Some cursory searching suggests that between 40 and 50% of copper is used in building construction. I don’t know the further breakdown, but:
Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.)
Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
> Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
Maybe you're already saying this: there was a period (maybe ~70s) where aluminum was used for household wiring because of the advantages you mention. Unfortunately it oxidizes resulting in higher resistance leading to heat and potentially fire at connections. Where I am, insurers ask you if you have aluminum wiring when you buy a house (and penalize you for it), and it is generally regarded as a failed experiment.
Yep. Aluminum wiring can be safe, but you need to coat all the connections with anti-oxidizing grease. And even at at that, I don't know how long it lasts.
Copper pipe for water is often specified by code in commercial construction. I've heard this is due to lobbying by plumber's unions but not sure about that. Most residential construction will use CPVC or PEX these days.
I am a huge fan of PEX from a cost and longevity perspective (it can withstand some freezing of water without bursting), but copper is cool for its anti microbial and similar chemical resistance properties. If money was no object, I’d spec copper over plastics for water supply if I expected the structure to exist for 50-100 years. Disposable structures? Plastics all the way, dump the whole thing in a plasma gasifier upon retirement.
I’m less convinced. Copper is susceptible to its own failure modes. Water moving too fast in a copper pipe can erode the pipe, and “too fast” is quite slow, especially for hot water. If you want hot water quickly, you want the fastest practical speed, which means the smallest practical pipe, and you can easily run into the limitations of copper. PEX and CPVC tolerate considerable higher water velocity. (I think this is because copper’s passive layer can be scoured away, whereas plastic pipes don’t need a passive layer.)
If you have well water or water from anywhere other than a utility that controls the chemistry correctly, the water can dissolve your pipes. The rainwater from my roof makes copper instantly shiny, which is a bad sign for the copper.
That’s pretty uncommon, generally the joints fail before pipes do.
PEX with compression fittings is the closest thing to copper in terms of durability, but exists because of labor savings. Appropriately installed copper is the most durable interior water service and will comfortably outlast the life of the structure.
They say all it takes is not de-burring the pipe to create the turbulence.
We have a lot of problems in my county with copper pipes leaking. There are entire plumbing companies dedicated to finding the leaks and repairing them. There are still more companies dedicated to repiping.
I know of developments where they epoxy coated all the piping because they were getting so many leaks.
You can read about the huge class action lawsuits going on involving the local water utility (who is being blamed for water chemistry causing the issues. They point fingers elsewhere, obviously).
I’ve seen a copper pipe where in the middle of the pipe there is a pinhole leak on the top side of the pipe (too far for turbulence, can’t be cause by sediment).
If you want the most durable, I would think it would be either pex-a or perhaps 316 stainless steel (which is a valid code compliant option). But no one really knows, and it’s probably water chemistry dependent. It’s being argued in the courts now (for whatever that’s worth).
Stainless steel is awesome! Unfortunately the connections are not so easy. Stainless steel-to-brass threaded connections are probably safe under most circumstances but are dubious per the code. Push-to-connect fittings often use little stainless teeth to hold the tubing in, and this may work less well when the pipe is nearly as hard as the teeth. (John Guest makes special fittings for stainless steel tubing.) You can’t sweat stainless steel pipes.
Obviously everyone should plumb their houses with swagelok fittings! :)
Probably a better compromise is stainless press-style fittings. The tools are going to be much too expensive for the average homeowner plumbing needs, but they work out in the commercial sector or for professional plumbers.
MegaPress and ProPress are a couple of popular brands.
The also have an advantage that they avoid "hot work" in places where it leads to greater regulation / stringent safety precautions.
Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) changed its chemicals at some point in the late 1990s, and a lot of customers found pinhole leaks starting in their copper pipes. Considering the relative density of lawyers in suburban Maryland, I suppose there must have been a lot of litigation, though I don't remember hearing.
On the other hand, I lived in a rowhouse built during a brief window in which it was OK with the code to run PVC from the main into the house. Whatever PVC is good for, it doesn't handle shearing force well. Essentially all of the townhouses needed repairs (a copper "pigtail" through the wall).
Three pinhole failures in 30 yr old copper pipe in ten years in this house says otherwise. We've (hopefully) torn all that out - tired of replacing 1/4 of the house every time there's another pipe failure.
One possible contributing factor: flux must be removed from copper pipes (the inside!) for good performance. Plumbing codes require that flux meets ASTM B813, which means that the flux will flush out with cold water.
Sadly, even today, most plumbers will show up to a job site with petroleum-based flux that most certainly does not meet B813. It can stay in pipes for years, slowly leaching chemicals that do their job: weakening the protective oxide layer in the pipe. Also it tastes and smells terrible.
Not to mention water itself is horribly corrosive. Pure water will strip copper pipes. That’s the real reason fluoride was added to tap water:
1) it was cheap
2) it was safe to drink
3) it kept the water from eating the city’s pipes.
We had a city in Illinois do whole city RO and advertise the cleanest water in the country. Well it was the cleanest water going into the pipes, but if you own a house in that city the water coming out of your tap is full of old pipe!
Funnily enough, this is technically true, but would only manifest in a warped reality.
In the acidic/caustic scale, regular water is just slightly on the caustic side of neutral. (pH 5.5 or thereabouts?) - It won't strip the pipes it runs in. But that's not the kind of water we're talking about here. That would be pure distilled water.
It's the near-universal cleaning agent. Because of the complete lack of impurities, distilled water has the ability to absorb fair amounts of almost anything it gets in contact with. It also tastes really bad. (The taste of "nothing" for regular water is our calibrated baseline with various minerals and other impurities. If you take all of that out, the perceptual difference between expected and experienced is quite stark.)
For what it's worth, cavitation and turbulence are much more likely culprits to eat the plumbing material. Also: shoddy quality will always cause problems, regardless of your choice of materials.
Your statement is at odds with what I know about water.
Your saturation index is what drives water’s interaction with the surfaces it touches, not just pH. If the index is too high it will deposit what it’s carrying (scale) and if it is too low it will pick up material from the pipe it’s flowing through (corrosive).
1) That isn’t distinct from PH, it’s a refinement of it?
2) There is theory, and there is practice in the field. What you’re referring to is the equivalent of ‘wet bulb temperature’ for temps. Which is a thing, but water conditions for a given area rarely vary like temperature will - and are in control of the local water treatment plant. What you’re referring to was specifically made to measure and help control these conditions.
If copper piping is allowed by local code, they’ll know - and keep it within these ranges. Areas with water that is not easy to keep within these ranges will also corrode galvanized pipe (commonly used for water in most areas), and will likely also corrode brass fittings and valves (including back flow valves) commonly used in many areas, leaching lead, copper, etc. among other things. Those areas prohibit them by code for that reason.
Copper piping will generally not corrode unless PH is < 6.5 or > 8.5, which is significantly outside what most would consider reasonable water quality.
I personally have a well in an off grid location with 6.2 PH, and use only CPVC for that reason. Where I live, I’ve done some retrofits and replaced 75 year old copper pipe that was good as new inside.
> If copper piping is allowed by local code, they’ll know - and keep it within these ranges.
I think I’m misunderstanding you. Your original comment was “that’s bullshit” but this seems like it’s in rough agreement.
IIUC copper pipe will last for 50-100 years IFF you pass impure water through it. Pure water will eat the pipe. Same with galvanized steel and brass like you pointed out. So the city treated it with _something_ to keep the water from eating pipe (knowing copper pipe is code) and I’ve anecdotally heard that part of that “something” is fluoride.
From my understanding a negative LSI means the water will try to "pick up" atoms/molecules from the container it is in (corrosive). A positive LSI indicates it will lay down atoms/molecules (scale build-up).
A value of negative infinity tells me that pure water is going to eat the pipes.
That being said, I don't know if the LSI scale is well behaved as these values trend towards 0! The values of water purity in the equation seem to dominate both pH and temperature as those values trend towards 0 - no big difference in results if pH is 7 vs. pH is 3 and no big difference if water is frozen or boiling. Temperature can have a big impact for _very cold_ and _very hot_ but then you're dealing with solid water or steam and that doesn't really make sense to me for this model. That probably suggests the equation is only well behaved for a certain range for each value, and I'd suspect 0 is outside the range these equations can model for TDS, Calcium, and Alkalinity. But I can't find anything that defines the ranges the LSI model applies to.
And yet, distilled water tests a 7 with a PH strip, people use copper pipes with distilled water with no major ill effects, and distilled water won't eat it's way through a copper pot either.
You're clearly trolling someone. I guess I'm done wasting my time on you?
Your assertion is that 'pure water' will corrode copper pipe, so it needs to be 'impure' to not do so (using flouride of all things as an example?)
Yet, distilled water - which is as pure water as anyone will ever see outside a lab - doesn't do so to any meaningful extent. And you keep using various clearly inapplicable theory to try to prove a point that is clearly false in the real world.
This has nothing to do with steel wool, after all.
My understanding is that, if you take fluoride out of the water, you’ll need to replace it with something or the water will replace it itself (aka eat the pipe).
That obviously doesn’t mean fluoride was originally added for that reason though.
I doubt most freshwater sources have enough minerals in them to not be corrosive enough to need to add anything to reduce corrosiveness (ground water wells, rivers, etc...). The only purpose for adding fluoride would be to add fluoride for dental purposes.
The only thing I could think of that might have corrosive issues would be desalination water that was overly purified like the sibling comment mentioned. But even then, they should be adding some kind of minerals back before distributing it to people's homes. Ultrapure water tastes horrible and likely isn't safe for drinking long term.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I’m totally open to being wrong. I’m eager to learn - which is generally why I share information. If I don’t readily share what I know to be true, like in this case, nobody will ever correct me and I’ll spend the rest of my life being incorrect.
On HN you generally start by telling someone why they’re wrong and supporting that in some way.
I.E. if you know/believe fluoride was added for another reason - that’s a good place to start.
Or if you know/believe purified water is not corrosive, that would be a good place to start.
Compression fitting will last longer than copper. If a copper fitting is done wrong it can pit. I'm going to be honest here and tell you I can't find sources for this but I thought I've seen it before in research -
Copper lasts 50-60 years. I believe that's type L which is used in the wall in homes in the US. The skill required to create a high quality copper joint takes time and a person may still make mistakes. A PEX compression fitting is basically just closing a tool. The probability of mistakes is lower.
I'm not familiar with the possibility of contamination in pex, is this due to the material?
I am fairly sure type M is used in normal residential construction. L is heavier and use for more underground or commercial applications. You can quickly tell the difference because M has red writing on it, while L have blue.
The problem is there are no "L" fittings and the normal fittings used for L copper can be quite poor. For this reason and others, some people like ProPress fittings which are very high quality (and expensive).
I'm curious why you would choose copper over PEX. It seems like PEX is really the best choice available these days in terms of near infinite lifespan, easy to work with, and affordable.
> It’s tough to beat copper pipes for longevity, which on average last 50 to 70 years, compared to PEX, which has an expected lifespan of 30 to 50 years. PEX’s life expectancy can be shortened by the use of extremely hot household water (180 degrees Fahrenheit or higher) or if the water in the home contains high levels of chlorine.
> Copper’s life can be shortened by highly acidic water. When installed under typical conditions (i.e., your home is connected to a municipal water system), copper can be expected to outlast PEX by about 20 years. If you’re on a private well, have your water tested prior to retrofitting your water supply system. Local County Extension Offices can test well water to determine whether it’s high in acid or chlorine.
