW and anecdotally, I'm in Canada and while I'm seeing a tremendous explosion of Tesla vehicles on the road, at least 80% of the people I speak to seem to think Elon is the devil incarnate.
(I 100% agree that he should be criticized for a lot of things, but nuance is not trending apparently.)
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
Elon Musk is not (and never has been) a politician. What exactly do you think he should do differently?
Reminds me of the energy outlooks of the different oil companies that were predicting up until mid 2010's that gasoline demand will always go up and more investment in deep water exploration was warranted.
Then they came across electric cars and fracking.
Nobody has a clue about the energy landscape in 20 years. They are just painting the canvas the way they want to sell it to their investors.
What worries me is lack of concrete plans built into the master plan for recycling. The only mention I found was “ In the 2040’s, recycling will begin to meaningfully reduce primary material demand as batteries, solar panels and wind turbines reach end-of-life and valuable materials are recycled. Although mining demand will decrease, refining capacity will not.”. There needs to be an integrated plan to not only prevent industrial by product pollution but reduce it over the years.
Tesla is already recycling 92% of its battery cell materials, but the low volume is mainly because people are not turning in their batteries for recycling yet. As the EV fleet ages, this number will steadily increase.
This master plan has a section dedicated to the estimated curve of material demand based upon recycling. It shows a large initial increase followed by a leveling off and then eventual dramatic decrease, as a result of battery retirement and recycling.
There's already several cash flow positive companies doing lithium ion battery recycling. You need to keep in mind though, that recycling, at this point, recycles mainly batteries from smaller products, hybrids or very very early EVs (or EVs that were totaled). There are almost zero EVs that are at end of life at this point. Tesla doesn't need to be getting into battery recycling if there's already companies doing it and are competing for that revenue source. I believe Tesla already works with such battery recycling companies who buy up Tesla's old batteries. It's not Tesla doing it, which is why they don't make big mention of it.
It’s not a very meaningful problem now, scaling is.
If you have a growth of 50% per year (Tesla) it mean that the 20 years recycling is 1.5*20 = 3325X less.
I hear that most of the recycling is from scrap production, if you have a 1% defect rate you have 30X more recycling from new production than from 20 year old batteries.
I hope it will help the industry/government to push things faster.
It seem to me there is a huge problem of incentives at the moment: the price of electricity is mostly constant (in most place) but the production is not.
In particular EV could help a lot to stabilize the grid and use excess renewable energy.
Am I missing something here? This seems to be a white paper with a vision of a global energy future. But it is not what I'd call a plan in any usual sense of that term, especially not a plan for one of the many companies that would be working to fulfill the vision.
It is certainly a departure from the previous master plans, which were informal blog posts by Elon describing Tesla’s future plans.
Maybe this is the formal groundwork for another such informal blog post, and it just happens to share the same title. Or maybe “informal blog post” was the effective medium for Tesla’s previous target audience (consumers) and “formal whitepaper” is the effective medium for a different target audience (government policy-makers?) and this indicates a change or expansion in Tesla’s target audience. I know that the US is putting out a “total electrification via renewable power” vision, perhaps this is Tesla positioning itself to be a critical supplier of that vision.
> Maybe this is the formal groundwork for another such informal blog post, and it just happens to share the same title.
Close - this is the detailed background behind the plan as presented a month ago. From the executive summary (page 2):
> On March 1, 2023, Tesla presented Master Plan Part 3 – a proposed path to reach a sustainable global energy economy through end-use electrification and sustainable electricity generation and storage. This paper outlines the assumptions, sources and calculations behind that proposal. Input and conversation are welcome.
What is under the sheets on page 23 of the PDF? The first vehicle under the 300M looks like it has a flat roofline like an SUV or RoboTaxi. The second vehicle under the 700M looks more like a sedan.
Right now the only minivan that's even remotely electric is the PHEV Chrysler Pacifica, and it only gets a few dozen miles on battery only. As a father of 4, I'd welcome any newcomer in the minivan space.
Most people don't realize that a minivan is better than a truck, SUV, or crossover for the blend of efficiency, people-moving, luxuries, and cargo capacity for anyone with more than a kid or two!
First principle analysis strongly suggests Tesla is definitely working on minivan/peoplemovers and cargo vans. In terms of broad clusters of vehicle types, you have:
Personal vehicles: sports cars, small sedans, large sedans, and SUVs. Tesla has 5 offerings in this category (S, 3, X, Y, Roadster).
Utility vehicles: pickups, utes, trucks. Tesla has one forthcoming offering in this category (Cybertruck).
Heavy transport: Semitrailers, 18 wheelers, freight haulers, road trains. Tesla has one forthcoming offering in this category (Semi).
Light transport: Minivans, peoplemovers, cargo vans, “Maxi Taxis”, mailtrucks/delivery vans. Tesla has no forthcoming offering in this category as of yet. All of their previous offerings synergize well with development of this category, and the advantages of Tesla-style electric vehicles have a lot of comparative advantage in this category.
As a fraction of human endeavor on this planet, rather than using some monetary unit...
What was the cost of light and heat in 1850 relative to human output? Whaling and chopping wood and digging up coal, etc. 20%? 30% I'm sure it's been estimated. None of those 1850's assets survived electrification.
