Electric Vehicles, Tools, & Other Once Fossil Fuel Things

[LFC]

In terms of new energy infrastructure for 2023, battery storage is expected to surpass natural gas generation. Companies are clearly looking to take advantage of their renewables in less than real-time.

Earlier this week, the US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) gave a preview of the changes the nation's electrical grid is likely to see over the coming year. The data is based on information submitted to the Department of Energy by utilities and power plant owners, who are asked to estimate when generating facilities that are planned or under construction will come online. Using that information, the EIA estimates the total new capacity expected to be activated over the coming year.

Obviously, not everything will go as planned, and the capacity estimates represent the production that would result if a plant ran non-stop at full power—something no form of power is able to do. Still, the data tends to indicate what utilities are spending their money on and helps highlight trends in energy economics. And this year, those trends are looking very sunny.

Big changes

Last year, the equivalent report highlighted that solar power would provide nearly half of the 46 Gigawatts of new capacity added to the US grid. This year, the grid will add more power (just under 55 GW), and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent. In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power, and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions.



As has been typical, Texas and California will account for the lion's share of the 29 GW of new capacity, with Texas alone adding 7.7 GW, and California another 4.2 GW.

Another trend that's apparent is the reversal of the vast expansion in natural gas use following the development of fracking. Last year, natural gas generation accounted for 9.6 GW of the new capacity; this year, that figure is shrinking to 7.5 GW. And, strikingly, the EIA indicates that 6.2 GW of natural gas generating capacity is going to be shut down this year, meaning that there's a net growth of only 1.2 GW. Should current trends continue, we may actually see a net decline in natural gas generating capacity next year.

The last big trend is the rapid growth of batteries. While these don't generate electricity, they are increasingly providing the equivalent function of a power plant, in the sense that they send power to the grid when it's needed. However you want to view them, they're booming, going from 11 percent of the new capacity last year (5.1 GW) to 17 percent this year. At 9.4 GW of new batteries, the additions have nearly doubled in just a year, pushing the new battery capacity ahead of natural gas and into second place.

To put 9.4 GW into perspective, a nuclear reactor generates roughly 1.0 GW.

[andydp]

Feb 9, 2023 5:28:09 GMT pnwguy said:

Feb 8, 2023 21:24:55 GMT LFC said:

Not a car for GV but this is pretty sweet. More electric mowers mean less weekend noise!

Having been at CES last month, I think the breakthrough is in lawn mowing robots that work like outdoor versions of Roomba's. One I saw has a base transit platform but with interchangeable units for mowing or snow blowing.  

I've seen them advertised.  Do you have a cost estimate ?

[LFC]

Feb 10, 2023 22:29:35 GMT andydp said:

I've seen them advertised.  Do you have a cost estimate ?

As with anything electronic it's all over the map. Here's PC Mag's picks for 2023. They run from about $350 to $4,800.

[goldenvalley]

OK so you all were no help on electric vehicles for grown ups beyond a John Deere lawn mower.  My grandson just got a 6 volt John Deere tractor though and he's fairly happy with it.  

His granny just got a Hyundai Ioniq 5.  It doesn't mow grass or pull a plow.

[goldenvalley]

After Elon Musk flounced Tesla out of California, it's coming back at least the engineering part is.

Elon Musk announced during a joint press conference with California Gov. Gavin Newsom that Tesla would be returning its global engineering headquarters to California, two years after a dramatic exit that saw the electric car company leave the Golden State for a facility in Austin, Texas.

Tesla will open up shop in the former home of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Musk said. The facility will serve as the company’s engineering headquarters while the corporate headquarters remains in Austin.

The move returns Tesla to the world’s center of technology and innovation, and puts Musk in closer to proximity to the headquarters of Twitter, which the billionaire tech entrepreneur purchased last year in a massive social media shakeup.

[LFC]

Powered, electric campers. What a great idea.

A young all-electric RV startup called Lightship looks to turn a lucrative yet stale segment in recreational mobility on its ear beginning today with the official debut of its L1 electric travel trailer. This purpose-built design is loaded with modern day innovations in aerodynamics, electric efficiency, and renewable energy could not only disrupt the RV industry, but truly change the way we approach the camping experience using an all-electric, sustainable eco system. Not to mention it looks sleek as hell. Be sure to check out the full launch video from Lightship below.

