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The Electric-Car Boom Is So Real Even Oil Companies Say It's Coming
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China especially needs EV's to the point that the smog in major cities is so bad in makes LA look like a pristine forest preserve.
On their last "Blue Sky Day" last year... where they banned 2.5 million cars (and curtailed some industrial production) in Beijing and the results were shocking:
http://www.boredpanda.com/blue-skies-military-parade-no-cars-beijing/
On their last "Blue Sky Day" last year... where they banned 2.5 million cars (and curtailed some industrial production) in Beijing and the results were shocking:
http://www.boredpanda.com/blue-skies-military-parade-no-cars-beijing/
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Yes, they are literally choking on their own success. This is why China is ahead of everyone else in EV production and adoption. Still, their EVs are mostly powered by coal so... It sucks to be the world's dumping ground for exported pollution.
Look again.
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Maybe, but their energy demands have become so great, that it will be very difficult for them to green tech their way out of it. Oil, gas and coal are cheap and powerful. In addition, their economy is all about manufacturing and that's a dirty business, because the world wants them to make all the stuff we consume and we want them to make that stuff cheap. That means they have to use the lowest cost energy they can get and they can't concern themselves very much about environmental issues.
China's smog has practically nothing to do with gas powered cars, which are very clean these days. Their big problems are factories burning coal and coal power plants that are not the clean coal plants that are found in Western countries. Their banning of gas powered cars is something of a mystery. They are heavy into nuclear power and also rushing to beat the world to advanced nuclear power molten salt reactors,which will surely dominate in the next 10 years, based on low cost and safety considerations - much safer than solar or wind, and can load-follow to boot, which no baseloaad power plant has ever been able to do - reduces the need for fossil fuel backup, which wind and solar depend upon to a great extent.
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but they do product massive amounts of greenhouse gases and carbon monoxide - which is poisonous…
what clean coal deployments are you talking about? From my research clean coal is still a fantasy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation
a country demanding the deployment of a fleet of zero emission vehicles is not a mystery - and no matter how much you assert to the contrary gasoline cars are _NOT_ the future - there are too many liabilities associated with chemical combustion - power generation will continue to rely on chemical combustion for some time, but at scale you can "clean up" a limited number of power production plants vs. billions of independent ICE's…moving to BEV's makes your transportation system power source modular (i.e. you can swap the power source without swapping the car)…the move makes a lot of sense unless you have an industrial revolution era solution you are wedded to…
please cite your research source for this - it's not what I"m reading- and nuclear power still has that whole melt-down Fukushima thing that is a nasty problem - otherwise it is a clean source of electricity which contradicts your "mystery" of why move to electric cars?
please enlighten me on how Solar and Wind are "unsafe"? This is news to me and last time I checked my solar panels, and those deployed by every nation on the planet have _NO_ known safety issues.
today's technology requires fossil fuel backup - scaled stationary storage is a promising/emerging potential solution to store excess clean/renewable energy to cover the peaks/valley's that are the current problem for fossil fuel generation plants - Wind/Solar/Hydro/Natural GAs fired power plants are not a bad combination pollution wise and you can phase out the NG plants in favor of stationary storage and move mostly to renewables…it's a ways off but a possible path forward.
The emphasis on electrical generation leads one to conclude personal transportation will be electrified due to efficiency, cost, and the modularity inherent in it's design.
ICE based transportation will never go away - but I envision a "peak" ICE point on the graph in the next few years with rising BEV/FuelCell alternatives so that personal/industrial transportation will become a "mix" of various power sources and ICE's having continued stengths in various nitches where BEV's simply suck…
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So Chinese made "nuclear power molten salt reactors" (still a nuclear fission reactor) are safer than solar and or wind power?
Wow! Gotta get me one of them "nuclear power molten salt reactors" to power the fairy lights and fountain pump in our backyard garden to replace that dangerous solar panel that's been quietly sitting on my shed roof for the past four years.
Can I get one at Harbor Freight?
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Energy sources have their own peaks and declines, if anybody is interested I can dig up a chart from the analysts.
- First was the wood age. Peaked in the 1700's and has been declining since
- Coal. Peaked in the late 1800's
- Oil. Peak is somewhere around here, have to check. Anyhow low oil prices are here to stay.
- Edit: Put nuclear in here, not sure it was ever a primary source of energy, more of a big side player I think.
- Natural gas. Peaking now, dirt cheap and huge supply
- Renewables. Will be peaking in the next 15 years and remain our final energy solution (unless fusion is solved and becomes cheaper)
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We may end up buying reactors from China. The US program is virtually dead in the water. Each technology has its trade-offs. Clean coal is a oxymoron at the moment. Maybe someday there will be a way to sequester CO2 in an economically feasible way, but not in the near future. Solar, wind and batteries for load balancing may eventually work, but batteries have a long way to go to be economically viable in that context. Still the there is hope mankind won't burn every carbon atom they can find in pursuit of energy.
The rapid change of view about BEV's is amazing. My guess is the automobile companies recognize that batteries will become cheaper and more powerful and this will make BEV less expensive than ICE. No fuel injection, no antifreeze, no 850 part transmission, easier to computer control, no local emission, just a motor, battery and a computer.