I’m a buy it for life sort of person, and will pay a premium for longevity. Future myself or others will thank me (buying or building something that will outlive me? Plant trees whose shade I’ll never sit in and all that jazz)
Well now you've sent me down a whole other rabbit hole wondering about who these people are who keep their hot water at 180 degrees or about how much chlorine constitutes high levels.
Yep, if you ever see bluish rings in your toilets, and you have copper piping, check your water pH, that might be part of your home's plumbing that's now ringing the porcelain.
I think to be truly fair Option A has to consider the energy generation you will have to do elsewhere to make up the difference, which may or may not be carbon neutral - or to flip it, the energy generation you won't have to do due to Option B. So it really depends on the energy generation landscape you are within.
> [PEX] can withstand some freezing of water without bursting
I learned that the hard way last year. Had PEX water lines hard freeze during the crazy February weather in Texas area last year. Thankfully no burst pipes!
There are also a new aluminum alloys (aa-8000) with better mechanical properties. The biggest issue is that that the trades/DIYers need to learn new processes. Treating aluminum wiring like copper wiring is a disaster. Also need to overcome the stigma from the aluminum experiment 50 years ago.
It makes a ton of sense to switch to aluminum in housing though. For the same current capability the wire is significantly cheaper, lighter, and stronger.
Aluminum also has issues with heat expansion and contraction causing connections to loosen faster.
With properly rated connectors, not a problem, but not all are, and not everyone knows it's a thing.
Copper pipe is much more durable as long as the local water isn't acidic, which is rare. CPVC has had a number of issues over the years (including leaching of chemicals and brittleness over time), and PEX is still relatively unproven. It's predecessor product had huge insurance claims due to failing connections after 10+ years.
Pex gets eaten through by rats and then you get to replace 20% of your house if you don't catch it in time. Copper for water is better, or you could run PEX in CSST conduit everywhere (never seen or heard of it). I don't know enough about rats and CPVC, but it seems a bit safer at least. But you will get rats, it's just a question of when.
Why doesn't anyone run PEX in CSST conduit (flexible galvanized steel, for those who don't know, as is commonly used to protect wiring) if this is such a problem? Flexible conduit is a hell of a lot cheaper than copper pipe, easier to bend and connect too.
It looks good as well. At the same time, all these plastic materials are petroleum based products we are piping our drinking water through, although we likely have no choice for this century at least.
Just read an article in a local paper about banning gas connections in new housing. Had a direct quote from the union saying they aren't inherently opposed per se, but need ___ $$ to offset any job losses.
And then next graph mentioned that union was part of a lobbying pac thing fighting for the status quo
> but you need to coat all the connections with anti-oxidizing grease
Actually, no you don't. Only wires from like 30 years ago need that. Modern aluminum wires do NOT need the coating. In fact in some places you will fail inspection if you add the coating.
Most people have not updated their knowledge on this, since they don't work in the industry.
The problem was not the oxidation. That problem is easily dealt with by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required. The problem was single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring. Higher capacity wires are multistrand, and virtually all such wiring is aluminum due to the cost difference.
Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.
> by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required
As is NOT required. This is old old info: antioxidant paste is not just not required, in some places you will fail inspection if add it, and other electricians might laugh at you for not keeping up to date.
> expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose
Nope, this is also not true. It's simply that there is a new allow of aluminum used today (since 1975) which retains its strength under heating and this problem is solved.
> This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building
Connector rated for Cu/Al are widely available, and not hard to make. There's just no market for it for smaller wires since everyone got scared and no one wants to install aluminum anymore.
It doesn't have to be that way, the current alloy is 47 years old at this point. People just don't want to change.
Doing a little reading and there is some truth to some of what you say, but it is not any more correct than what I said because we are both a bit lacking in nuance, so I will just leave a few links for further reading. I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves. My point on legislation would be just to take anything not rated for the use off the market, so there would be no worry about installations using the wrong products.
Some of the problems with aluminum wiring and whether all problems are solved:
I looked at your link and they confirm what I said 100%. Aluminum installations after approx 1975 are simply not a problem. There is no issue with oxidation, no issue with multi strand, nothing.
> I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves.
What issues do you find? All you need is a connector rated Cu/AlR and that's it.
Not really. If the higher insurance costs are born by the building owner rather than the person who installs the wiring (which is likely the case), then increased insurance premiums aren't likely to haveuch effect. Classic externality
The causal connection can be remarkably tenuous, especially if you add securitization or other financialization into the mix. The people supplying the money often care more about hitting standards than maximizing overall eventual profit. Understanding this aspect of human and market behavior is useful for realizing why a lot of libertarian ideas are unworkable in practice.
Not sure, it's very workable for lots of other aspects of buildings.
Eg I don't think there's a legislation that floorplans have to be useful (and how would you even define that in the abstract). Yet, most buildings have quite reasonable floorplans.
There's some transaction costs in that its hard for the eventually consumer of the building to express all their preference to the builder. As you say, for some aspects the price signals can be weak.
More competition can help.
See also how it's pretty easy to find restaurants that serve tasty food, despite taste not being legislated nor regulated.
But seriously though, since when did Laissez-faire economics and legislation ever lead to sufficient safety not to kill people or burn down their homes willy-nilly?
HN is the only place I visit that has such wild ideas as "safety regs are too burdensome, let the free market sort it out".
In the UK, only around 1 person per year is killed by electricity in the home. And often that person is doing something totally non-standard, for example building a tesla coil, or deliberately committing suicide.
Contrast that to 250,000 deaths per year (in the USA) by medical mistakes or preventable adverse effects.
At some point, we have to decide where to put our efforts. Electrical safety is arguably oversolved - ie. we put too much effort into it compared to the safety gain of any extra effort, compared to medical accidents which is likely undersolved. Even simple things like requiring a doctor to not do more than an 8 hour shift, like we require of truck drivers, would probably save a lot of lives.
The idea of 'more safety is always better' needs to be broken.
If you live in a representative democracy and vote for politicians that expand regulations, you are effectively regulating.
> yet they see a lot of need for regulation
Of course they do, their ideology reaches for that solution by default. Look at this particular thread just to see how misguided the recommendation for regulation was in this case.
Yeah, with perfect information these wouldn't compete. This is why some countries put energy efficiency labels on products and on property sales. To make the market work better.
Some countries just prefer to ignore long term problems for short term "gains" though, in a tragic fractal way.
I don't think there's any law anywhere that prohibits a manufacturer from sticking the required information on their product and in their marketing.
As a customer, I can draw my own conclusions when a manufacturer doesn't provide the information: I'll assume that thing is a gas guzzler and will avoid it. (Unless I read trusted reviews to the contrary.)
It's not the law that prevents the people in a Prisoners Dilemma situation from freely choosing the best outcome for themselves. It's the lack of enforcement of rules which incentives defection.
In this case:
good guy installs insulation
bad guy doesn't
good guy publishes info on future savings
bad guy publishes fake info
good guy publishes trusted reviews
bad guy publishes fake reviews.
and so on.
The good guys want the legislation, not to force then to do the thing they wanted to do anyway, they want it to stop bad guys putting them out of business via scamming customers.
Yes, the answer that evolves is co-operation, i.e. in the real world, regulations and legislation, binding all the individual players to do the thing that's best for all of them and punishes defectors to ensure incentives are aligned.
The better analogy for the prisoners dilemma is a drug deal or a spy swap. How can you trust the other person to do the right thing with no legal system to enforce penalties if they don't? Without that, less deals are made than they would otherwise, a loss of efficiency.
Yeah, I'm sure the fossil fuel industry would be overjoyed if they couldn't dump CO2 into the atmosphere without first contracting with every person and animal on earth to reimburse them.
And how are you going to ensure that buyers are aware of those ongoing maintenance costs? In a free market builders are disincentivised to make such issues public. So I guess the only way to be sure is to create legislation forcing such detail to be exposed. But if you're going to do that, then why not just create legislation that solves the actual problem instead?
> The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism is a widely-cited[1] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.
The obvious-in-hindsight business solution to this problem didn't require legislation. It's just to build a used-car dealer that builds and safeguards a really solid reputation.
People don't need lemons. They do need home. So often in free market economies you see companies virtually colluding to put themselves first in sectors where consumers are required to buy into that product or service. Because in those sectors, businesses have a captive audience with no other options and they don't need to worry about reputation.
Housing is one of those sectors. Often people need a home based around requirements other than the reputation of the builder like location to the school that their kids already attend, or family members, or work, bus or rail stations, etc. Cost to rent. Is parking available. etc
If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple. For starters even if your ideology worked in practice, you still require a bunch of customers to get burnt initially in order to generate that reputation. However there's also nothing stopping disreputable businesses restarting with a new company name and branding so the reputation model doesn't work in practice (you see this all the time with online sellers eg on Amazon). And that's on top of the former point about how some products are essentials that people don't have the luxury to shop around on.
We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
> Well your past history of housing problems would suggest your optimism here is misplaced
Who is 'you' in that sentence? I can see that I have optimism, but what's my past history of housing problems?
And what makes you so sure that those past problems were caused by not enough regulation? (Instead of eg too much regulation, the wrong kind of regulation, or they might have nothing to do with regulation at all.)
> If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
Huh? It's always a trade-off. All else being equal, I'd grab a house from a builder (or landlord) with a great reputation before one without a reputation or even a bad reputation. I might even pay a bit extra for a great reputation.
Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
> I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple.
Who said that? Huh?
I suggested that in this specific case more regulation is not required.
The free market won't get you a girlfriend, for example. But neither would any sensible regulation.
> We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
You know that European real GDP per capita is quite a lot lower than in the US? (You can pick almost any European country. Or pick the average etc.)
And the US is also still pretty overregulated.
I grew up in Germany, but put my money where my mouth is, and now live in rather more pro-market Singapore.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. Partly because this is really more of an opinion-based discussion but also because comparing Singapore to the US or Europe is never going to work given how massively different their cultures are. So there's far more variables at play than just how the markets are run.
That all said, one part did stick out for me:
> Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
I'd argue that disproves your point rather than proves it. The reason being, lousy jobs still exist because employers know that people need jobs. So there's no incentive for employers to change. Hence why we need employment laws.
This comes back to my point about different cultures. For example some American and UK companies have been gaming the system, arguing that people who work from them are not employees. In the UK we call them gig workers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gig_worker) and they're effectively working for 0 "dollars" if business is slow that day. Yet some people work them simply because they have no other choice.
In Singapore, we just have employment laws that aren't as strenuous on the employer, so there's less need to 'game the system'.
Oversimplified: legally everyone is already a gig worker in Singapore.
Seems to work out fairly well.
This is also closer to how the system worked in eg the US until a few decades ago, when it was easier to get a job just by walking into the shop and asking and also work your way through college etc.
I remember, Slatestarcodex had an article about the dangers of outsourcing your social welfare to employers.
I feel this point is getting lost on you but Singapore has a vastly different culture to America. The fact that Singapore doesn't need to "game the system" isn't because there are fewer regulations. It's because it's a different culture.
The reason America needs legislation is because American companies have a culture of abusing a free market.
What works for one country doesn't automatically work for another.
Singapore is mostly made up of immigrants from China. Remember, China is the place where we like to complain about 'companies abusing a free market' even more than in the US.