Lightship is a San Francisco, CA and Boulder, Colorado-based startup that describes itself as the first all-electric RV company designing battery-powered trailers for the inevitable electrified age of mobility. It was founded in 2020 by Ben Parker and Toby Kraus – two industry veterans with notable tenures at Tesla as well as other electrified innovators like Proterra.

After three years of development, Lightship officially shared its flagship L1 electric RV with the public this morning, kicking off the potential dawn of a new age of recreational mobility should the travel trailer reach production.

As you can see in the images above, the L1 is a clean-sheet approach to the traditional RV, focusing on hyper-efficiency while being towed before transforming into a spacious camping space offering complete ecosystem of battery powered amenities.

The 27-foot trailer measures 8.5 feet wide and can power its height up and down from 6 feet 9 inches in road mode to ten feet tall when parked in camp mode, offering the capability to sleep 4-6 people. Being sleek and spacious is one thing, but the performance of this electric RV is truly unique and should be an enormous selling point to consumers, whether they’re towing it with an EV or a combustion vehicle.

The L1 itself is equipped with its own electric powertrain and 80 kWh battery pack (Lightship is not sharing its battery supplier at this time). As a result, the trailer propels itself behind the towing vehicle, offering near-zero range loss. That means a 300 mile range electric pickup towing the 7,500 pound (when fully loaded) L1 will maintain near full estimated range. In fact, Lightship’s cofounders told us that combustion trucks towing the L1 actually gained fuel efficiency in certain cases thanks to the trailers advanced aero. Score! (Those drivers still should go all-EV though, just sayin’.)

A huge thorn in the side of current electric truck owners is the extensive range losses when towing – up to two-thirds in many cases. By keeping the force behind the towing vehicle near-zero as much as possible, Lightship owners will someday be able to take longer road trips without stopping to recharge, or reach their destinations with even more power to spare when camped. Lightship cofounder and CEO Ben Parker elaborated on this design approach in an interview with Electrek:

It’s a pretty rare and awesome chance we’ve gotten where there is an industry that hasn’t changed a ton for a few decades. It’s huge. There is the sort of product opportunity where given the state of the technology, if you don’t do a from-scratch approach here, you can’t make a product that meets all the specs you need it to. It can’t be long range enough, it won’t be lightweight enough. Only through a ground-up approach can you make an efficient enough product for it to also be cost effective enough that you can sell it at any volume.

There’s a catalyst too. Electric trucks are taking off. What do people do with trucks? They do truck stuff – they go towing. You literally can’t tow a traditional travel trailer for more than about 100 miles right now. People are not going to stop RV’ing, this is a massive pastime. So it’s the convergence, the sort of the confluence of a few things that makes this so cool.

Cool indeed. Know what else is cool? The power in the electric RV itself is further bolstered by solar panels across its large roof, offering up to an additional 3 kW of renewable power to support the amenities and appliances within the L1 without any reliance on gasoline or propane generators. Below are some renderings of the interior of Lightship’s L1.

[pg]

Feb 23, 2023 0:37:51 GMT goldenvalley said:

After Elon Musk flounced Tesla out of California, it's coming back at least the engineering part is.

Elon Musk announced during a joint press conference with California Gov. Gavin Newsom that Tesla would be returning its global engineering headquarters to California, two years after a dramatic exit that saw the electric car company leave the Golden State for a facility in Austin, Texas.

Tesla will open up shop in the former home of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Musk said. The facility will serve as the company’s engineering headquarters while the corporate headquarters remains in Austin.

The move returns Tesla to the world’s center of technology and innovation, and puts Musk in closer to proximity to the headquarters of Twitter, which the billionaire tech entrepreneur purchased last year in a massive social media shakeup.

HA Good riddance to that poorly designed facility in ATX- basically was trying to build itself. musk has the attention span of of a firefly. I do feel for those who staked their lives on the facility but whatever. It didn't escape me when I saw way too many Teslas with CA plates disappear.  This caught my eye:

"Tesla will open up shop in the former home of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Musk said. The facility will serve as the company’s engineering headquarters while the corporate headquarters remains in Austin." HA! Anybody smell the tax grab?  