How many 50 year old infrastructure assets of the coal and natural gas ages are still working fine? Lots of them, I'd wager. $10 Trillion seems like a lot (and oh boy, it is a lot), but that's how the soil gets turned over for the next season's crop. We don't harvest whale oil for lights anymore, though it was the primary source of high quality light in the 1840s. We shouldn't burn oil from the ground to boil water to spin a thing to make electricity 800 miles away from the light today.
> "We don't harvest whale oil for lights anymore, though it was the primary source of high quality light in the 1840s. We shouldn't burn oil from the ground to boil water to spin a thing to make electricity 800 miles away from the light today."
Primary energy infrastructure planning takes place at a 20-30 year timeframe. GDP for 25 years is nearly $600 trillion USD, so the Master Plan is approximately 1-2% of available resources.
How many liquidity injections and financial bailouts we will need over the twenty year timescale in the plan? One advantage of this plan is that it provides a direct liquidity injection and provides demand in several key industries. It goes without saying that an EV company would be a huge beneficiary from some of those funds, but I wonder what the net cost would be if it offsets the need for even some of the trillions being used to glue together the world economy since the events of '08.
It is remarkable to me that on HN (a tech discussion forum?) the top comment on this thread is about politics. Sign of the times, I guess.
I look at papers like this and predictions with great interest. Several years ago I wrote a simulation model to try to understand energy requirements for a full transition to electric ground transportation in the US.
I learned a few things through this exercise. The first was that speaking of energy was wrong. Charging vehicles is a power problem. Second, predicted a need for an additional 900 GW to 1400 GW. Again, just cars, nothing else electrified.
Over the years I've had confirmation of this range being within what I would call a reasonable prediction. It is interesting to see Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) continue to confirm I wasn't too far off.
I have also modified my stance over time about what this meant. In simple terms, this prediction would be equivalent to having to build over a thousand new 1 GW nuclear power plants. This is never going to happen. I doubt we can (or want to) even build a hundred of them. MPP3 assumes we build zero additional nuclear. Not sure I agree with this idea. However, it isn't a deal-breaker.
After reading this paper a while back I developed the thought that wind might just be a far more intelligent source of clean power than nuclear (definitely) and likely solar.
Table 6 (page 20) is interesting to me. We have to build a 5,338 GW (again, power) generation capacity in order to reliably produce the energy we will need.
Our current capacity is 1,200 GW. This highlights the enormity of the project. We have to replace the current generation systems with clean systems and build an additional 4,138 GW on top of that. That is over three times current capacity on top of what we have. Again, just highlighting the enormity of the task so it doesn't get lost in the numbers.
When looking at table 6 I immediately focused on what I will call the "specific energy generation factor" for each technology. I'll define this as Annual Generation / Installed Capacity.
In other words: How much energy do we get per year for each GW of installed capacity for each technology.
Once we look at installation cost solar and onshore wind are very similar. Yes, table 5 shows a difference in operating and maintenance costs. I'll take their word for it. My sense is these costs would decrease, perhaps significantly, through the natural optimization that happens as a technology is deployed and matures.
My point is that, to me, wind seems like a far better idea that solar on many fronts. It is far more reliable on its own. Without going too far, solar is off approximately 50% of the time and requires 100% reliable backup even if a nice fluffy white cloud flies over a panel.
Wind requires far less overbuild and somewhere in the order of a factor of four less storage to be over 95% reliable.
Jumping to table 14, we discover how much land is required for each technology:
Solar: 3.9 acres/MW or 3900 acres/GW
Wind: 0.75 acres/MW or 750 acres/GW
Wind requires 5.2 times less land.
Going back to table 6, solar and onshore wind combined contribute 10,106 TWh.
How many GW of installed capacity would be required to supply that much energy if all of it came from a single technology?
Solar: 7,598 GW
Wind: 3,292 GW
How much land?
Solar: 29,632,200 acres = 12 times the area of Hawaii (all islands)
Wind: 2,469,000 acres = 1 time the area of Hawaii
Anther comparison of land requirements:
Solar: 30% of California
Wind: 2.5% of California
I am not categorically stating that wind is a better option. I am simply raising the question. To me it seems that solar might not be the best idea. It requires far more land, storage and overbuilding. The cost is about the same. And, apropos to the crazy times we navigate today, a massive proportion of the supply chain for solar is in China.
NOTE: Sad that I have to make this request. Another sign of the times.
It's OK to disagree with with me.
If you do, please use numbers, not insults. There's just too much of that crap going around these days. I actively want to know where I might be wrong. That only happens in the context of a conversation, not by throwing fecal matter at each other.
Oh, yes, and it is also OK to ask questions. For example "How did you calculate...?" or "Why do you think ... is more important than ...?", etc.
Again, sad that I feel it is important to explain how to disagree and have a conversation these days.
PS.: Hope I didn't make any dumb errors in the math. Please let me know.
- Why not build wind where there are natural strong winds and solar where there is naturally a lot of sun?
- Solar is more modular - you can have one panel on a residential house, and you can have thousands of panels in a farm. But you can't have wind turbines in residential areas.
- Costs.
- We don't need a single 100% reliable source (none is), we need a clever combination of sources to achieve 100% together with the lowest total cost per energy unit.
> Why not build wind where there are natural strong winds and solar where there is naturally a lot of sun?
The simple answer is: Because you don't need to do that.
You can build wind wherever it works best and will not be detrimental (from NIMBY to environmental factors) and deliver the power where needed.
How far can you go?