I think the Bolt is more revolutionary than it looks. It is almost affordable, has enough range and is being "mass produced" unlike the Telsa M3, which has only about 240 built so far. OK, I know Tesla will get it right in time.
The rapid change of view about BEV's is amazing. My guess is the automobile companies recognize that batteries will become cheaper and more powerful and this will make BEV less expensive than ICE. No fuel injection, no antifreeze, no 850 part transmission, easier to computer control, no local emission, just a motor, battery and a computer.
I think the Bolt is more revolutionary than it looks. It is almost affordable, has enough range and is being "mass produced" unlike the Telsa M3, which has only about 240 built so far. OK, I know Tesla will get it right in time.
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It should be noted that there are inherently safe nuclear power generation technologies which, for a variety of economic and political reasons, have not been deployed. Nuclear cycles such as Thorium reactors are incapable of the kinds of headline-generating runaway events, and the waste products are far less toxic than those of conventional reactors.
Nuclear power has gotten a pretty bad rep because of the designs currently being used, which originated with military requirements. But it doesn't have to be that way.
And electric cars will benefit from the clean, zero-emission power generated by any kind of nuclear plant or by wind or solar plants.
The waste may be less toxic, but it is still toxic for hundreds of years, with some byproducts toxic for thousands of years.
Solar and wind (unless you count sunburn, tornadoes, and hurricanes) have no such dangers. And we have these regardless of whether or not we harness the energy.
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Nuclear, meh. The US doesn't need them, renewables are already cheaper than oil and nuclear. Japan depends on it (ironically considering their history with nuclear weapons), France has a few. We have better alternatives, which is lots of empty southern land.
Molten salt nuclear reactors can burn either Thorium or Uranium, although molten salt developers like Transatomic Power avoid Thorium because of its state in which Plutonium is produced. When fueled by Uranium, there are NO proliferation issues to worry about.
Molten salt nuclear reactors are the future of nuclear power and can be build in factories, are so inherently safe that they can be sited ANYWHERE - no nearby bodies of watwr required - they are air cooled. The basic technology has been around for a very long time and prototype and experimental molten salt reactors have operated for many years - the safety aspect of the technology is not a question mark at this point - it has been thoroughly proven, and it is physically very simple - does not require operator intervention of any kind, at any time.
Only the advent of one new material (for some of the designs - others use sacrificial metals)
and a new moderating material are required to make what had been an impractical reactor (incapable of producing enough power using non-weapons grade uranium) into a very practical reactor - capable of producing power cheaper than any other technology - and doing so as both a baseload generator and a peak load generator. China and India are rushing to develop their own versions of these reactors. The future of power generation is clearly these reactor - economics alone will force their adoption world-wide. They should be available within this decade for sure (Western developers - numbering half a dozen) and probably sooner from India or China
Molten salt nuclear reactors are the future of nuclear power and can be build in factories, are so inherently safe that they can be sited ANYWHERE - no nearby bodies of watwr required - they are air cooled. The basic technology has been around for a very long time and prototype and experimental molten salt reactors have operated for many years - the safety aspect of the technology is not a question mark at this point - it has been thoroughly proven, and it is physically very simple - does not require operator intervention of any kind, at any time.
Only the advent of one new material (for some of the designs - others use sacrificial metals)
and a new moderating material are required to make what had been an impractical reactor (incapable of producing enough power using non-weapons grade uranium) into a very practical reactor - capable of producing power cheaper than any other technology - and doing so as both a baseload generator and a peak load generator. China and India are rushing to develop their own versions of these reactors. The future of power generation is clearly these reactor - economics alone will force their adoption world-wide. They should be available within this decade for sure (Western developers - numbering half a dozen) and probably sooner from India or China
Actual numbers for our electric energy supply:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
At least until this administration takes the site down. Right now solar contributes 50% more than diesel, which is miniscule. Nukes are our third largest source. PV would need to grow by an order of magnitude to replace it, and ten orders of magnitude to replace coal, and natural gas as well. This is beyond a huge challenge. It is all but impossible. This is why I get so annoyed at people who think electric SUVs are the answer to our energy problem.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
At least until this administration takes the site down. Right now solar contributes 50% more than diesel, which is miniscule. Nukes are our third largest source. PV would need to grow by an order of magnitude to replace it, and ten orders of magnitude to replace coal, and natural gas as well. This is beyond a huge challenge. It is all but impossible. This is why I get so annoyed at people who think electric SUVs are the answer to our energy problem.
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I could quote reams of data from energy analysts who make it their life to study this, but better for others to check on their own. Simply, renewables are at parity with fossil so that's where all the investment is going.
Seven renewable doublings is cheap compared to a trillion dollar market.
"Seven renewable doublings is cheap compared to a trillion dollar market."
If money were the only issue, I would definitely agree with you. We can print an infinite amount of money. Actually we can't even do that, as paper is finite. But we can do electronic money....just add more ones and zeros. But this investment is really about tons of cement, copper, steel, etc. while still rebuilding Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the dozens of other disasters soon to follow.
If money were the only issue, I would definitely agree with you. We can print an infinite amount of money. Actually we can't even do that, as paper is finite. But we can do electronic money....just add more ones and zeros. But this investment is really about tons of cement, copper, steel, etc. while still rebuilding Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the dozens of other disasters soon to follow.
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