[LFC]

ICE vehicles have not recovered their peak sales from back in 2017, and it's doubtful they ever will. I had no idea that they were already on the downward slope. I know COVID and supply chain issues bogged things down but EV sales are going up, even here in the U.S. which is a slow adopter.

There are growing signs that global auto sales will continue their comeback from the pandemic, chip shortage and other supply chain snarls. As the recovery takes shape, it’s becoming clearer that sales of internal combustion vehicles are unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic levels.

Calling peaks is generally a no-win endeavor. The call will either be correct but seem obvious after the fact, or wrong and cause for years of mockery. But with 2022 data now available, BNEF is confident the global market for internal combustion vehicles peaked in 2017 and is now in structural decline.

[goldenvalley]

Report on my EV.  Got my rebate from the power provider today...$1000.  Not bad.  If I charge midnight to 6 PM I get a break on the price of the electricity.

Public charging stations provide uneven results...the manufacturer of my car sold the idea that 30 min free charging was a great benefit for buying this particular EV.  But I charged at the same charger...same power cable...4 times.  Twice my car got to 80% battery in 30 min or less.  Twice it took an hour.  I suspect skullduggery on the part of the company that runs the chargers.  I called their customer service once to complain...nice guy but he had no answer about how this was possible but assured me the new chargers will be better.

Complaint on tax policy regarding EV tax credit.  I didn't expect to qualify because my income is higher than the cut off--barely. But I learned that my car wouldn't be eligible anyway because it is manufactured in Korea.  If the goal of the code was to encourage purchase of EVs it makes no sense to penalize the car buyer for buying a Korean made vehicle.  If the goal of the code is to encourage American manufacturers to produce EVs in the US it still makes no sense to penalize the car buyers.  People will buy the EV they want regardless of the tax credit so the goal will never be achieved.

[fercer]

Travel app development involves various stages, from planning an MVP to designing a user-friendly interface and developing a core architecture. It also requires integrating essential features such as maps and directions, real-time notifications, online payments, and more. To ensure a successful product, you must test the app extensively for security and scalability, and market it to reach your target audience. With the right approach, travel app development can help you create an engaging and profitable experience for your users.

[LFC]

California is the biggest market for plug-in vehicles in the U.S. I guess that's no shock.

Californians have bought more than 1.5 million electric vehicles

21.2% of all new light vehicles sold in California in Q1 were plug-in vehicles.

California is far and away the country's largest adopter of plug-in electric vehicles. Because of the state's ability to regulate its own air quality and spurred on by a large economy and plenty of affluent residents, the EV has gained plenty of traction in the Golden State. So much so that last month, California met its goal of having more than 1.5 million clean vehicles on the road two years ahead of schedule.

"No other state in the nation is doing as much as we are to accelerate our electric and zero emissions future," said California Governor Gavin Newsom. "California is setting the bar for climate action—and we're achieving our goals years ahead of schedule thanks to unprecedented investments secured in partnership with the legislature. We're making real progress on the world's most ambitious plan to end the tailpipe so our kids and grandkids are left with a cleaner, healthier planet."

California's Air Resources Board (CARB) began its Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program in 1990 with the intent of ameliorating the state's severe smog problem. By the early years of this century, air quality had improved to the point where CARB could begin using the ZEV regulations to help drive down climate emissions.

It has accomplished that with goals that are more ambitious than the ones adopted by the US Environmental Protection Agency at the federal level and despite political interference from the previous administration, which wanted pollution to continue almost unabated.

A number of other states—Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington—have adopted CARB's ZEV program within their own borders. But none are as far down the road to EV adoption; in the first three months of this year, 21.1 percent of all new light-duty vehicles bought in California were zero-emissions vehicles. That's a 153-percent increase year on year, according to the nonprofit Veloz.

Battery EVs made up the vast majority, with 95,946 sold. Unsurprisingly, Tesla was most well-represented on the sales list, with the Model Y accounting for 33,205 units by itself. (The Model 3 was next, at 19,989 sold in Q1 2023.) BMW was the best of the rest of the OEMs in total sales numbers thanks to healthy plug-in hybrid EV sales.

[LFC]

There are certain things you can do with 4 independent motors on a car that you can't do very easily with a single motor.