It seems like this is an ideal case for modular wiring, ie the wire is cut to size, and terminated with modular connectors at the factory. Installation is just threading the wire through the building and pluging it in.
Connectors could be copper, the wire itself could be aluminium, completely sealed in pvc.
In addition to the other mentioned reasons, larger gauge wire is commonly terminated in blocks rather than at end points and likely won't be touched after initial installation, compared with branch circuits which will have their outlets or switches changed multiple times and often without professional assistance.
You can take precautions to avoid the oxidation. This is already done reliably on airplanes and in overhead power distribution, where aluminum wire is the standard.
Which is relatively expensive and error prone, compared to copper connections.
For service connections and large scale power distribution where trained professionals are already required and lack of maintenance is already a fire hazard, it isn't a problem.
For small branch circuits where work is often done by random Joe's and where any sort of preventative maintenance is few and far between, it is a failed experiment.
Assuming copper prices continue to outpace aluminum prices, eventually copper will be the expensive option vs. aluminum (done right). Not sure if the error prone aspect could be remedied though.
Compared to electrician labor? It would have to be price at silver prices to matter; most likely.
Either way, home and commercial construction is likely to crater (already starting in many areas) due to cost of $$ going up, so that should help tamp down demand quite a bit.
That's actually myth. Widely believed, but not actually true.
The aluminum wires of today are a different allow of that simply does not have the problem anymore. It's a solved issue. You don't even need anti-ox on the connection.
Building code is not a standard by which to judge possible practices, it just formalizes the normal approach to prevent halfassery. (And arguably, to prevent disruption of established businesses in a regulatory capture kinda way.)
Aluminum wiring is the thalidomide of the construction industry. No matter how much you improve it, you will never get over the stigma. No one will buy a house with state-of-the-art aluminum wiring just like no one will ever take thalidomide, even though they know exactly what caused the birth defect issue (chiral molecules that were created during the manufacturing process).
It's not just stigma with thalidomide - the two forms of the molecule interconvert in the body. So even a dose of 100% pure R-thalidomide (the useful kind) will invert into its mirror image, L-thalidomide (the harmful kind), and will approach a 50:50 mix. As the sibling comment says, it's still used in cases where there's little to no chance of pregnancy, because we don't know another way to make it safe.
Wikipedia straight up says "thalidomide causes birth defects." Could you please cite where you found this info? I might take a stab at updating the article if it's a legit source. Thanks!
> Maybe a new generation of aluminum wire could be better.
It already is better, this is VERY old news. Modern aluminum alloys do NOT have this problem, but it's too late, no one wants to think about aluminum wires.
they will if it goes up 10-20x its current cost (adjusted for inflation of the time). that's the beauty of the market, it forces you to try new things not to go bankrupt.
Just because the US isn't on the metric system doesn't mean that every single standard we adopt is inherently wrong. Hating on our electricity is one of the silliest things I can think of. In my house the only thing that needs 240V are kitchen appliances, A/C and a car charging outlet, those get circuit breakers that tap both phases. Everything else gets one phase. The way more and more appliances and light fixtures(LED > CFL) are trending towards high efficiency and solar even 120V is more than necessary.
If there is anything to change, it is the horribly dangerous electric socket. I was also shocked to see that many house still doesn't use differential circuit breakers. I guess using 120V reduce the risk of a fatal electric shock, but I still wouldn't trust any installation that doesn't use differential circuit breakers.
Building codes only require upgrading the home's electrical when doing certain types of repairs/renovations. Newer homes will have afci or gfci breakers on most circuits.
Don't forget kettles and space heaters. Also, visiting vacation homes or cabins where the owner doesn't have an electric car leads to very long charge times.
I'm not sure what's so odd about running your railroad at 50/3 Hz? Do you not like rational numbers?
(I guess you are talking about three-phase power in general, or is there anything special about railroads?)
In practice, just like everything in engineering, you don't run your grid at 50 Hz nor your railroad at 50/3 Hz. You run the grid at some frequency that varies slightly around 50Hz. There's always engineering tolerances.
So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
(I don't know how tight the tolerances are in practice here. It doesn't matter for the argument.)
> In practice, just like everything in engineering, you don't run your grid at 50 Hz nor your railroad at 50/3 Hz. You run the grid at some frequency that varies slightly around 50Hz. There's always engineering tolerances.
> So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
In practice the nominal frequency was changed to 16.7 Hz anyway due to some weird edge case created when running motor-generators [1] for prolonged periods of time at exactly the nominal 3:1 frequency conversion ratio. (See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrom#16_2%E2%81%843_Hz_ge... and use an online translator at your own peril if necessary.)
[1] These days, newly built (or probably occasionally re-built) substations prefer to use solid-state frequency converters, which are immune to this particular problem, but there still are enough of the older motor-generator sets around, too. Wikipedia also claims that motor-generator sets are more tolerant against earth faults, which might or might not preclude against getting rid of all of them even long-term.
For hysterical raisins: Before the advent of power electronics, which allowed three phase asynchronous motors to proliferate, commutated series-wound motors were the railway motor because of their beneficial characteristics (quoting Wikipedia: "high starting torque, can run at high speed, and are lightweight and compact").
A classic commutated series-wound motor is a DC machine. The problem with DC power is that without power electronics, you can't really change the voltage (except downwards by wasteful resistors), so your transmission voltage is limited by your maximum motor voltage and you incur relatively high transmission losses and need frequent substations every few kilometres. (Mainline railways can cheat a bit by equipping all of their rolling stock with two (or occasionally more) motors permanently linked together in series, so each motor only gets a fraction of the voltage, but you can take that approach only so far…)
So you want to switch to AC power, which is more efficient because it can be easily transformed up and then down again, because transformers can actually be made small enough to fit into a locomotive.
Fortunately with some adaptations a series-wound motor can be made to work on AC, too, but there are some trade-offs depending on the required amount of power and the frequency. I.e. the motor still works better if your AC current is more "DC-like", i.e. doesn't have too high a frequency.
It turns out that for something more modest like a hoover or a domestic power drill, an AC series-wound motor ("universal motor") will work fine enough even at 50 or 60 Hz, but for railway purposes with their somewhat higher power demands things didn't work so well.
Because at that time power electronics didn't exist or were still in their infancy (e.g. mercury arc rectifiers), there was no possibility of doing anything useful on board of the locomotive, so instead it was decided to reduce the frequency of the railway's power supply system, because at 16 2/3 or perhaps even 25 Hz motors could still be made to work reasonably enough.
Also at that time changing the frequency meant using a motor-generator set, and presumably choosing some simple integer ratio for the two frequencies also simplified things.
By the time other countries started considering switching to AC electrification, usable rectifiers existed that could be used on locomotives, so those countries could electrify at the full 50 or 60 Hz and then rectify the current to DC on board of the locomotive, thereby sidestepping the problems of running a commutated series-wound motor with AC power.
Even later on we then got fully variable voltage and frequency inverters, which finally allowed serious usage of (usually asynchronous) three-phase induction motors.
I am not sure that Western Europe is objectively worse at the safety department than us. Also you can always put a smaller breaker on 240.
The 120V in the US is a 640kb ram should be enough situation. You were first, thought you build the spare capacity, were surprised by the explosive growth and how useful electricity really is.
With modern homes moving to 100% electricity even 240 is not enough. In my flat I have pizza oven (3kw),inducation burner x 2 (3kw each), normal oven, 12000 btu AC x 2, tumble dryer, some other appliances that chug sub 1k... throw in some car charging, electrical water heater... A modern home is using orders of magnitude more electricity. And it is going up.
You seem to be confusing voltage as the unit that dictates electrical load. Voltage x Amps is what dictates how many electrical devices you can use at the same time. Residential voltage is fixed at 120 or 240 with no chance of changing in our lifetimes.
As homes need more power, they are delivered more amps. The common for newer construction in the US is 240V at 200 amp or 400 amp for larger homes. Older homes will have anywhere from 80-150A depending on when they were built or remodeled enough to require replacing the main service panel.
Stove, HVAC, and dryer require their own dedicated 240V circuits.
I have not confused anything. The idea is that powerful applliences require more copper and bigger gauges for lower voltages (not linear). And we have more if them. So by upping the voltage we can save on the wiring.
In eu you don't have to think where to plug 2.5 kw space heater. Any outlet is good enough. In the US you have to. And with home appliances actually becoming bigger and more powerful I think that even the EU baseline will become too constraining eventually. Since usually there are limitation on the gauges that are ran from the main breaker to the sub-breakers (don't know english electric jargon)
Where I live I have a wire that can hold I think 40 amps in the wall from the main breaker to the board where the small breakers terminate the different home circuts. If I want to upgrade it is dig baby dig. 6 floors.
How do you resolve phase imbalances? Most generators are 3 phase. The system is othrewise well designed to use one or two phases when needed. We use one or three phass in Europe.
So it's the same way we do it in Europe with single phase, but I think it's easier to split three phases between single phase loads (most AC loads in a hosehold), rather than three phases between two phase loads (a few AC loads in a household). I still like the 120V plug connector with a key on the hot wire. In Europe I always wire the hot on the right hand side of the Schuko socket, as most standards have it on the right.
> Unless you're in a condo/apartment building where it's often 208V, not 240V.
208V (vs 220/230/240V) has minimal to do with it being a condo and everything to do with the type of incoming power. 208V is from taking two phases of a 120V three phase service. One phase to ground, 120V, phase to phase, 208V. For the alternative voltage (named 220/230/240V depending on context), the incoming power to the transfer is a single phase. The transformer then produces a split phase 220/230/240V where each phase is 180° opposite each other. The only reason you _might_ see it more frequently at a condo/apartment is due to there being a need or desire for 3 phase power.
At least around here, condos/apartments will have big elevator, water pump and HVAC motors and therefore prefer 3ph, so 208V is the "rule" rather than the exception.
Where it gets a little funny is that the Canadian standard for "industrial" power is 600V, not 480V, and that can make it hard to find replacements in some larger buildings with custom requirements.
Probably the least common voltage in Canada. We’ll have some 347V though.
My condo parking spot has a wonderful looking junction box above it labelled “600V”.
But I’ve heard some Canadian factories will still get spec’d with “US Voltage” (ie: 277 and 480) for “standardization”, but probably so they can move the plant to the US without having to find electricians that can speak Canadian.
> Probably the least common voltage in Canada. We’ll have some 347V though.
Yeah, if you don’t have 480V, extremely unlikely you’ll have 277V. 347V has comparable issues to what I was referring to with 277. 480/600 aren’t voltage you’ll normally find wire nut’s in a jbox or behind say a light switch for example, but 277/347 you will. Unlike 120V though, if something were to cause it to arc (or worse, electrocute you), you’re going to have a very bad day! Not tagging off a circuit is always a bad idea, but especially when voltages are 250+.
It also expands/contracts more than copper which can cause screws to come loose and trigger sparks that set fire to the inside of your walls. (Source: A home inspection report from a house I looked at buying a few years ago.)
I'm going to assume that folks in construction, who are under massive cost pressure lately, aren't paying more money out of habit. I'm also going to assume the cursory googling is worth less than 15 minutes of actual experience.
I'm not an economist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here: my expectation is that between now and 2025, a decline in construction demand in China will have a more significant impact on global copper consumption than an increase due to EV demand. I think the copper supplies will be okay.
Who's expecting a decline in construction demand in China? I think I've heard this a few places, granted, but have they really built up enough for their whole population (that would want it)?