The UK are doing a project that will deliver power from approximately 4000 km away. In other words, if we limit ourselves to thinking about the US continental region, you could build a wind farm in California and deliver the power across the country to Maine.
Thankfully we don't have to go that far. We could build a bunch of wind farms in optimal areas and move power anywhere from there. My guess --and I have not done the research on this at all-- is that, at most, we would need to move power a few hundred miles from most sites.
> Solar is more modular - you can have one panel on a residential house, and you can have thousands of panels in a farm. But you can't have wind turbines in residential areas.
Absolutely correct. I happen to think that solar at homes and commercial buildings is a good path. This study, unless I am mistaken, is only about grid-scale technologies. My thinking at the moment is that, at grid scales, wind might be superior to solar by a serious margin and across a wide range of parameters.
Here's one: Nearly the entire supply chain for solar maintenance requirements is or will be in China. A heavy reliance on solar might be really bad strategic decision. It would create a never-ending dependency to China for the entire world. I don't think this is a good idea.
> Costs
I talk about this in one of my other answers. I don't think solar has an advantage here.
> We don't need a single 100% reliable source (none is), we need a clever combination of sources to achieve 100% together with the lowest total cost per energy unit.
Absolutely correct. Agreed. My argument is almost precisely in line with what you are suggesting here. Solar is 1.33 times more expensive for the same energy delivery. It requires over 5 times more land area. The factories required to build solar cost twenty times what wind factories will cost. Solar requires more than four times the battery storage systems when compared to wind (and can't deliver the same reliability at 4x). Etc.
I am thinking that we don't need a menu consisting of every single possible energy technology to make the transition to clean energy. Solar on homes and buildings is fine and very useful. Even some batteries at home might be a great idea. At grid scale? I don't know. Looking at the data I am starting to doubt that solar makes sense.
As I mentioned in another post, if we were to eliminate solar and make-up the difference with wind, you would need an area the size of Hawaii. Eliminate wind and make it up with solar, you need an area the size of 12 Hawaii's. That's should make anyone take a moment and ask: Wait, what?
Yes, other technologies are still required to get as close to 100% power availability as possible. My argument is that it might not be smart to use grid scale solar to do this.
There are two factors that you have not addressed:
- Ongoing maintenance costs (the numbers are in table 5, but essentially wind requires 2x the maintence cost of solar on shore, and the ratio is worse off shore).
- Material used in construction (table 15), the amount of concrete used is 6x greater for wind than solar. This implies a far higher CO2 cost during manufacturing. The steel used is far less for wind, I didn't see a complete breakdown of CO2 emissions for manufacturing, say per/GW of capacity.
Your overaching point seems to be that solar is not an entirely better approach than wind. But the suggestion in the plan is a mixed approach using both solar and wind. One point for comparison (made in a sibling comment) is that solar allows a more distributed approach, and a more incremental roll-out. So let me flip your point around somewhat and ask the converse: why concentrate more on wind instead of trying to optimize a balanced approach over all of the variables?
BTW, just in case people get the wrong opinion. I am NOT anti-solar in a general sense. I built a beautiful 13 kW ground-mount solar array on my property. Much of my opinion of the realities of solar is based on data I have collected and analyzed since building this system. Most people don't realize what solar can look like and assume some idealized form. Here's a quick video I made for a friend considering solar.
I intend to make a better video after I write some code to use the data from my system and analyze/visualize. One of the questions I want to answer is about how much storage is needed to deal with weeks of bad weather.
> Ongoing maintenance costs (the numbers are in table 5, but essentially wind requires 2x the maintence cost of solar on shore, and the ratio is worse off shore).
I actually did look at this, including reviewing the source of the numbers (link is on table 5). The way I read it is the maintenance cost is about the same.
Why?
Wind (onshore, not even considering offshore) delivers 3.07 TWh/GW, while solar only gets you 1.33. That's a ratio of 2.3.
In other words, you install 2.3 times less wind (in power rating) than solar for the same energy output.
The operating and maintenance costs are given in terms of kW per year. Therefore, when we include the fact that wind requires 2.3 times smaller installation (again, in terms of power), the total O&M cost is actually lower for wind.
Quick calculation, using 1 MW wind for simple numbers, the equivalent solar would require 2.3 MW. The annual O&M cost for each would be:
Solar: 2.3 MW $36,731
Wind: 1.0 MW $27,570
Solar, per unit power, is 1.33 times more expensive to maintain.
> Material used in construction (table 15), the amount of concrete used is 6x greater for wind than solar.
I did follow this link as well (sorry, my comment would have been a book if I included every step). Here's the source document:
Table 2 (page 21), in the above document, shows that wind can be constructed with as little as 243,000 t/GW.
Table 4 (page 39), calls for 60,700 t/GW of concrete for solar. Yes, there are other numbers. They are based on the LDS/MDS/HDS scenarios as described on page 8. Frankly, some of this feels hand-wavy to me. That's just my opinion, I can't put numbers to it.
The numbers, again, are related to installed capacity in GW. Using the ratio I used above, we can then compare concrete requirements for installations that deliver the same amount of energy:
Solar: 2.3 GW * 60,700 t/GW = 139,610 t
Wind: 1.0 GW * 243,000 t/GW = 243,000 t
In other words, for the same energy output, wind, today, requires 1.7 times more concrete.
I am not sure that's a negative.