[jackd]

The two major issues with EV's are 1) cost even with deductions, and 2) lack of charging stations. On the latter point, PBS news had an item with Miles O'brien illustrating that attempting to drive from LA to SanFrancisco on the interior route was significantly delayed by the scarcity and unreliability of charging options. For local driving close to home, it's not a problem but several hundred mile trips are problematic. This will be eventually remedied but in the meantime it's a severe disincentive for routine auto ownership.

[pnwguy]

Apr 28, 2023 18:14:47 GMT jackd said:

The two major issues with EV's are 1) cost even with deductions, and 2) lack of charging stations. On the latter point, PBS news had an item with Miles O'brien illustrating that attempting to drive from LA to SanFrancisco on the interior route was significantly delayed by the scarcity and unreliability of charging options. For local driving close to home, it's not a problem but several hundred mile trips are problematic. This will be eventually remedied but in the meantime it's a severe disincentive for routine auto ownership.

I think a big part of the transition will be in 2 car households where the next purchase will be an EV.  They still have the ICE vehicle for long trips if need be, as the infrastructure gets built out.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 28, 2023 23:11:57 GMT pnwguy said:

Apr 28, 2023 18:14:47 GMT jackd said:

The two major issues with EV's are 1) cost even with deductions, and 2) lack of charging stations. On the latter point, PBS news had an item with Miles O'brien illustrating that attempting to drive from LA to SanFrancisco on the interior route was significantly delayed by the scarcity and unreliability of charging options. For local driving close to home, it's not a problem but several hundred mile trips are problematic. This will be eventually remedied but in the meantime it's a severe disincentive for routine auto ownership.

I think a big part of the transition will be in 2 car households where the next purchase will be an EV.  They still have the ICE vehicle for long trips if need be, as the infrastructure gets built out.

Yup that’s the GV household. One gas, one EV. The farthest I intend to go with EV is about 275 miles round trip to a place that I know has new public charging station. I have no need to drive from SAn Fran to Los Angeles I’d rather fly anyway. 

[LFC]

YES! A thousand times, YES!

You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors. In a February interview with Fast Company, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “further research” is needed before addressing the obvious risks that oversized SUVs and trucks pose to those not inside of them.

Happily, there is one area where we are making at least marginal progress: A growing number of automakers are backpedaling away from the huge, complex touch screens that have infested dashboard design over the past 15 years. Buttons and knobs are coming back.
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The touch screen pullback is the result of consumer backlash, not the enactment of overdue regulations or an awakening of corporate responsibility. Many drivers want buttons, not screens, and they’ve given carmakers an earful about it. Auto executives have long brushed aside safety concerns about their complex displays—and all signs suggest they would have happily kept doing so. But their customers are revolting, which has forced them to pay attention.

This! (bold mine)

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.

In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 29, 2023 19:53:54 GMT LFC said:

YES! A thousand times, YES!

This! (bold mine)

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.

In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.

Yeah my EV has tried a compromise.  There are buttons for radio and navigation. On the steering wheel there are buttons for volume, station switching etc.  And theoretically there is voice control for some of it but I haven't figured that out yet.  

[andydp]

Apr 30, 2023 15:14:54 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apr 29, 2023 19:53:54 GMT LFC said:

Yeah my EV has tried a compromise.  There are buttons for radio and navigation. On the steering wheel there are buttons for volume, station switching etc.  And theoretically there is voice control for some of it but I haven't figured that out yet.  

I have the same problem with my four year old touch screen radio in the Corvette.  Mostly its from my wife yelling at me to watch the road even when I want to change the stations (I don't have steering wheel controls).

I don't even want to get into using the Apple Play and Waze.

[LFC]

The Chinese government, being smarter in many ways than Republicans, supported and pushed hard for an EV industry. Well now they've got one. China has also become the single largest EV market in the world and 22% of vehicles sold there annually are either full EVs or plug-in hybrids.

Meanwhile Republicans just want more broad tax cuts for the rich and extra support for the already well subsidized fossil fuel industry. They're useless harmful.