China's population will start shrinking around 2025, and there's a real estate bubble that's clearly starting to deflate right now.
Obviously China is still a poor country and there's a lot of housing stock being upgraded, so it's not going to be a complete collapse, but I do expect construction to slow down both in the short and long term.
Depopulation hits the non-urbanized areas first, since the first thing young people in the countryside do is move to the big city. Much of China will never be urbanized.
too late, evergrande is already defaulting on 350 billion $, other companies cant finish construction mandated by government, suppliers dont give credit anymore, people are ansioux to buy "homes on paper" (RE devoleper financing vehicle), homebuyers on unfinished homes are freezing mortage payment at record numbers due to completition challenges (these are literally personal loans with heavy penalties).
The central gov will have to squander trillions of RMB to clean this mess and fast. the reactionary & corrupt friendly nature of officials showed its results
There’s a difference between the collapse of China and a slowdown in their pace of construction. The CCP is intentionally trying to decrease the amount of construction and housing developers in China have been running into issues with debt repayments that the Chinese government doesn’t want to rescue.
in today media landscape there are a lot of sources of news about china that can filter out of the Great firewall and that are not pathetically parts of X agendas. I reccommend "the china show", "china in focus", "china update" and "china insights" on Youtube, they show unfortunately a darker face than any Bloomberg or "FOX" could ever do, and accurately (personal opinion).
Btw china has its real estate sector (homes fo speculation, public infrastructure for gov) debt fueld at unsustainable levels (affecting also tax revenues at local level that are dependent or land leasing for financing themselves), the bubble is bursting, how fast and dangerously will depend from gov reaction. bail out is the most sounding solution but the gov is doing too much QE already and will have to make sacrifices here or there. Easy growth is over forever, skills are neeeded now, a problem with XI leadership.
China residential construction growth is slowing. Their rates of urbanization have almost reached levels seen in developed countries. People are paying close attention to where China goes from here.
Probably completely anecdote evidence, but plastic piping needs to be replaced every 20-ish years, while copper has easily last multiple decades.
20 years is fine assuming all the piping is easy to get to (e.g. around a hot water heater). A lot of piping is not and would require refinishing quite of a bit of piping.
My research seems to indicate most residential plastic tubing still has a lifetime of 20 years, from what I can tell.
PEX-A (expansion PEX) almost all have a limited warranty period of 20-25 years depending on manufacture. It’s minimum reported lifespan is closer to 40-50 years with it estimated to be as high as 100 years depending on water quality, usage, other factors.
> limited warranty period of 20-25 years depending on manufacture
If there’s a significant enough problem, these construction manufacturers have a tendency to go out of business and reorganize, voiding all the warranties in the process.
I'm in a 25 year old building and we had to replace all the plastic piping last year. The pipes became fragile and started randomly bursting. In about 50 apartments, we were having about 2 leaks a year, and were finding it hard to find plumbing companies to actually repair them.
That was probably polybutylene. PEX has been installed even before that (since the 1950s) and proven longevity, while polybutylene piping was already beset with lawsuits in the 1980s. As usual, the USA only does the right thing after exhausting all other options.
Actually, I'm remembering there were some widespread failures of PEX-C. Hmm.
I believe I've ABS pipes in the condo in suburban hell, but one cracked and left a pretty nasty mess. The whole development is about 40 years old so maybe it's age related, maybe not. One thing I've learned is that these pipes had a high rate of defects when new.
It's been interesting living in a new-ish apartment building. Everything in the condo was garbage (the early 80s were not kind to construction in the US) assembled reasonably well. Everything in this apartment is pretty reasonable quality assembled by a small army of blind glue sniffing idiots.
My concern with plastic pipes is wildfire. Up in the north bay the municipal water was rendered toxic and unusable after fires got things hot enough so that carcinogens were leeching into the water. That's less of a concern with individual buildings, but it's not fun when a city or water district has to rip everything out of the ground.
I couldn't tell you what cities laid down up north, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'll build it back with something else (plastic or otherwise). My place has black plastic pipes that I think are explicitly called out as ABS.
CPVC is brittle right off the factory line. Improper handling during transport and install are suspected to be the bulk of the issues down the road. Tiny micro-fractures occur when the pipe is dropped, struck, or even left to sit in the sun too long, which creates weak points and eventual failure. The only use I’ve seen for CPVC in modern installs is the discharge pipe for the TMP valve on water heaters. Can’t use regular PVC because it’s not rated for heated water.
PEX isn’t PVC. I would definitely avoid using PVC for anything in drinking water contact because of the phthalates used as plasticisers. PEX on the other hand doesn’t need plasticisers, and I don’t think it should really abrade to create microplastics in normal use…
> Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
If a product is just as good and less expensive, why aren’t builders using it already? Builders (like farmers) are pretty aware of and sensitive to their cost of inputs.
I have a slate roof that’s around 100 years old. It’s had maintenance over the years, but rock lasts essentially forever. I’m coming up on some copper replacement from wear after 100 years and it’s definitely not going to be zinc-plated carbon steel, aluminum, or low-grade stainless. I’d consider 316 stainless and will ask the contractors about it. I feel like the malleability and solderability of copper actually matters here, but I’ll ask.
> Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics.
According to my plumber, who now does all plastic, plastic is indeed cheaper, however, connectors are more expensive, so in the end, it ends up being about the same price. He does plastic mostly because it is easier to work with. I believe it is just manufacturers making bigger margins, it is impressive how expensive all these small parts are.
And yes, it is a sign of the industry adapting. It is just that if may not reflect on the final price the consumer pays.
Copper pipes react badly if they are in contact with steel, such as a nail driven into the wrong place. It doesn't have to puncture the pipe. It's an electrochemical reaction that can destroy the wall of the pipe. (Learned this the hard way. Not a fan of pipes breaking in the ceiling...)
> Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics.
Rats do not chew through copper.
Getting a plumber out, replacing the pipe section, replastering, etc to deal with the fallout was substantially more expensive than laying copper pipes would have been.
> Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
For which applications? I've been told to avoid any houses with aluminum wiring because of how dangerous it is.
It can be used for cabling, though that's going to be industrial connections (like an inch or so in diameter, and connections between 400V equipment). Though those types of connections a practically babysat with inspections every year or two, compared to house wiring which is run once and never think about again.
Also not exclusive, internal parts of gear will probably still be copper.
> Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Superior in what way? Being lighter / more flexible? Did you account for the fact you have to upsize aluminum to carry the same amperage load as copper? When comparing Apples to Apples (Err.. Aluminum to Copper) on say a 200A service entrance cable, the difference in weight / flexibility isn’t much based on personal experience, but there are other negatives to using aluminum over copper for SER cable. One example, voltage drop over 50ft isn’t as much an issue with copper.
For pipes, I would always choose copper over plastic, regardless of the price.
All the plastic pipes that I have ever seen had a too short lifetime, and when it became necessary to replace them prematurely in whatever hard to access place they had been installed, the costs were much higher than the cost of the pipes.
Even if the plastic pipes were claimed to be made of some high-quality long life plastic, instead of being made of cheap PVC or the like, such claims are difficult to verify, unlike for a copper pipe, where you do not need special instruments to verify that the pipe ready to be installed is really made of copper.
>> a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
Very likely true. This is usually the case with materials, and as the article mentions it is happening.
However... this doesn't mean that adaptation is without side effects. In a lot of cases, prices will just rise and the finished products will be more expensive and scarce.
It's pretty hard to predict downstream effects, but material availability is increasingly more of an issue.
You mentioned pipes within the context of water. Copper pipe (tubing to be more exact) is used in air conditioning systems, the coils (heat exchangers) and the tubes that connect the condensor and evaporator.
There's also all of the copper used as windings in electrical motors, fans, compressors, transformers, etc.
A "hidden" use of copper is brass which is an alloy made with high percentages of copper.
Plastic pipes have a really bad reputation for joint failures in the construction industry in the UK. I’ve heard of whole commercial buildings having plastic pipes fail all over the place during commissioning resulting in the whole lot getting stripped out and replaced with copper. I always specify copper piping because it’s a lower risk for me.
If all of those alternatives mentioned were superior options, they would be industry standard. They're not because of their big gapping flaws you pointed out in most and hand-waved away as not a big deal.
I agree with most of this except for galvanized steel. It doesn't last long enough for a flashing application, plus the installation (drive a nail through it) destroys the zinc coating.
Aluminum is most commonly used these days - copper is more rare, and mostly used for looks.
> Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
Sort of. Aluminum made before 1975 is not safe, but aluminum wire made after that date is a new allow that is perfectly safe in branch circuits, but no one wants to use it.
My home is almost all PEX instead of copper piping. I love the stuff. Definitely opportunity to cut down on a lot of it there. But I wonder how many new builds already do?
Copper is a well known bacteria killer in water. Typically Pex is used for most plumbing with copper ends. Older construction will have all copper indoor piping
I didn’t know that. I assumed that my Pex always terminates to copper because that’s basically the common interface for all fixtures being sold. But you’re suggesting it’s actually bacterial related? Or was that just a fun fact?
I have a mixed system of PEX / Copper in my basement since they used that when installing the water softener. The pipes sweat during the summer and this resulted in mold on the PEX pipes. Copper pipes seem to resist it, which wasn't to surprising. I've heard copper top strips are sometimes used on roofs because the run off prevents moss and other things from growing atop the roof.
> Contamination of drinking water
The PEX EIR found that methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) and tert-Butyl alcohol can leach from PEX in amounts that exceed taste, odor and health guidelines set by the State of California for drinking water. The PEX EIR found that PEX pipes can initially leach as much as 290 ppb of MTBE. The California Department of Public Health and the California Office of Health Hazard Assessment have established a drinking water taste and odor standard of 5 ppb for MTBE and a drinking water public health goal and maximum contaminant level of 13 ppb. One of the key issues for the California State Pipe Trades Council was the recognition that construction workers are often the first to consume water from newly installed pipes. Because the levels of MTBE contamination from PEX pipe are highest during the first month of use, workers were at risk of repeated exposure to drinking water contaminated with MTBE at levels exceeding public health goals as they moved from job site to job site.
The PEX EIR found that, unlike copper pipe, outside contaminants such as pesticides, oil, gasoline, and benzene can permeate through PEX pipe into drinking water.
Several studies and articles comparing potable water pipe materials, including variants of PEX, polybutylene, polypropylene, CPVC, copper and steel, have found that PEX, at least initially, displayed the strongest biofilm formation and the strongest promotion of the growth of Legionella bacteria.
for clarity, in "plastic pipe designed to be carrying water", the plastic pipe is non-polar. Yes, water is polar, which is why you want it carried in something non-polar, because like-dissolves-like.
it's funny because you can make the same arguments against freshly brazed lead connections on copper pipes. And those "low lead fixtures" aren't lead-free.
hrmmm, looks like plumbing solder has been banned (for sale I guess) since 1986 in USA and since 1990 in Canada. US regs are specific to potable water lines, so unclear how available it is.
(Wouldn't be surprised if plumbers stocked up on several years worth prior to the bans).
Copper as a material is fairly unique in that many things we make of copper have alternatives that could be used if the cost was too high.
For example, copper is used for water pipes. But we also have steel and plastic pipes.
Copper is also used for wiring and electrical conductors - but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages (double the voltage needs only one quarter of the copper). Or, we can switch to aluminium for wiring, which is also a good conductor.