We have to go back to the idea that wind requires 5.2 times less land. Without diving too deep, preparation of the terrain and all of the activities related to construction, operations and maintenance cannot be ignored. My sense --and I have not done any calculations on this at all-- is that the actual comparison might have solar dwarf wind in terms of costs and consequences.
Going back to my prior post, full solar (no wind) in the US would require an area the size of 12 Hawaii's. The full wind scenario (no solar) only one Hawaii. Imagine trucks and heavy machinery delivering materials, transporting components, plowing, leveling, creating access roads, etc. I don't think this is a trivial difference.
However, there's another difference that I found to be shocking. I had never considered this, I guess. This goes back to the Master Plan document, table 12.
The initial investment in factories to build solar and wind are:
Solar: $212 billion
Wind: $ 11 billion
That is an absolutely massive difference and one that, in my opinion, cannot be ignored. That's nearly 20 times the cost for solar. I also wonder what the material, energy and land area utilization intensity might be for these factories.
> why concentrate more on wind instead of trying to optimize a balanced approach over all of the variables?
I don't think there's anything (physics, engineering) that requires a balanced approach, other than the obvious, which is that solar and wind need 100% backup for some portion of the energy cycle. This can be achieved through overbuilding, batteries and a few additional technologies. I am suggesting we don't need a menu of absolutely every technology in order to meet demand.
The advantages of wind, as I see them:
- Far greater reliability
- 4x less batteries delivers significantly higher reliability
- 5.2 times less land area
- 20x less manufacturing (factory build) investment
- 3/4 the Operating and Maintenance cost of solar per delivered GWh (energy)
- Potentially far lower reliance on Chinese supply chain
I have gone over most of these in my comments. I'll just highlight that the lower battery requirements against increased reliability is likely an important metric. The study below shows the results of looking at 39 years of data from 42 countries.
Figure 2 shows that wind, overbuilt to 1.5x and with just 3 hours of storage, in the US, achieves a reliability of approximately 95%. Solar, under the same conditions, only gets you about 70% availability. In other words, you go dark 5% of the time vs. 30% of the time. That's when other technologies would have to be brought in to supplement.
Oddly enough, the same table shows what happens if you go up to 12 hours of storage. It doesn't really buy you much at all.
Neither does combining solar and wind. You gain a few percent against the case of wind only. Yet, you have to build fully two redundant systems, with solar requiring over five times more land.
That doesn't make much sense to me. When wind alone can easily get to 95% reliability with 4 times less batteries, that's got to make people take pause and possibly rethink what we are saying about solar.
For the ongoing maintenance costs I have assumed that the costs per GW are given with respect to faceplate capacity. You have assumed (or know) that they relate to the useful output. I went back to check in the source document (and in reference 41 where they originate from) but could not see a definite statement either way. Did you find something that clarified this?
That's part of the problem with some of these things, isn't it? The deeper you dig you end up with either word-spaghetti explanation or averages of averages of averages. Take this for example, from reference 41:
"For wind and solar PV, in particular, the cost favorability of the lowest-cost regions compound the underlying variability in regional cost and create a significant differential between the unadjusted costs and the capacity-weighted average national costs as observed from recent market experience. To reflect this difference, we report a weighted average cost for both wind and solar PV, based on the regional cost factors assumed for these technologies in AEO2022 and the actual regional distribution of the builds that occurred in 2020 (Table 1)."
I am not sure I have a clue what that means. And here we are, two reasonably intelligent people, trying to make some sense out of what's being presented. I don't even want to imagine how politicians or people without technical/scientific training and little interest driving them think about this stuff.
My guess: It's indistinguishable from magic. And, of course, because Elon says it, it must be correct. I don't have a problem with him. He is a smart guy, very focused and dedicated (I worked for him for a couple of years). That said, he is selling solar panels and batteries. So, yeah, I would want to really look closely and demand justification for the claims.
One can easily lie (strong word, not accusing Tesla of this) by omission, which can happen without intention. What I mean by this is that, as an example, nowhere in that document do I see a study, a comparison, of only using solar for grid-scale power vs. only using wind at grid scale. In other words, limit solar to residential/commercial buildings. I am arguing that wind at grid scale might have massive advantages when compared to solar. Tesla omitted this comparison, likely because it didn't occur to them to ask the question. At the extreme you have the "well, we sell solar panels and batteries" realization. I don't know.
The other problem I have with a lot of these papers and articles is that they use averages. The average (mean) is a fine central tendency indicator. And it is absolutely horrible for anything else. A more accurate approach divides the data into bands and studies those bands to reach a set of conclusions rather than applying a single average to the entire population.
Wind is great, and has been cheaper. Solar is overtaking though.
One key point is that solar is very predictable and pairs well with lithium ion batteries that cycle daily to meet demand for most of the globe that doesnt have dark winters.
> Wind is great, and has been cheaper. Solar is overtaking though
Understood and agreed. I am simply suggesting we might want to pump the brakes before jumping in head-first. Unless I am missing something very fundamental, wind, to me, is looking like a far better decision than solar. I am talking grid scale here, homes and buildings do benefit from solar and it's easy to deploy.
Take a look at some of my other comments for additional perspective.
One of the things that isn't in the Master Plan report is an analysis of current and future dependency on the Chinese supply chain for all of these technologies. Tesla has to tread lightly here, so, I understand.
I have a sense that the world can easily do wind with minimal, if any, input from China. This, I think, is good.