[goldenvalley]

Continued problems with EV charging infrastructure where people can't charge their vehicles at home in their garages:

With electrified parking, as with its analog predecessor, the public sector is determined to mandate or subsidize what the private sector won’t build on its own. Because it’s cheaper to install EV charging during building construction than to add it later, many progressive jurisdictions have started requiring developers to include EV-ready parking in new buildings. Last week, for example, the Colorado Energy Code Board voted that 60 percent of new parking spots in large multifamily buildings should have the infrastructure to support future charging ports. That presumes a little sharing, but not much, and a lot of overbuilt electric-vehicle infrastructure—Kobernick projects that more EV chargers will be attributable to building codes than to retrofits by 2035.

Cities have also begun to install publicly funded EV infrastructure at the curb, which anticar activists say functions as a long-term subsidy for drivers and permanently consigns valuable urban real estate to car storage. If a private garage shared among neighbors might get by with, say, 25 percent of its spots electrified, just how many chargers will be needed on the streets of a big city like Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Los Angeles, where millions of people park at the curb? In New York City, Con Ed is funding Level 2 public charging to the tune of more than $100,000 per curbside parking space. At that price, evidently, a fully electric fleet will require a whole lot of sharing: low-battery drivers pulling in as fully charged drivers dutifully pull out.

Even then, the system works only if there’s buy-in from the millions of car owners who may purchase an EV without a dedicated charger at home. So far, the chargers are getting installed—but buyers aren’t yet ready to commit to a life of powering up at the curb. Nathan Yang is the chief product officer with Flo, the electric-charger company that manages curbside stations in New York City, among other places. Public-charger installation, he says, “is not economically sustainable today. Utilization rates are not high enough, and reliability is a challenge.” Low usage of Flo’s curbside stations suggests that New York City drivers without dedicated parking are not ready to take the EV plunge.

To see how this plays out, just look at China, the world’s largest EV market, where 1.7 million public chargers have been installed, almost half of which are Level 3. Each one is used, on average, just once a day. Most EV experts agree that infrastructure must precede EV adoption. But it’s going to be a very expensive change if we can’t get comfortable with the idea of a shared plug, a shared parking spot, and a little more attention to the practice of parking.

The commercial chargers are theoretically capable of giving a decent charge from 20% battery to 80% battery in 30 minutes.  My experience says that is only sometimes true.   Level 2 charging in my house in that same battery range takes 6 hours (midnight to 6 AM).  That's a lot of time in an apartment building or office building for a single car.   

This reminds me of the issues with public transportation...governmental agencies are constrained by concern over tax payer expenses and build if they have guaranteed ridership so they can break even, but people won't use it unless the transportation is there and runs very frequent routes so it doesn't get built and on and on.

[LFC]

Tesla's reputation takes another hit. This sounds like something Elon Musk would have come up with, after being the one who demanded they use inflated range claims. I'd say it's got a Musky smell all over it.

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.

The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.

Managers told the employees that they were saving Tesla about $1,000 for every canceled appointment, the people said. Another goal was to ease the pressure on service centers, some of which had long waits for appointments.

In most cases, the complaining customers’ cars likely did not need repair, according to the people familiar with the matter. Rather, Tesla created the groundswell of complaints another way – by hyping the range of its futuristic electric vehicles, or EVs, raising consumer expectations beyond what the cars can deliver. Teslas often fail to achieve their advertised range estimates and the projections provided by the cars’ own equipment, according to Reuters interviews with three automotive experts who have tested or studied the company’s vehicles.

[indy]

All things Musk are subject to the 'X' factor. Personally, I think of it as X = whatever Musk says * .4. In the case of Twitter, X = Original Twitter * .25. X is a handy variable, perhaps that is why he is so fond of it.

[AnBr]

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/electric-vehicle-charging-price-vs-gasoline/

[goldenvalley]

Aug 9, 2023 2:42:29 GMT AnBr said:

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/electric-vehicle-charging-price-vs-gasoline/

Very interesting.  If you use the high powered charge you pay a lot more than for other amperage charging.  (probably not the correct electrical term). But most people don't use their EVs for long distance.  Mine is for my local driving and has the ability to go to my coastal place about 150 miles away where I can recharge at a nearby shopping center.  Good enough for me.  

[jackd]

Not good enough for extended road trips, though. Many people, like me, mostly use their cars for local driving but like to have it available for road trips from time to time.