Plenty of users are already economical with copper. For example, have you noticed that if you buy a USB cable that's 1 meter it is less than half the price of a 2 meter cable? Don't you think that's odd, because presumably there is a fixed labour+materials cost for the connectors, and a per-meter cost for the cable itself? No... The USB specification requires a specific wire resistance, which means longer wires must also be thicker (more copper) to meet that spec. Lately, very cost sensitive USB wires have moved to aluminium conductors.
There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
> There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
It's not just talk, a number of EVs run at 800V (Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron GT, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). And while there may be a cost benefit for the manufacturer, it also makes a more desirable car for the owner, since they can charge twice as fast. While most 400V EVs top out around 125 kW charging rates, the 800V EVs can hit mid-200s.
You are correct. The max charging rate of the battery is independent of its voltage, and runs around 2.4 C (Tesla) to 2.8 C (Porsche). You only get this max rate for the first 20% or so of SOC (state of charge). One way to think about this is that each individual cell has a nominal voltage around 3.7, and doesn't care how it's wired into the battery.
The confusion arises because a given DC charger can deliver twice as much power at 800 volts as it can at 400, assuming it's running at its max current. But that's a limitation of the charger, not the battery. This article has a brief discussion:
The charging voltage has to mach your battery voltage, so twice the voltage in the charging cable means you can send more power for the same amount of amps.
In nearly all DC charge setups the charge voltage (ie. the voltage on the wire you plug into the car) does match the battery voltage.
Sure, it's technically possible to do voltage conversion on the car side, but it either requires expensive and heavy hardware (A device that can convert 300 kilowatts from 400v to 800v isn't cheap!), or it requires funky use of the electric motor inverters and coils for voltage conversion instead - which in turn constrains the design and forces compromises.
In either case, you probably with have ~3% efficiency losses, which effectively increases the total energy bill for the customer over the lifetime for the car by 3%, which might be thousands of dollars.
> In nearly all DC charge setups the charge voltage (ie. the voltage on the wire you plug into the car) does match the battery voltage.
Except the battery pack on the car is 300V to 400V depending on the model car, but the grid voltage is 120V (mobile charger) to 480V (Supercharger station). Some EVs are 800V even. So tell me again how the input voltage matches the battery voltage? ;)
The reality is that either the charger or maybe the BMS, either inside the car or elsewhere, is not only stepping up or stepping down the voltage to match the battery, but also rectifying the AC grid input into DC for the battery packs.
> In either case, you probably with have ~3% efficiency losses, which effectively increases the total energy bill for the customer over the lifetime for the car by 3%, which might be thousands of dollars.
There is more than 3% efficiency losses usually and some commercial charge providers handle that differently. Most directly expose the overhead by charging for “kwh used” whereas car shows “kwh stored in battery”, but Tesla does (or did until recently) just charge for what was “stored”.
> but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages
Rings circuits[0], popular in the uk due to post-wwii copper shortages, use less wiring than the typical radial circuits. Wikipedia says about 25% less?
Instead of worrying about how we substitute every ICE car for an EV car, we should be trying to get cars off the road.
COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. We should be leveraging these facts when planning towns, to reduce the reliance on cars.
> COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work.
I think you could easily look at people's reactions to COVID lockdowns and reach the opposite conclusion.
A lot of people hated being stuck at home, a lot of people couldn't wait to get back to normal, travelling to see concerts and sporting events, or just travelling for fun. A lot of people, despite having jobs that can be done remotely, prefer to commute to offices because they think it has other benefits.
All COVID really showed us is what is possible with regards to remote work and keeping people close to home, not is what is largely desired by people.
I think a large reason for people longing for all those things again, was because many people who were locked down, were locked down in suburbia, which has almost none of those things within walking or even driving distance (under an hour, obviously you can drive further).
But regardless, I think the solution to many issues being talked about here is bette decentralised planning. We need to do away with monolithic cities surrounded by an endlessly increasing suburban sprawl. It requires every household to have at least 1 car, and it means if peool do need to spend time close to home, they suddenly miss out on many things they love or even need.
Many small towns is better than a few huge cities.
The supply chain problems, in part are a result of the Lockdowns.
So sure it "showed us" what people already knew, information workers can work from home. The final tally is still out on if that was better for companies or not, or if companies in the long term will keep work from home for employee
Hell at my company it is about 50/50 on if people want to work from home or not. I think HN being what is it tends to not recognize that here we have a strong bias towards WFH that may not be shared by large parts of the workforce
The major problem for copper is the lack of large projects in the pipeline - current mineral explorers are entering a new phase of what they need to look for and it's a super exciting time to be working in Exploration, honestly.
P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.
Does the mining industry need help with software? I was talking to someone with experience in the the oil & gas sector and he mentioned that there is a lot of things that could be automated because scraping data and data entry is often being done by hand.
If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially.
Why would car manufacturers be limited to copper from cars? For example, there's huge amounts of copper in telecoms infrastructure that's being replaced with fibre at the moment. The originating source of the metal is irrelevant. The only things that matter at purity, contaminants, and cost. If the copper is sufficiently high quality, doesn't contain anything that would stop it being used in a battery or a motor, and it's cheap enough, then it's all good.
Tesla has a patent on replacing lots of individual power and control wires with a single smarter wire carrying both for multiple components.
They were talking about it for the model Y and it was suppossed to reduce 1.5km of wire down to 100m but I dont think it's hit production vehicles yet.
They mostly talked about lighter weight and easier robot install, but should be cheaper and use less copper too if that actually becomes an issue.
For information on this sort of thing the USGS mineral survey is an excellent source.
There's the general overview on copper [0], annual summaries, e.g [1] for 2022, and the more detailed "yearbook" [2] which it looks like is in the process of being updated since the last official release in 2017.
for example, [1] says this about "World Resources":
> A U.S. Geological Survey study of global copper deposits indicated that, as of 2015, identified resources contained 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contained an estimated 3.5 billion tons.
Note that this article is careful not to outright say "there isn't enough copper", even if it heavily implies it. It says there aren't enough mines for future demand. And in the sense that more mines should be built in anticipation of that demand, it's correct. But the idea that a copper shortage will meaningfully delay electrification is ridiculous; even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive while other uses of copper move to substitutes and more mines are built. The economic incentives are too strong for anything else to happen.
> ... even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive
Seeing as expense is currently a major barrier to adoption of EVs by the general public, I'd say that becoming even slightly more expensive provides a significant barrier to electrification in the near-term.
> For some standard EV models, Ford will use lithium-iron-sulphate batteries
Googled this, and google gave me a page full of results for lithium iron phosphate batteries. Not a single mention of sulphate (or sulfate). There are people actually getting paid a salary to do this.
It is actually similarly difficult to Google other new battery chemistries like lithium-iron-manganese-phosphate batteries (Google would confuse it with lithium ion manganese oxide batteries).
This is a Google Search bug. If you search for something less popular, that exists close to a popular phrase, it will give you the popular results. Kind of like "horse riding a man" fails in both Dall-E and Google Image search:
They pretend they are using transformer neural nets in search, yet fail at such a clear semantic task that should have been easy for transformers to solve.
i might have missed it in the article but it seems the issue is that there arent enough mines coming online to meet the new demand NOT that we dont have enough copper. it is about the same abundance as zinc and nickel. this is where the free market should help, if the price goes up enough it should incentivize companies to open more mines and possibly innovate new mining methods.
While there is enough copper in the world, geologically speaking, to supply the increased demand, there isn’t enough time.
It takes 10 to 15 years to get a new copper mine through permitting and construction. Twenty years is not unusual for very large projects.
It's mining dot com trumpeting the S&P Mineral Intelligence position on the recent independant Copper position report .. anticipatinting a potential crunch in 15 years if not averted now by investment in developing projects.
The average time figure quoted is best read as "typically, in the absence of the demand we see ramping up now..." and reflects a typically sedate pace for mineral projects which have 50+ year lifespans with trannational owners who overlap exploration, development, and production.
The industry voice here is for Cu projects to accelerate.
( FWiW 14+ years back I wrote a chunk of the backend of what was sold on to become S&P Min.Intell.
The article is on mining.com, there is a section about mining :)
> In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine.
Hopefully demand for EVs (seems automobiles in general) is more elastic than you make it out and people start gradually living less cad centric lives and cycling/walking/bus/subwaying more.
Can aluminum take up the slack? I know long distance power cables are often aluminum. Even some of the larger gauge in-home wires. If copper prices rise too much, some demand will switch over to other conductors.
Sure, depending on the application you can just redesign to larger gauge aluminium. Aluminium has useful mechanical properties that trump the lower conductivity (such as power lines,where thermal cycles can make copper brittle). You could argue that there is a silver shortage in a similar way as the article has argued a copper shortage...
The lower conductivity of Al isn't important: you just use larger wires to make up for it and get the same resistivity. Al is so cheap that it's still much cheaper than Cu even with thicker wires. Al also has low density, so even with thicker wires, it isn't as heavy as Cu, which is important with power lines.
2.5 times as much copper per vehicle as in ICE. 2.5 times according to the article that tries hard to be alarmist, so they probably don't underestimate. How much of the global copper supply went into cars? If it was a lot I'm sure that car manufacturers would have found ways to do with less (e.g. the dead simple step of moving to a higher voltage)
Well, in the US maybe time to eliminate the 1, 5 and maybe 10 cent coins ?
Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year. The others have a copper core. With current inflation, 1/5/10 cent coins cannot buy anything.
The only reason for the 25 cent coin are vending machines.
The copper penny hoarders are beating you to it [0]. I met a "retired" guy who is driving around the US buying boxes of pennies from banks sorting them into copper or not. He sells the sorted copper pennies to penny hoarders [1] and uses the non-copper pennies to spend at the Walmart NCR cash registers (they have to love him). He said he does not get rich but makes enough to get by.
We went out for a meal and discussed the feasibility of sorting the pennies by date using ML. The real gold mine would be that an AI approach might potentially identify numismatic grade pennies and really pay for itself.
My coworker is a sport shooter like you would see in the Olympics. His club noticed differences in grouping patterns between different bullet manufacturers. He built a sorting machine using python, 3d printed parts, and image recognition. It sounds similar to penny sorting by date and weight. He sorted by looking at the stamp on the shell and verified they weighed a certain amount.
The US mints about 8 billion pennies per year, which at 2.5g each and 2.5% copper, works out to about 500 metric tons of copper. Add in nickels (1.5B x 5g x 75% copper = 5600 metric tons), dimes (3B x 2.2g x 92% copper = 6100 metric tons Cu), and quarters (2.5B x 5.7g x 92% copper = 13000 metric tons copper).
Which works out to just over 25000 metric tons of copper per year used in US coinage.
About 2 million metric tons of copper are used in the US per year. So all coinage represents about 1.25% of US copper consumption, of which quarters are about half.
There are some good reasons to eliminate small coinage, but "it will noticeably help with a copper shortage" isn't really one of them.
I'm actually quite fond of the 25 cent coins I got from the US. They work in shopping carts here (you have to put a coin into a shopping cart to get it, and you get the coin back after you bring it back, but they usually only accept 1 or 2 euro. I'm much more likely to still have the quarter, since I can't spend it here.)
I got bunch of coins when I had to use a laundromat in the US once, they only accepted quarters. Exchange $20 at a different machine and get a ton of metal. I suppose its like legacy software.