However, the real issue, in my opinion, is the operations and maintenance column. Deploying unimaginably large amounts of solar means that nearly 100% of that business will go to China. I am in manufacturing, have been all my life. One way or the other, we end-up in China. This also means that the entire world will forever be dependent on China for the ongoing maintenance of these systems.
I can't even imagine what this means in dollars per year. I think I can say it could represent the single largest transfer of wealth into one nation in the history of civilization.
I don't hate China at all. They've been very smart, worked very hard and, in about fifty years, achieved a transition from an agrarian economy to a technology superpower. This is remarkable.
My comment about dependence on China is more about balance than anything else. We need to live in a world where, well, to put it concisely, no single society has the entire planet by the balls. That's where we are headed with China. I don't think that's a good thing at all. We need to develop other areas of the world so that other societies and cultures can benefit from international trade and elevate their standards of living.
I have a feeling that mass world-wide reliance on solar will effectively shift an equally massive range of economic opportunity to China in more ways than we can imagine today.
Wind, on the other hand, I think, can be made to be far more equitable.
> One key point is that solar is very predictable and pairs well with lithium ion batteries that cycle daily to meet demand for most of the globe that doesnt have dark winters
Yes and no.
On the pairing with batteries. This is a study of 39 years of data from 42 different countries:
Table 2 is very interesting (it take some effort to get comfortable with it).
One of the interesting findings is that, after overbuilding both technologies by 1.5x, wind + 3 hours of storage gets you to 95% reliability (you only go dark 5% of the time). Solar, with the same three hours of batteries, only gets you to about 70%. Even if you bring solar to 12 hours of storage, you only get up to about 85% reliability.
It is easy to understand why at a basic level: Solar is shut down half the time, when the sun isn't up. That's the baseline from which we have to start and make something that is as close to 100% reliable as possible. In other words, it's a losing proposition from the start.
My argument is only about grid scale. Local power on top of a roof is a different story. You can't have wind turbines there, solar is the only option as a supplement for the grid.
On that topic, I have noted elsewhere that I am not anti-solar at all. I am simply trying to understand if what I am observing in the data for grid scale systems is correct. I designed and built a 13 kW array on my property. Before installing this system I, as many do, saw solar in some idealized form. I guess I never gave it a second thought. Now, after many years of operating this system and viewing the data, I have a very different opinion.
This speaks to your comment about solar being very predictable. My opinion matched yours before I had solar. Today, I would say, sure, only under perfect laboratory conditions.
A friend of mine is considering an off-grid system (self sufficiency). He asked me for guidance on this based on my experience. Here's a quick explainer video I recorded for him. I didn't record this with the intent of making it a refined public presentation, keep that in mind as you watch it. The reality of solar, in this context, is likely to horrify most people who still hold an idealized view of the technology.
Again, I am not saying it is a bad technology, I am simply suggesting we are not necessarily exposing the realities that a town or city might have to content with if solar is the predominant source of energy.
> Solar, with the same three hours of batteries, only gets you to about 70%. Even if you bring solar to 12 hours of storage, you only get up to about 85% reliability.
I can't quickly see it in their methodology, but this feels like it's just because of the capacity factor, based on equal capacity.
You'd want to adjust for a fixed sum to spend, in which case I think solar would (these days and in sunnier places) go further. And continue to extend its lead in future.
I get your point. In fact, I think my argument aligns perfectly with the capacity factor.
Have a look at Figure 12 of the Master Plan.
The zoomed-in portion of the capacity factor very much tells a story that aligns with my observation.
If you eliminated the solar curve completely and added a bit more wind, you'd have all the energy you need. And, relatively speaking, it would be very consistent, which is one of the reasons for which I think wind could be a superior choice. Remember, we can move power thousands of miles. Wind does not have to exist near to where the power will be consumed.
I actually took the time to measure the areas under those two curves. The units don't matter (it was square cm, measured using Solidworks):
Solar: 3212
Wind: 6570
Total: 9782
This is a measurement proportional to the energy produced during those days.
If we completely eliminate solar and decide to produce the same amount of energy using wind, we would have to overbuild wind by 50%. That, I think, is a fantastic finding.
Why?
Because wind can deliver far greater availability with just 3 hours of storage. Solar requires well over 12 hours of storage (and overbuild) to deliver anything approximating what wind can do with less land, less batteries. Solar requires over 5x more land, 30% more in operating and maintenance cost (per installed MW) and 20x greater investment in factories.
Put a different way: Even if you overbuilt solar by 10x, you would still, at best, have about 50% darkness (at night). Solar requires 100% backup at least half the time. Wind does not work that way, particularly if located in areas optimized for it.
That's why I am asking myself this question. Solar at home, schools and businesses, sure, no problem. I have it. So should everyone else for whom it makes sense. Grid scale? I am not so sure. I am getting the sense wind is a far, far better option for grid scale.
Once again, we should not discount the global supply chain realities. I would prefer if the energy supply chain of the future did not create a dependency on China for all maintenance from here to eternity. I think that's what we all walk into if we go solar for grid-scale energy. I have a feeling (not confirmed other than superficially) that wind provides the opportunity to globalize the supply chain and create a far more diverse distribution of wealth around the world as it pertains to building, supporting and maintaining wind power installations. That, to me, is very important. I don't think anyone is talking about this reality. I don't understand why.
