We were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
Treating alternative energy and PHEVs/EVs as a core national security concern should have started in the early 2000s. Yes, the PV revolution hadn't happened yet, but the hybrid auto was released in 1998 or so, and a PHEV is a natural extension to that.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
China is currently implementing this national security strategy. Each addition EV car driving in China a car running on domestic solar+coal electricity and not running on imported oil.
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
"
The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
The PV revolution has happened. Most countries with significant energy grids get most of their energy from PV during the daytime. Some even get 50% of their yearly energy from PV.
Do I see every single building covered in residential solar? Can I install grid independent solar in a typical house for under $5,000 or maybe $2,000? Because I think that's what's on the horizon still.
Solar has yet to incorporate likely a fundamental cost drop from perovskites, silicon perovskite multi junction, and fundamental advances in sodium ion battery storage.
And every time you bring up solar wind taking over the majority of a grid, you get the pro-nuclear people ringing their hands over grid stability and the like. I do think of a little bit is that overblown but there's definitely a large structural cost to grid adaptation and issues with industrial power using current battery storage and PV wind economics, especially when you start talking about everybody having a phev or an EV charging.
Utility scale ground mounted solar is cheaper than residential solar (often 50% less per watt).
Residential PV for $5,000 is too expensive for many people in many countries, Pakistan is doing it for much less. Large scale battery storage is too expensive for most countries.
Pro-solar people like to point out that LCOE of solar is lowest of all forms of electricity generation. At the same time they ignore the increased costs for grid upgrades and grid stabilization (short term stabilization - grid inertia, voltage stabilization, frequency stabilization) (long term stabilization - backup gas/coal power plants). If don't invest enough in grid stabilization and your country has grid that is not connected to other countries, you can get a blackout like in Spain.
On the other hand, blackouts or load shedding are much more common in developing countries and have large economic impact.
"The costs associated with load shedding have led to an annual GDP reduction of 1 to 1.3% since 2007, with daily economic losses estimated between $85 million and $230 million for the country."
Just like pro-solar people have their favorite future solar improvements: perovskites, multi junction, battery storage, long term energy storage, etc. Pro-nuclear people have their favorite future nuclear improvements: small modular reactors, ship mounted reactor, generation 4 reactors, breeder reactors recycling nuclear waste.
I say put a carbon tax on all countries (including China, India, US) on all forms of emissions (including mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, shipping) and let the cheapest technology win.
I would love to see how the industry of China would evolve if China had the same carbon tax as Europe. The same applies to India, US.
You're talking to a molten salt reactor nut so I have some enthusiasm in the nuclear market.
The problem with nuclear is that all the fancy designs aren't ready to go, all of them have 10 to 20 year permitting and construction cycles with the inevitable price overruns as well, there aren't enough nuclear industry people anymore...
And really the biggest problem is that you can't Target an economic price 10 to 20 years out. Because wind and solar are dropping still on a constant improvement curve, as is grid storage.
So already price non-competitive nuclear, and you fund a large-scale build out of nuclear reactors, and then in another 10 to 20 years have a bunch of reactors that are now three or four times. Less competitive than they were when you initially started construction.
> In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
EVs are 3 to 4 times more efficient than ICE vehicles. So just converting to EVs is a huge efficiency gain. In fact, if we electrified industrial and transportation using existing technology we could reduce energy demand by up to 40%. And as you recommended, power generation from solar (where/when feasible) removes the need for ongoing fossil fuel purchases.
That 40% number is impossible. First of all transportation is 30% of energy, which already makes 40% impossible, second if it's 4 times more efficient then it would still use 8% to 10% of energy, making your actual savings 20% of energy at the MOST.
But your 3 to 4 times number is also not real, because the actual number is 2 to 3 - and that's measured at the outlet, if you measure starting from primary power generation they are about 2 times as efficient, not 4.
So I stand by what I said: Electric vehicles are not what matters for clean energy, what matters is power generation.
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Software engineers were always creating, maintaining and updating automated business processes. In olden days we would have computers, that is rows of people computing things. That room of people is replaced with code in von Neumann machines.
The economic tension has always been a resistance to grant programmers status and class of management. Instead management wants to treat programmers like labor.
Governments should have been full bore pushing subsidies and cost breaks for phevs, home solar, evs,and hear pumps for the last decade.
Covid was the wakeup call that globalization was dying a slow death, and the first trump that world cop America was also on the way out.
Oil dependence in a top level national security concern of the last 150 years (hey, what really triggered WW1?), yet the primary means for independence has been politically suppressed for 50 years.
How soon would we have has better PV, better batteries, better heat pumps with proper subsidies and research starting with the 70s oil shocks?
I have a dream that electric motors + battery get so compact that you can make kits that fit engine blocks and large numbers of cars can be custom swapped relatively cheaply.
Trying to up-tier fractional improvements in something that can't be quantified easily, and !BONUS! with gated access it can't be as easily analyzed by the (low profit) AI analyzers/benchmarkers.
Foster paranoia among top executives that the fractional/debatable improvement is a MUST HAVE to STAY COMPETITIVE in your industry.
Meanwhile, I have not seen any improvement in software in the now almost ?three to four? years than mainstream LLM and AI coding assistance has arrived on the scene.
Although I will hold out the possibility that software has actually gotten far worse for the end user, because AI code is being dedicated to revenue enhancement and dark data collection.
Can we charge all Jan 6ers with the murder or manslaughter of the congressional security police officers?
There's the case of the getaway driver in a bank robbery that resulted in murder also getting murder, and that is basically what the two poster up is advocating for.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
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