Back in the late '70/early '80s the UK 10p coin was similar enough in size and weight to fool some German vending machines as a "1 DM" coin (Deutchmark). The rough rule of thumb rate of exchange was 1 GBP to 4 DM back then.
It depends on what side of town you're on. There is a big class and culture gap in the US financial system. Everyone on this forum from the US likely is well banked. But a large chunk of the US is not. A large number of people either do not meet the requirements (undocumented immigrants), distrust the system, or don't meet minimum balance requirements (or don't want to deal with those requirements).
I'm "well banked" I guess, but the laundromat nearest me still only takes quarters for some godforsaken reason and sometimes it is convenient for parking meters (although most of them use the same app nowadays).
This is true, but cash is still widely used by the unbanked as well. Go to a grocery store in a poor part of town and you will see plenty of cash being handled at the checkouts.
Banks make money by lending on deposits. If you have no deposits, they can't make any money. Although, almost universally, banks will allow you to pay a few dollars per month for your account instead. But, people who don't have very much money usually don't have much of a need to spend spend money for a service to hold on to their money, because they don't have any.
I don't think a few dollars here and there is not really indicative of a huge difference in anything but product/marketing strategies and consumer preferences. Banks have a lot of different fees that vary not only between continents, but between banks that literally sit across the street from each other.
I thought most European banks do charge for basic accounts?
"Free" accounts seems like a big US thing because there's lots of competition between a highly fractionated banking industry. Something like 4000 banks in USA and next biggest is Russia with ~400
For example historically and until fairly recently, most American banks were prohibited from having more than one branch. In total.
That's called unit banking. And that's why you have those small-town American banks, and national chains almost everywhere else.
Obviously, that bank with only one location is much more dependent on the fortunes of its only location. This makes for a hilariously brittle financial system.
I use it pretty much every day. Almost all restaurants and stores have an ATM, and when not, there's always one somewhere nearby.
For me it's a matter of principle, I use cash because I want businesses to continue accepting cash. I have credit cards and I sometimes use them out of laziness (or for anything over $200 or so, or online...) But if a business refuses cash then I'll refuse to do business with them, because I think they're disenfranchising people who don't have credit cards and I won't support that. Thankfully this is fairly rare.
Come to Austria. The entire country revolves around cash.
I rarely see someone pay with card at the supermarket and it's most likely a foreigner. Small shops and cafes don't even take cards, only cash and the rare time they do it's only for larger sums.
I learned to avoid lines with old people in France, because they will be paying with cash or even worse, cheques.
Yes, I've heard all about the benefits of cash on HN, but the millions of man years saved by not standing in line has to be worth something too. One Auchan was boasting that they got line time down to 4 minutes. In NL, anythng longer than 30 seconds is unusual.
NL is a more modern country with a forward thinking population. Germany and Austria are more backwards and conservative.
If you come to Austrian supermarkets at rush hour, the lines will last several minutes. It not uncommon to hear disgruntled customers (usually old people ironically) yell at supermarket employees to open another till after waiting for ages.
I'm not from Germany, but I just came back (to the UK) from a holiday spent partly in Germany and partly in Denmark.
In Germany I paid cash for every casual snack-grade transaction, and some bigger ones like restaurant meals. It seemed totally normal and I was happy with that.
In Denmark I never saw the currency at all and I have no idea what it looks like. I never used it and I never saw anyone else use it. Contactless everywhere.
I much prefer cash and regret its disappearance from use in my own country - we are about half-way between the German and Danish experiences above, perhaps closer to the Danish end. A holiday in Germany felt more like a holiday because of this detail. What it feels like when you actually live there is another question.
But this stuff about cash is something of a distraction from the question of metal use - it's increasingly apparent that although electric cars may be an improvement on oil-driven ones, they are not in any useful way the solution. Being rid of cars and basically all powered individual transport may be both dreary and extreme, but what alternative is there?
There is really no need to get rid of all powered individual transport. That is basically an ideological position, not a scientific one. It has basically become a modern secular religion, where people feel the need to atone for the "sin" of harming the environment, and want to forcibly convert the rest of us heathens.
Anthropomorphic global climate change is absolutely a real problem and we should do more to reduce carbon emissions. But reliable, high-speed personal mobility has brought about a tremendous improvement in quality of life. There's no way I'll agree to give up owning personal cars.
> There is really no need to get rid of all powered individual transport. That is basically an ideological position, not a scientific one.
Nah. I used to hope that moving propulsion to the electric grid would allow us to use renewables to drive transport and so do it all for almost nothing. And I also thought that it was vital to sell a solution, to come up with replacements that people would not just accept but actively choose. And that these could lead to a sustainable world.
But it's not true. It's wishful thinking, the dreamer's position, it's the ideological one. The scientific position is that none of this is remotely enough, for reasons like those discussed in the article above. Cars will be got rid of, one way or another - we don't have the resources to sustain them except at the cost of, well, us. The question is just whether we can find a way to sell that idea to ourselves and reorganise ourselves before it happens for us.
As I said, it's dreary and it feels extreme and I don't like it, but I don't see what alternative there is. The brilliant and engaging ideas just don't add up.
I live in the UK and don't think I've used cash for at least three years if not longer, at least I can't remember the last time I did and I love it.
I understand the concerns about everything being logged digitally, but it is just so much more convenient than carrying a bulky wallet with a coin pouch, and messing around with coins at the till holding everyone up for ages. For some reason people think it's a binary choice between privacy or convenience, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I have started going out without my wallet recently, one less thing to lose, and just paying with my phone everywhere.
Meh, since everything on your phone is digital, loosing it and restoring everything including your digital wallet is a few taps away after buying a new phone.
Meanwhile when you loose your physical wallet, it takes day or weeks, plus trips and legal paperwork to issue new cards, IDs, driver's license, etc. It's a complete nightmare.
> Meh, since everything on your phone is digital, loosing it and restoring everything including your digital wallet is a few taps away after buying a new phone.
In this thread where the assumption is cashless & wallet-less, I have to ask: buying a new phone with what?
Seems like you'd need a friend to spot you a few hundred until you got your access back…
Anecdote but I was there a few weeks ago and did have a similar experience. It was really annoying, so many small shops chose not to take card, and as tourists you usually get screwed on the exchange rates if you need cash.
Also a concert with 20k people attending, none of the card machines worked, and no one seemed to kick up a fuss just paid cash, while we had none with us so had to "enjoy" it without drinks or food.
Cash is still king in Germany, but use of "contactless" payment methods have drastically increased in the pandemic.
Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.
Before Covid: cash was absolutely king in Germany. Plenty of restaurants, even in the most touristy parts of Nuremberg, did not take credit cards (maaaybe EC cards, but that’s a different system, and no tourist from outside Europe would have one). Loads of stores didn’t take credit cards.
Now: while cash is still normal, just about everywhere has contactless credit card terminals. I don’t even get a second glance when I ask to pay with a card at the bakery for a 3 EUR purchase. Some food trucks won’t take cash.
However, we did pay for our 17k EUR used car with cash last year, and that is still the recommended way for private used car sales.
Quasi-german here. Cash is still king in Germany as of 2022.
It has gotten better after the Pandemic.
Germans use outdated tech because it works. They use cash very rapidly and efficiently. I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.
Fun fact about cash payments in Germany - they're all reported to the government in real time. There used to be fiscalization rules that meant Point of Sale devices had to store 5 years worth of transaction data for auditing, but recently theyve moved to just having the POS report everything directly over the Internet. Lots of countries do the same sort of thing.
That's not a good argument for progress in general. We'd still be in the stone age with that mentally.
This is also a reflection on the lack of digitalization and IT/tech innovation in Germany and Austria in general vs other European countries that tend to adopt tech earlier.
>I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.
I'd beg to differ when there's lots of change and coins involved.
Some could be fast with an abacus but that doesn't mean we're not all better off with pocket calculators.
Like with many things, just because that's how Germany does a thing, doesn't mean it's great.
Honestly, it depends. Essentially every German has a bank account backed debit card (not a CC!), except may the most poor (though I think there is a legal requirement for banks to offer basic accounts + debit cards for everyone). For me it's my preferred mode of payment since I got mine 18 or 19 years ago.
//edit: Cashless might imply debit card is accepted, but not necessarily credit cards. Though these are catching up.
For groceries at the usual chains (Edeka, Lidl, Aldi,...) cashless always works, and from my POV always did. For a while many stores only accepted cashless for sales above 10 Euros, but I only know one shop that still has that antique rule.
In the past paying by card was something you did for "bigger" expenses; I'm young enough to only have witnessed how that seems to have phased out, but I definitely got strange looks when I payed for an inexpensive item by card. These days most cashiers don't blink an eye when I do so for a <1 Euro item.
As a rule of thumb, the more expensive a place is and the less shady (as in "might cook the books" or "not a drinking hole"), the more likely it is to accept cashless. The "expensive" barrier is coming down ever since: 15 years ago I might have needed cash for a restaurant with the average dish costing 20 Euros, or going out with friends to drink. These days it's safe to assume "if customers are expected to sit down, and pay 10 Euro+, then cashless is probably accepted".
Exceptions apply, like that one, new (post-COVID!) restaurant, which insists on cash; and also I go to other places like I did two decades ago while being a pupil or student.
When I go out in our city (six digit populace) I usually assume that I can pay cashless, though if I know the next ATM to be unpleasently far away, I make sure that me or a companion has enough cash, just in case.
I still pack some cash when venturing into an unknown town/city.
Overall, I think due to COVID more cusomters now use the option to pay cashless; the only huge impact in acceptance (that I noticed) seems to have been bakeries around here.
It's important to remember that, while Germany is about the size of one of the US's states, it's much more densely populated and has vast differences in customs, traditions and subtile social norms like cash vs cashless.
It's also super annoying to wait in line at the supermarket until all banknotes, coins and pennies are exchanged and counted between each customer and the supermarket employee vs paying by card wich takes 2-5s. It adds up to minutes wasted nearly every day.and probably weeks/months over a lifetime. Plus the CO2 to transport cash back and forth.
But most seriously, cash payments enable tons of tax fraud, especially by business owners in the hospitality industry, making it unfair to those with jobs who pay nearly half their salary in tax, while Gastro owners will buy another Porsche or vacation home from the taxes they dodged thanks to cash payments.
I hope they ban cash, it's annoying, time wasting, environmentally unfortunately and makes life super easy for tax fraudsters to the detriment of those who have to pay their taxes fairly.
The privacy reason is some hypocritical bullshit, as those same people using exclusively cash, carry privacy invasive Apple/Android phones and constantly use spying services of Google, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. The real "privacy" they're referring to means privacy from the taxman for their illicit financial gains, a.k.a. tax fraud. That's the real reason, and I hope it gets cracked down.
Parent was trying to be charitable. Apparently your time is quite valuable, so that it is a serious imposition to find oneself ahead of you in a supermarket queue. Since your time is so valuable, we'd all breathe easier if you would avail yourself of more significant time savers like the many grocery delivery services that are now available. Or perhaps you should hire a personal assistant to run your errands?
No need to be snarky. You can have efficient grocery shopping that saves everyone time if everyone paid by card/contactless like you see in NL or the Nordics instead of wasting time and resources counting coins and transporting them around when the digital alternative is so much more efficient.
No need to create more CO2 for the packaging and transport of groceries to your door if the supermarket is on your way from work anyway. Plus you get to pick the exact fruits and veggies you like yourself.