Maybe the right (or the better) solution is grid scale wind with minimal storage and residential/commercial solar with some local storage. No grid-scale solar.
Why am I thinking this might be a better idea?
Well, for one thing, this, for the most part, virtually eliminates a huge portion of the materials requirements for solar installations. No concrete, except for ground mount systems like mine. From a deployment perspective, likely far less damaging to the environment all around. Going back to one of my calculations, full solar would require the area of 12 Hawaii's, while wind only 1 Hawaii.
Storage at home would also have to be nominal, just to smooth things out. Just one to three hours of storage would likely deal with most short term (24 hours) weather events nicely. Stuff like this (from my own system, due to rain and clouds):
Wind, combined with grid-scale storage, then become the steady and reliable backup power source. The power can come from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. Grid-scale storage can be more localized or distributed and load-sharing across regions.
The point is to minimize the cost, material intensity, land damage and ecological impact of shifting to cleaner sources of power.
The next step would be to either have very generous tax credits for solar installation or fully subsidize it in some form. Whatever we were going to do for grid scale solar, we do to pay for residential scale solar.
One of the things that is very obvious just walking around my neighborhood is that lots of people feel no need whatsoever for solar. In a lot of cases it's retired couples of people who have very low energy footprints. Another situation is rental property. None of these cases inspire anyone to spend money on solar. That's lots of roofs, millions, tens of millions, not being utilized to contribute clean power to the grid.
This is where I see a better program in support of solar could do very well. In other words, what do we have to do to make it worth everyone's while to install solar on their roofs?
I think that's where I am with this today. Rooftop solar, installed as widely as possible. Perhaps with a small amount of local storage. Then plan on grid-scale wind with adequate storage for bulk reliable backup power 24/7/365. No grid solar.
I wish electric car manufacturers would focus on serving taxis / Ubers first, as maintainence is the cheap part of electric vehicles in theory, and those cars would have a huge immediate impact.
I remember in Europe a taxi company wanted to switch to 100% Tesla, but service times were too bad, because Tesla is focusing more on selling cars than servicing them in guaranteed timelines, even though both can make profit for Tesla.
EVs are a bad choice for a high-use vehicle like taxis / ubers. You'd need to recharge every 30 - 40 trips; in an ICE, that's 2 minutes at the pump - in an EV that's an hour of time you're not making an income.
It’s sad that I was downvoted when this whole thing just makes sense. Electric cars shine in cities, they are only problematic / less efficient to use at long distances. Taxi / Uber drivers are low payed people, they care much more about gas costs than waiting an hour (lunch break).
In general what matters for humanity is using electric cars instead of selling it, that’s why there should be the focus. Though I guess me repeating it doesn’t help, as it’s a huge initial investment for taxi drivers :(
For taxis that operate from taxi stands, that shouldn't be a problem. Even if the individual breaks are short, you only need to recharge one trip.
According to a Uber driver I asked about this, it's not a major problem for them either: The battery comfortably lasts half a day, and after that, it's lunch time anyways.
Or, using your numbers, you'd need to recharge after 5 hours of 6-8 trips per hour.
Looking at EV ranges, ranges inside cities are higher (unlike with ICE cars). Combine with lower speeds (i.e. more hours per mile) and more frequent stops, and it means a lot of "range" in terms of hours between recharges.
That's way more than enough trips for an Uber and a taxi.
In NYC, the average taxi driver drives 180 miles per day. This is the total distance covered, whether they have a passenger or not, and including the distance to and from their home.
Tesla Model 3s have a range of 272 miles. Also it doesn't take an hour to recharge a Model 3. You can charge from 10% to 80% in 25 minutes at a Supercharger.
Even in the worst case when an electric car goes less (people don’t just use Teslas), net revenue can go up if costs go down, it’s just basic business 101.
But as others have said, plugging in the car in a mall while having a lunch break is not a big deal, all people deserve a lunch break, they are not robots.
> EVs are a bad choice for a high-use vehicle like taxis
That's funny. In London, all the new "black cab" taxis are a custom EV (1) and the vehicle of choice for "minicab" taxis has long been Toyota Prius Hybrids. Though newer models such as Hyundai EVs are also present now.
That wouldn't be the case if you were correct, would it?
Slight correction, the new London Black Cab is a plug-in hybrid vehicle. Although it did seem to be in all-electric mode, every time that I've been in one.
I wonder why they don't see small modular nuclear reactors as a part of the solution. Also, they mention iron-air chemistry for batteries, but don't consider them in the calculations. Their approach seems to be pragmatic; utilizing and mega-scaling tech that is available right now.
All SMR companies suffer from economic constraints. If they got really investment and commitment to build many, it would be much different. It also requires a more engaged faster regulator.
And we could also just do normal nuclear until then as well.
Yes nuclear was notably missing. Also the „Li-ion (4h-8h)“ range for storage is doing a lot of work. You can’t operate a grid with intermittent energy production on a 4h buffer, 8h I‘m not sure. Unless they include nuclear I‘m assuming this compares unfavorably.
> You can’t operate a grid with intermittent energy production on a 4h buffer,
With good electricity transmission you can.
Infact, in this plan they specifically model this, and it comes out that by overbuilding solar/wind 32% you are fine.
> here is
an economic tradeoff between building excess renewable generation capacity, building grid storage, or expanding transmission capability. That tradeoff may evolve as grid storage technologies mature, but with the assumptions modeled, the optimal generation and storage portfolio resulted in 32% curtailment
and the footnote:
> Currently, the transmission capacity is <1% of the combined regional peak loads (with transmission to/from Texas the lowest). Higher transmission capacities generally reduce the total generation and storage buildout, but there is an economic tradeoff between building more transmission and building more generation plus storage.
Am I misunderstanding this or does this make the whole grid a lot more vulnerable? The internet was once designed to be resilient, economic forces have made it centralized in large network exchanges and thus vulnerable. We did the same with our supply chains, and it backfired so badly during covid that we're still not fully recovered. Should we do the same with our electricity supply?
The gas generators don't evaporate. Using them for a week once a decade is a negligible amount of emissions and paying the entire staff to just mime the other 99.5% of the time on top of a renewable grid is still vastly cheaper.
Small modular reactors don't actually seem to solve nuclear power issues to me. It just punts the regulatory regime away from the manufacturer/builder to the installer. I don't really understand the hype behind modular reactors though so perhaps there's something I'm missing. It just seems like another form of venture capital led snake oil selling. Reminds me of the hype around ridiculous ventures like Virgin Orbit/Galactic that are now failing.
I think they are going to fail if used for general power. Small reactor have uses, primarily remote locations that can't use solar or wind. Remote towns in Arctic and Anarctic that currently import and burn diesel. SMR would be be expensive but reliable option.
This is about what I'd expect from someone who makes money selling electric vehicles. I wonder what it would look like if Musk had chosen to start a company for making small, safe nuclear reactors.
I get that this seems to be tesla fan-boy central... And that for some reason trains are a dirty word for Elon...
> Class 8 Truck 5.3 MPG (diesel) 22 MPGe (1.7 kWh.mi) f 4.2X
But if I look at these numbers, they're missing the point. For one thing, how much can the theoretical tesla semi actually haul? Cause the gold standard in this space isn't a truck that gets 10 ton-miles per gallon. It's a train that gets 492 ton-miles per gallon (Note, everywhere I look for freight is using this other metric, which makes me think that this number is real bad for Tesla...)
Trains have the additional possibility of actually being pretty readily electrifiable in a way that doesn't require a battery (potentially a large weight-add for trucks).
Lastly Trains can cover a lot of middle/long distance trips that are currently being offloaded to planes. This solution would save on the total energy requirement for not-overseas-flights.
I cannot edit my post (it has been up for too long, the site won't let me).
They aren't swipes, they were an observation at the time of reading that people were gushing about the paper. I have backed my claims in other parts of the venue. I maintain nothing about calling someone a "fanboy" is derogatory. (I have been an Elon "fanboy" in the past. I am a public transit "fanboy". If fanboy is like, some new 'f-word', then this site has fallen far.
I did my research to back that claim up, and I didn't want to get auto-downvoted because I was posting in a venue that seemed to be pretty positive on all of the things Elon is saying in that post.
I was pre-defending my comment about trains being a dirty word for Elon, which they are (please see the existence of the hyperloop), by asking people to step outside of their comfort zone and consider it on the merits which I provided.
If this is flamebait, why are all of the comments off of it civil discussion of the merits of trains and electric trucks?
I believe you about your intent, but the problem is that "I get that this seems to be tesla fan-boy central... And that for some reason trains are a dirty word for Elon..." pattern-matches to garden-variety flamebait. If your intent was to have a substantive conversation about trains, that is definitely not the way to do it. Past explanations about this in case they're helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> why are all of the comments off of it civil discussion of the merits of trains and electric trucks?
A fair bit got derailed into arguing about "fanboy". However, that's not really the metric—we have to evaluate these things by their general impact, not what specifically ends up happening in a given case, which is subject to a lot of randomness. I promise you that the general impact of posting like that is to inflame and provoke flamewars.
Just the first bits though. The rest of your comment was great! That's why the site guidelines ask you to edit out that sort of thing.
That is one comment thread, initiated by me. Even the other discussion on the comment-thread about whether or not fanboy is derogatory, is completely unrelated, and sticking to the merits of the discussion.
And I again believe that fanboy is not derogatory. But I've been downvoted to oblivion on hostile threads before, so I think it's reasonable to pre-defend some of my comments in order to change people's mindset going into the thread.
If this were flamebait, people would be flaming on it, and they're not.
> If this were flamebait, people would be flaming on it, and they're not.
Dropping a lit match in a dry forest is a fire hazard even when the match fizzles out. You have to judge by the statistical risk. Individual cases are too random to draw reliable conclusions from.
Edit: I see that I already made that point in my previous reply to you. Sorry for the repetition! But surely it's not hard to understand?
Like, everything people say could incite flaming given the right situation. So saying that something could when it doesn't is an arbitrary standard. Also you can't run the statistical risk more than once, so your sample size will always be 1.
The general case is quite reliable. If a commenter posts the way you did, the expected value is most certainly a flamewar, and that's obviously the basis on which we have to moderate the site, precisely because we can't predict the specific outcome in any given case.
But... you're moderating after the discussions have happened. You can moderate on the outcome by the point that you flagged my comment. And the outcome is not actually a flamewar. Also, that's why there are humans moderating, not bots, if you wanted to moderate based on a formula, you could just have a bot do this.
The random outcome isn't the important thing. If I ride my bike in front of a car and don't get hit, does that mean it was safe to do so? No—it just means I got lucky.