I assume you have a US viewpoint where grocery delivery is common but this is not a thing for consumers in Austria outside of the capital. It also costs extra so there's that.
I have never used grocery delivery; perhaps it has been available in my area for a couple of years. After we've been "locked down" for so long, it seems fortunate that we're able to enjoy the company of fellow citizens in the grocery store and various other locations where we all queue together. People have waited behind me in queue (and I've visited some benighted locales where queueing is a habit the public has not yet mastered), so I appreciate the opportunity to take the other side in this transaction. One character we don't need around is someone who feels like the line should move faster.
Either you vastly exaggerate the time savings of card payments, or credit card machines in your community are more reliable than what we have here. Don't brag too hard about living in the future, however, because here we often have the option of self-checkout, which typically is faster than even looking at a cashier. (Unless one of the oldsters who annoy you so has wandered into that lane and now contemplates the scanner as if it were the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. In that case one might offer assistance? Most of our self checkouts take cash!)
The day will come when all purchases will require the approval of several more parties than the buyer and the seller. We will not enjoy that circumstance, so people wiser (and perhaps less hurried?) than you will use cash as long as we can.
Grocery delivery services are mostly trash and don't save time; in my experience dealing with the hassles often takes more time than just driving to the supermarket. The delivery windows are too wide, and often too far in the future. They don't pick the right pieces of meat or produce. And if something is out of stock they pick an inappropriate substitute, not none at all.
Easier tax fraud mostly to keep your illicitly gained money away from the taxman.
Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak.
Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?
I carry cash almost entirely to tip servers and other service industry employees in cash. One Americanism for another, huh? But that’s only bills, no coinage.
Not much copper in those unless you collect pre-1982 pennies. New pennies have such a thin layer of copper plating that separating that would be more trouble than it's worth.
EDIT: Darn, can't delete now. Yes I agree, the penny should be eliminated to save on copper.
It is still a totally irrelevant amount of copper.
One penny has 2.95g of copper in it. 10 billion pennies have 30,000 tons of copper in them. Worldwide copper production is 20 million tons. 0.015% of the world's copper is used for pennies. That's a rounding error.
Just because a number is big, doesn't mean it matters.
Sure. Get rid of the penny. But not because it will impact our copper supply in any way.
Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand. How many houses, cars or circuit boards could be made with 30,000 tons a year?
There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless, but as they say, 30K tons of copper saved is 30K tons of copper earned.
> Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand
This attitude is exactly why our planet is dying. Instead of investing time and effort into things that matter, people become hyper-focused on worthless things that have no impact. Like measures to conserve a trivial amount of water at home.
It's a poisonous and wasteful way to think.
> There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless
That's simply not true. We have real problems to solve. The numbers are clear. This isn't one of them.
It's good to highlight these issues but honestly I'm just not worried about that because this is the kind of thing that spurs innovation. That could be recycling more copper, using less copper, findin gnew sources of copper, finding alternatives to copper and so on.
Remember that copper's primary use is as a conductor and there are lots of conductors from aluminium to gold.
I don't expect fuel-based vehicles to go away completely because there are still use cases where fuel is better than electric. Cold conditions are still a problem for EVs. Range is another factor.
What I expect to see more of is using renewables to store energy in the form of fuel instead of in batteries eg producing methanol, methane, ammonia or kerosene. This will at least be carbon neutral. It's not currently economic to do it but the advantage comes in not needing potentially expensive batteries, being relatively easy to store and not requiring power grid infrastructure in remote or unstable regions.
In my years, I've often learned that only necessity will push people towards solutions. In this case with copper, only once we have used up most of the copper available easily will we truly start to care about extracting it in more efficient ways, whether it be through recycling or other means. If it's too easy to do the naive way, people just won't care about efficiency enough to do it the hard way.
It's the same thing in software with bloat even as hardware gets faster. Rather, it is precisely because hardware gets faster that software engineers have little regard for the speed of their software, since any inefficiences will be overshadowed by the horsepower of the raw silicon. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away, I've always known, but now I see it everywhere, not just in software.
Copper price today is exactly the same as it was in July 2006 (using the same source you linked). Not sure this is such a wonderful asset when you look at it this way.
Not sure what are you referring to the price of copper has been increasing for the past 20 years. 2006 was high because it was before the housing prices with all of the plundering. The demand has increased and the are no signs of slowing down https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch....
> Currently recycling (an EV battery) is an expensive process where North Americans are footing the bill,” Chiang said. “That’s why they’re charging people thousands of dollars for recycling. That’s why the stat is only 5% of all EV batteries are being recycled.
Wow this was new for me, it makes plenty of sense to reuse the batteries when they’re no longer sufficient for an automobile - but is that’s something available to the general public?
No one is repurposing whole packs because they are only gotten rid of after they've completely failed. Repurposing individual battery cells is difficult when they're tightly integrated into a battery pack. They're welded in, and often entombed in wax, foam or adhesives. If you can disassemble down to a module level, then you have a shot. Usually when an EV pack fails, it's due to a single module going bad. There's a pretty good sized industry to refurbish failed Prius battery packs by disassembling them down to modules, and then characterizing the modules and matching them back up with similarly degraded but otherwise healthy modules across many battery packs.
It will be interesting to see to what extent either other conductors (such as graphene, one of the best conductors [0]) or asteroid mining for iron, copper, nickel, and cobalt [1] become feasible in time (mid-century?) to offset the shortage of copper.
Not sure if that's available but the same source was expecting a mild glut of copper over the next few years due to new mines opening and no one seems to predict higher prices long term, so I think this might just be standard industry whining that taxes and health and safety and environmental laws are holding them back.
> Even though a rise in demand is anticipated, this will not be enough to absorb the increase in supply, Commerzbank's commodities analyst Daniel Briesemann said in a note.
> Also, the conspicuous supply difference is due to the expected noteworthy recovery in mine output.
> According to ICSG, mine output >will rise by 3.9% due to the commissioning of several new projects and the expansion of existing mines, Briesemann said.
> This was echoed by UK brokerage Marex Spectron, which said in a research note Dec. 7 that according to CRU -- a commodity research company -- the view is that after a deficit in 2021, the following two years are expected to see a surplus.
> Aside primary copper production, an increase in secondary production, from scrap copper, was also likely to contribute to copper's surplus, Briesemann said.
This is the inevitable outcome of continuing to uphold the status quo of the car-dominant society: shortages in gasoline, lithium, cobalt, copper, urban land, etc.
We have to face the music: Converting gas cars to electric will only fix a small fraction of all the problems caused by cars. Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.
What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context.
Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good.
While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change.
> Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda.
Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions.
Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.
But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities.
As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)
> Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.
I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung.
I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight).
Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.
Density is key. The US is HUGE. It's the same reason why standing up cell towers doesn't work well in the US vs other countries.
I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation. Maybe because voters don't hold their local officials accountable when they mismanage public funds (California's $80b train fiasco)
I do know cars are needed in rural areas for many reasons and aren't posing any sort of a problem.
Fix the cities. Transit, traffic, and parking is a mess, but it has nothing to do with cars, they are a symptom, it has more to do with population and public spending.
China is huge too. Russia is gigantic. The US was huge before the 1950s too.
The terrible city sprawl of the US is not a law of nature, but specific post WW2 city design policies that could easily be reversed at any time.
> I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation.
It's the same policies. Take the minimum parking requirements: you can't have multiple shops accessible from one station because every shop needs to be surrounded by a walking distance worth of parking. You need to duplicate your entire network because things like corner stores don't exist, meaning there are basically no trips within residential areas. Allocating almost all budget to cars for the last half century has lead to severe loss of experience with designing transit. The Buy America clause says that foreign companies must set up temporary factories in the US whenever someone orders a trainset from them.
There's lots and lots of things, but they all originate with car-centric post-ww2 policies.
Spot on. I really hope that through automation, rural public transportation becomes cheaper and more frequent as a result.
I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons.
Who had cars though? No problem.
But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.
And takes many hours to travel the same distance as a 20 minute car ride. People who say "just hop on public transportation" live in the top percent of cities where that actually makes sense.
As a litmus test, choose a few random city in the US. Get times for a 41 mile (average commute) public transportation trip, and times using a private car. You'll might be surprised how much longer it is.
With "returning to 60s or 80s standards of technology", do you mean repairability and great build quality? That would a great step towards a circular / no-waste economy :)
Maybe build quality of the assembly, but definitely not the build quality of anything mechanical! Modern cars have ludicrously better reliability than anything from the 60's to 80's. A car not making it to 100k miles is a rare exception these days, even with somewhat abusive upkeep.
Every car I have ever owned (9 so far since 1975) went far beyond 100k miles, even my 1965 Mini van that I bought in 1975 for 65 GBP. But I agree that the newer cars were much more reliable.
Not sure what we'd achieve by going back to less efficient technology. Miles per gallon almost doubled since 1980, so we'd need to get rid of 50% of cars just to break even on that front and the same is true for lots of things.
Although some of the things we had back then were basically fine, if all tech reverted back to that era we lose a lot of environmental benefits, e.g. the ability to work from home and skip commuting entirely, and cheap PV, and cheap electric bikes and electric cars with useful range, efficient lights and fridges, and so on.
Repairable vs unrepairable, local production able vs needing huge global coordination and resources, "dumb" devices (ie better) vs "smart" and IoT, less tech vs more tech encompassing more areas, more public transport and trains and less cars (including electric cars), and other such things...
> We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture.
The problem is that some of these are working against each other. Electric cars means much much higher electrical energy needs - perhaps needing to even double the current grid. And that works against the need to decomission fossil fuel plants.
As such, significantly reducing car usage seems like a much safer bet than achieving a 0-carbon grid that is double the size of the current one in ~15 years.
They are not "literally batteries on wheels", because their charge is used up by the car itself, not by the grid. They take energy out of the grid, and never put it back in.
Sure there are some ideas that EVs which don't see too much use could be used to discharge back into the grid, but that is hard to organize and destroys the battery much more quickly.
Batteries dont need to discharge back to the grid to time shift energy demand.
Australia has heated water overnight att off peak times for years with ripple signals because otherwise the coal plants wouldn't run efficiently.
They don't need to use that domestic hot water to feed electric energy back into the grid, they just need to use it to avoid calling on the grid when they would otherwise have added to peak load.
EVs are batteries on wheels, with computer chips and internet connections to tell them the best time to charge. All the pieces are there and in actual use for decades.
The problem we're discussing, and the biggest problem for renewable, is that we need massive amounts of storage to handle the cases where production is unexpectedly low for long periods of time - months of low wind and cloud coverage. Car batteries don't help in any way with this problem, which is the biggest risk for a renewable-only grid.
Now, let's assume this problem were solved, and now we start replacing all fossil fuel power plants with renewables + storage. Unfortunately, we are also replacing ICE vehicles with BEVs at the same time, which require massive amounts of extra electrical power to replace the power they were getting from oil. Suddenly, we can no longer close all of our fossil fuel plants, because all of the growth in renewables is consumed by BEV charging.
The problem you're discussing - handling variable load - is somewhat secondary. It's a significant practical problem if you're adding new solar and wind to the grid without closing down old fossil fuel generators, which is what everyone is mostly doing currently, so it is a very discussed problem. The problem of ensuring reliability from a renewable-only grid is so complicated, no one is really tackling it yet, especially since they can barely construct enough new renewables to handle all the extra new load from growing industry + BEVs.