We have to moderate for the general case! I'm not sure what else to tell you!
I think what you're missing is that Tesla is trying to make things that people buy on their own.
What you're talking about would probably require a political campaign of some sort since it doesn't appear to be happening on its own? I'm not saying your idea is wrong - but it's not right to put down Tesla because they are not pursuing your idea.
I think what you're missing is that Tesla is trying to make money, because it is a for-profit company. Anything else beyond this - saving the planet, humanity, etc. - is just the BS to get you buy their stuff.
All of this calculation would be very different if instead of solar, wind, cars and trucks it would be be nuclear plants, bikes and trains. But that would require some amount of logical thinking and leadership.
FYI, using "fan-boy" is kind of frowned upon on hacker news.
However as someone who commonly agrees with Elon on many things, I do think trains are a good idea, but you can't look at them in a vacuum. The train network of the late 19th century is long gone in the US and many of those right-of-ways are long gone. There's no way to re-integrate a train network into the wider US without a lot of forcing people out of their houses. Using electric semis is the next best option. Trains definitely have a future in the US, but not as a massive fix-all.
The amount of space need for trains is tiny, and if you do expantion smartly it's really not that hard on the population. Compared to the endless and insane expantions of highway that is for some reason still ongoing it's totally reasonable.
Also there is a huge amount that could be done with existing rights off way. Train companies are making enough profit that forcing them to electricity is totally reasonable.
I saw this video recently that claims that right of way from freight trains are the only thing stopping expanded Amtrak service between many big metros - eg. LA to Vegas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQTjLWIHN74
The amount of space needed is indeed tiny, but you still need to cut a fresh line through areas where buildings exist, and it can't follow the road network generally and has to take gradual curves, which increases the amount of buildings that must be destroyed rather than going around them.
If you are not building for high speed and super long trains, the curves aren't that crazy. And lets not pretend the US is some incredibly densely populated place. Lots of those areas are filled with cheap single family home subburbs, not skyscrapers.
If we are not willing to move a few houses for climate change, then how are we ever gone solve anything? Somehow most nations of manage this without that many issues.
And again, remove money from highway, to trains and you remove less houses.
Trains go best in those few densely populated areas though. That's kind of the catch 22 with trains, they're best in dense areas, but dense areas tend to obviate the ability to build trains.
Trains are great for populated and less populated places. Lots of not so densely populated places can be connected to more densely populated places with trains.
> FYI, using "fan-boy" is kind of frowned upon on hacker news.
Why? It's not derogatory. What word would you have me use in place of it?
There are a bunch of people speaking very highly of Elon for what is not a very interesting/ground-breaking paper, if I'm being honest. An impromptu Google search turned up a .gov website with a lot of the stuff in here[1]... I suspect the rest of it is also googleable (Grid setup, and per-grid usage, cost per watt, MPG, Dollar per kW).
They made some cool infographics... But mostly this is a very thinly veiled sales pitch for Tesla products, wrapped in the beginnings of a case for more gov't funding.
re: rail network
You could readily cannibalize a lot of our highway system, as well as invest in fixing up the rail that we already have. Companies that have been making money off of rail should start paying for that infrastructure, in particular...
I made a specific comment about how people on this thread were gushing about a "plan" that I still don't understand the hype about. Nothing they're doing in this "plan" (that others have mentioned is not really a plan) is groundbreaking.
No worries! I definitely tailored it to the comments after reading through a bunch of them. Normally I expect to find a lot more pushback in the comments of HN for Elon's grandiose promises, and I just wasn't seeing it here.
The proposal is not the electrification of trains.
It's the moving of trucks to trains, and then the electrification of trains. But it would depend on a lot of infrastructure investment in trains that I recognize we're not going to do.
Many people do NOT realize just how empty most trucks are - and major intercity trucking can be relatively easily "trained" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer-on-flatcar - but the vast majority of local deliveries are trucks that aren't even half full.
When shipping (trucking is just shipping) each "transfer" costs you money and time, so you want to reduce those as much as possible. To encourage trains, you just make the transfer cost "worth" it - interstate road-mile taxes, for example would do it.
What if I told you... That Trains aren't just proof-of-concepted... They're real. And they don't require adding wires over miles of highway. I do appreciate they're thinking outside of the Battery-Electric Trucks here, but it's incredibly frustrating to have people miss the obvious solution staring them in the face in place of the solution they're hoping will become autonomous in "the future".
Also, I know it's a tough sell because of the number of jobs created by trucking, but there are already L3+ autonomous vehicles, and they are trains...
Lastly, the fact that most trucks aren't even half full seems very much a fact of last-mile delivery. That would be a great place to apply a battery electric-vehicle. Seems like you would want a non-class 8 Truck for that space... (and that you would save a lot more mileage for that)
Due to the tax incentives, I have been expanding my solar array by investing about 10k every year, and I added a powerwall to distribute the energy better. The result is that last month my electricity bill was $38, despite being an all-EV household that grows 36 food plants hydroponically. I also coincidentally cancelled my gas bill the same month as I replaced the final gas appliance in my house with a really efficient Japanese electric oven.
I'm not fully net zero, but considering I wasn't even considering net zero, let alone trying for it, I have to say it's startling how easy it was compared to the impression I get from talking heads and Twitter warriors.
Considering people spend 10-20k per year on hobbies and I've only been at it for 3 years, i would highly recommend the hobby of self sufficiency.