How would you propose to significantly reduce car usage in 15 years? I've never seen a realistic plan for that which accounts for politics, funding, and the time required to build large infrastructure projects. Just pointing out that we ought to do it doesn't get us anywhere.
I think you could do a lot with quick-build bus and bike lanes, and some combination of pollution taxes and market-pricing for parking & high-demand roads/bridges. A lot of people will take a bus - it’s so much cheaper & less stressful - but only if service is reliable so I’d focus on how you could remove delays there, and many things like bus priority lanes or enforcement can be implemented quickly at modest cost.
The big question is politics: even in cities where many people use transit, the political class favors cars.
A lot of single programmers in dense metros, living in apartments, conveniently located next to transit and close to work, might do so. Getting groceries for a family, getting kids to schools and after school activities, running errands etc. is very inconvenient on a bus. As for how much cheaper is the bus I am not sure, last time I've taken one it was $1.5 for each leg, of course, this depends on location, though it's pretty stressful with half of the passengers being seemingly troubled and sometimes "experiencing" strong BO, urination, vomiting and drug consumption right on the bus.
> Getting groceries for a family, getting kids to schools and after school activities, running errands etc. is very inconvenient on a bus.
This isn’t a universal truth - I know a ton of people who do that (I bike more) - but rather a policy decision. Driving has been massively subsidized for a century so it’s not surprising that it often works better but other choices are possible.
> As for how much cheaper is the bus I am not sure, last time I've taken one it was $1.5 for each leg, of course, this depends on location
Okay, that’s still 20 trips a day before you’re at AAA’s _average_ cost of owning a car. If we chose to offer better service, I’m sure more than a few people would pocket the difference — the primary deterrent for most people is when service is infrequent and inconsistent.
What do you mean by "subsidized driving"? Care to give examples? I am not getting anything for driving, instead I pay taxes in registration and in fuel.
>Okay, that’s still 20 trips a day before you’re at AAA’s _average_ cost of owning a car.
It might be so if they amortized TOC but when you already own a car the additional cost of travel per mile is much cheaper than buses charged 15 years ago or so.
> What do you mean by "subsidized driving"? Care to give examples? I am not getting anything for driving, instead I pay taxes in registration and in fuel.
You pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain the roads — the U.S. average is about half.
Public space is reserved for driving — legal categories like jaywalking were created to remove other users from those spaces — and land owners are required to dedicate substantial amounts of space for parking, most of which is either not charged to users at all or at far below market rates (this is famously a cause of congestion as people drive around longer looking for street parking since it's so much cheaper). Even businesses like bars whose owners don't expect their customers to drive are in many cases forced by parking minimums to provide spaces, which means everyone is paying for that parking even if they don't benefit from it.
Employers can offer free parking as a job perk with no tax impact but cannot do the same for transit or bike commuters.
There are also a lot of social costs which come back to the idea that we've built the world around the idea that everyone has to drive everywhere: we're extremely reluctant to take away unsafe drivers' licenses, drivers are not required to carry enough insurance to adequately compensate people for serious injuries, cities are typically much slower to repair pedestrian infrastructure than car infrastructure, sidewalks, curb cuts, etc. are often not ADA compliant to leave more room for drivers, etc.
>You pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain the roads — the U.S. average is about half.
I don't think so. Quick search shows that states and localities spend $200B per year on roads, the US alone tax revenue from just individual taxes is roughly ~40% of 4T i.e. $1.6T. What sources do you use to support your claim?
>Public space is reserved for driving — legal categories like jaywalking were created to remove other users from those spaces — and land owners are required to dedicate substantial amounts of space for parking, most of which is either not charged to users at all or at far below market rates (this is famously a cause of congestion as people drive around longer looking for street parking since it's so much cheaper).
I don't think you are being serious, there much more legal categories against drivers: speeding, DUI, dozens of kinds of illegal parking etc.
And would need some source on the parking below market rates and land owners required to provide free parking. I own land, I am not required to provide parking to anyone, least so for free or below market rates. Parking requirements for public accommodations is not subsidizing anything it just taking reality into account and prevents patrons from crowding nearby streets with their cars as well as using parking space from other businesses.
Driving is subsidized in many ways. Gasoline taxes and registration taxes don't fully cover the cost of road construction and maintenance, so the rest of the money comes from general revenue at the municipal, state, and federal levels of government - property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes. Parking lots take up a lot of land but pay much less property tax than residential or commercial buildings on the same plots of land. Sprawl causes everyone to travel farther, even people not in cars who didn't ask to sign up for this development pattern. Crashes resulting in property damage and personal injury/death are not fully compensated for by drivers or insurance; every time a driver hits something, both the driver and the rest of society lose together. Paved surfaces increase the amount of flooding during rainstorms, a cost borne by everyone, even those who don't drive. Noise, tire dust, polluting gases, and oil leaks affect everyone.
Gasoline taxes and registration taxes might not fully cover road construction but other taxes do, I am just pointing out that drivers do not get subsidies but are taxed more than, say, bicyclists or pedestrians who use the same roads but don't pay extra tax.
Pedestrians don’t use those roads, usually enforced by law. Their taxes are subsidizing roads they are at best sidelined on, and in many cases have their experience made worse and riskier for.
Bicyclists do use roads, but need much less space - far less than the half of the road their taxes pay for even for the cyclists who don’t own a car. Nobody needs a 6 lane road for bicyclists - even a single lane can handle more people than would fit in cars on that kind of wide road.
The underlying problem here is the spatial inefficiency of driving: you need far more public space for the same number of people and that requires more expensive infrastructure to build and maintain than it would if people primarily used active travel or transit.
The fairest way to pay for the infrastructure which is required to support a predominantly private-vehicle based model would be to fund it entirely by user fees, which would also handle the case of larger vehicle owners paying more to reflect their greater use, but because that model has been subsidized and often legally required for so long most people aren’t even aware of how much that’s true.
>Pedestrians don’t use those roads, usually enforced by law.
They do, it's called "sidewalk".
>Their taxes are subsidizing roads they are at best sidelined on, and in many cases have their experience made worse and riskier for.
Even if they don't walk on the streets and only walk by unpaved footpaths they might be still using roads to get their food and clothes shipped to them.
>Bicyclists do use roads, but need much less space - far less than the half of the road their taxes pay for even for the cyclists who don’t own a car. Nobody needs a 6 lane road for bicyclists - even a single lane can handle more people than would fit in cars on that kind of wide road.
But they pay zero extra tax regardless of the space they use when they don't own a car. So I am not sure what the point you are trying to make here. A one lane road is not free, somebody has to pay for it.
>The underlying problem
I got it in the first 1000 posts on HN from anti-car people, I just have not seen "driving is subsidized" yet so I had been asking what is it based on.
The looming copper shortage does not just coming for EV's. ICE vehicles use a substantial amount of copper (and other metals). "Starters, generators, and alternators contain an average of 2.8, 2.6, and 1.5 pounds of copper, respectively. Alternators also contain 3 to 4 pounds of aluminum. Most of the remaining metal is iron. About one-half of the starters have a solenoid that contains 0.5 pounds of copper." [0]. So that's at least 4.3 lbs (1.95 kg) of copper per ICE vehicle, not including uses in electronics etc.
Correct. The article mentions that EV use 2.5 times the amount of copper though. It also mentions how it's more than just what's in the car - that more copper infrastructure is required to power them. Lastly, it also mentions how using aluminium as a substitute just moves the goal posts, bc more bauxite need to be mined and smeltered.
> Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.
That is simple to say, but what does that actually mean? I think some cities simply wouldn't exist if being navigable without car was a requirement. People will never move around Phoenix like they move around Amsterdam.
Why not? A lot of europea cities went car-centric (building highways through city centres etc) in the 20th century, and a lot of those changes have been rolled back. It won’t happen immediately, but it could easily happen over say 50 years. The barriers are political not technical.
Weather and terrain. Amsterdam is fortunate in being flat, and in having a fairly moderate climate where it's rarely extremely hot or cold. That situation doesn't obtain in most large North American cities. Sure it's possible to ride a bike up a steep hill in Philadelphia in the middle of an ice storm or across Phoenix in a 40 °C heat wave, but it's simply unrealistic to expect most people to do so. We ought to do more to improve bicycling infrastructure in most cities but that will never fix our fundamental transportation issues.
There is a very significant difference between a dense city with a highway through the center of it, and a city that never had a dense center to begin with. Many places that people live in the US only exist because of cars. Without cars, they'd cease to exist.
There are not many cities in Europe that are predated by the ubiquity of cars.
No, it's not really easy to drastically change the density of an established metro area. Zoning/planning is forward-looking. It won't change the status quo that millions of people in a metro area already live (and work) in sparse suburban neighborhoods far from city centers.
This really isn't much different than what already exists. Office parks are already commonly placed in US suburbs. The problem is, because good highways already exist, people don't choose to live in the same places that they work. It is common to live in one suburb, and commute to another suburb.
Maybe, but Phoenix is not every city in the country and it’s possible to make a lot of improvements even if you’re not perfect. For example, many cities have marginal finances because a large chunk of their resources have been dedicated to suburban commuters who contribute little other than pollution. Reclaiming public space for residents, removing density restrictions, and especially doing quick things like dedicated bus or bike lanes can make a huge improvement in desirability at modest cost.
The second most populous state in the US is Texas. How would someone possibly redesign any major metro area in Texas to work without cars? Tear everything down and start over?
It was all built to work around the automobile as primary transport. There's no patch fix.
You don’t need to ban cars to reduce usage. The Texans I know would like more bus & bike infrastructure and even in Texas, most city dwellers make a ton of trips which are within bike range. As a simple example, think about how much the average family could do with the extra $10-12k a year they’d save by having one car instead of two. In a lot of places, people buy 2-3 ton SUVs so mom can drop the kids off a couple of miles away - a distance even a 4-5 year old could bike if it was safe.
The question is, how disadvantaged are public transit projects given the barriers imposed by the existing choices that have been made, and the marginal cost and benefit of that project compared to existing choices?
Sprawl is difficult to cover with public transit, so you end up with a system that costs 2x as much, covers 1/2 as much area, and takes 2x as long to go anywhere. The most successful public transit systems in the world area all places where driving is car is not a viable alternative for many. In a world of 10 lane highways and free parking in a sea of strip malls, it's going to be hard to convince people to stand at a transit stop.
Oh, definitely – I'm not saying it's easy but that we could start getting positive feedback loops which would show meaningful improvements long before car share of commute even drops to 50%. The two things I think that'd need to start with are the areas with the most pain — i.e. the urban commutes where people are basically sitting in traffic where people very reasonably prefer driving to an express bus stop & playing with their phone until they get to the office — and changing zoning requirements which prevent density. You can't rebuild sprawl overnight but if you encouraged higher-density development along a few corridors which are better served you could at least stop making the problem worse.
Yeah cities should be redesigned, but let's not forget everyone else...? Most of us are still living in rural areas, whereby public transportation wouldn't really solve much.
You might want to brush up on the concept of economic "externalities," and also how transportation funds are raised and the shares of funding different transportation modes receive. After that, I bet you'd have some worthwhile things to say on this topic.
Yes, and we can really stick it to the collectivists by spending ~$10-15,000/year per vehicle on the initial purchase of the car, and the associated costs of insurance, gas, maintenance, parking, and car-dedicated infrastructure.
Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.)
Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.