Article says the next F-150 Lightning will be an EREV-style plugin hybrid. Which, if so, makes a lot of sense. EVs are great, but not so much for trucks.
I was always bothered about how cars were either supposed to be all electric or all ICE. Working together is the smart way forward.
I wonder if it's hybrid electric is super old tech and manufacturers can't have a monopoly on it or something?
Hybrids have been powering heavy industry and locomotives for the past 100 years or so, it seems like a perfect first step towards mass electrification of vehicles. Plus I imagine it'd be possible to swap the engine for more batteries as that tech improves.
Edison Motors up in Canada is interesting, in the truck space.
Diesel EREV semis, and heavy-duty pickup modifications. Sounds like they're running into overregulation issues though.
This is how China gets ahead, because the West is dumb and thinks regulation helps. They've already dominated drones (since it's effectively illegal if not actually illegal in the States to make them), seems the same will happen with EVs.
Remains to be seen if it’s smart - personally I think erev is going to be obsoleted very quickly by batteries getting better and cheaper. You can already buy 1000v 5min charging EVs in china, as well as semi-solid state batteries. And the batteries get cheaper year on year, relentlessly.
EREVs are a way better idea than the lie of PHEVs, but their time in the market is still limited. I wouldn’t be making that bet as an auto manufacturer , unless I had protectionism to hide behind.
PHEVs aren’t a lie, but the economics need to be compelling for people to plug in. If my car was a PHEV (it would weigh too much) I would plug it in to save over gas for weekly commutes, but I pay for premium gas.
i mean, they are a lie as they exist today. They were sold as low emissions vehicles (and in the EU this lets them avoid a bunch of regulations!) but real world data shows they have negligible emissions impact. Just because people _could_ use them differently if things were different, doesnt matter, people dont.
Every 5 years, there's a better battery in development 5 years hence. So I'm a bit skeptical that just a better battery would exclude hybrids. Any battery improvement would improve PHEV and EREV vehicles also, and they'd retain their advantage over straight EVs in range.
The advantages of these hybrids is a) using multiple fuels - has all of the main 80%-of-trips-local on electric range advantage of EVs, combined with an extended range of gas (and those gas engines run at optimum rpm, so they're more efficient too) and b) easier on the battery supply chain; they don't need as large batteries; batteries have more uses than just EVs, making all such products cheaper, including EREVs
The real disadvantage is the higher complexity, although EREVs do still get rid of the transmission gearing and other driveline components.
And of course, EREVs are probably the only solution for trucks and off-road vehicles. Edison Motors's diesel EREV for full trucks seems way more promising than Tesla's Semi (if Canada could stop over-regulating their startups, that is).
If batteries get cheap enough, the fixed extra cost for the complexity of the additional ER system will become prohibitive & uncompetitive. Who wants to pay extra for a car with >1000ml range? Almost no-one, it’s unnecessary for 99.9% of people. We know this because almost no cars have massive or dual gas tanks.
Short to medium haul trucks are already being replaced by EVs in china, Europe is next. I agree about long haul US distances though, it will be quite some years before they can go full ev, the physics is hard.
BMW i3 is a true EREV and I absolutely love it. Always drives like an electric, but can pound highway miles on gas. Best of both worlds. I hope to never go back to pure one or the other, until battery and/or charging tech leaps forward a ton.
The REx hold up for about 60-65mph on flat ground without climate control. Change those parameters and you’ll still eat battery, just less of it. In the NA config of the car where the REx only comes on at 7% battery, this is a critical failing, but OBD coding the car to enable on-demand REx at any point below 75% (and then hold state of charge) transforms it into a whole new beast that’s extremely road trip capable.
That's confusing "consensus building" with "effective". Killing a private api is pretty effective. And consensus building doesn't always build the best software.
The weird thing is 13 days later his temporary successor Han was also impeached, basically because he vetoed two bills doing investigations into Yoon. IIRC, the constitutional court wasn’t fully appointed yet. And also apparently, an impeachment is a simple majority in the Assembly, and appears the DPK (the current majority party) has been impeaching everyone they disagree with.
My wife, who’s from Korea, says that Lee, the now president, apparently had a “revolutionary” past, and was thrown in jail; and also one justice from the court also had a criminal record.
It’s pretty crazy over there, Lee’s probably safe right now just because his party’s the majority. But it also sounds like they’ve been abusing the impeachment process against the minority party.
> 13 days later his temporary successor Han was also impeached
Crazier than that![0]
- Han Duck-soo: Acting president for 13 days. Impeached for refusing to investigate Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon Hee (Yoon's wife).
- There were 192 votes against him and 108 members *abstained* from voting. This meant that they failed to form a quorum. *This vote was strictly party lines*
- They ruled that they only need 50% approval because Han was the Prime Minister. *President needs 2/3rds btw*
- Choi Sang-mok: was the acting PM for those 13 days. But only serves for 87!
- 24 March SK's (equivalent to) supreme court overrules Han's impeachment 7-1, and Han once again becomes the acting president.
So he was impeached after 13 days for trying to bury Yoon's impeachment case, the Conservatives refuse to show up to the hearing, and months later he gets reinstated by the highest court.
> the DPK has been impeaching everyone they disagree with.
My understanding is that there's kinda a history of this as well as pardoning. Take Park Geun-hye[2] as an example. She was the leader of the GNP (Grand National Party; SK's conservative party), and in December 2016 she was impeached (234 to 56) for influence peddling. Hwang Kyo-ahn (Prime Minister) becomes acting president. In March of 2017, their supreme court upholds the impeachment unanimously, and in May Moon Jae-in (DPK) becomes president. April 2018 Park is sentenced to 24 years in jail, and then is further prosecuted for stealing money from Korea's CIA and interfering in elections. In December 2021 Hwang pardons her and she's back home early 2022.
Before Yoon was Moon Jae-in (DPK), who the GNP tried to impeach in 2019. (Hwang Kyo-ahn was acting after Park's impeachment, who preceded Moon).
Before Park was Lee Myung-bak (GNP). He got 15 years in prison. In 2022 Yoon gave him a pardon.
Before Lee was Roh Moo-hyun (Liberal party) (Goh Kun was in between because...) but was impeached (193 to 2) in 2004 and his supporters were literally fighting people in the assembly. Month later supreme court overturned impeachment. After he left presidency people around him started getting sentenced. In 2009 he threw himself off a cliff as investigations were following him too.
Since the 60's they've had a president exiled, a coup, and even an assassination. It's fucking wild!
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions.
This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.
Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead.
Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants...
It really doesn't matter what the uptime of individual power plants is. What matters is the uptime for the consumer which is essentially 100% in EU countries.
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
> I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group
I agree it's unlikely you'll just have solar + batteries used just for LV. However, taking a look at the adoption of storage in California and Texas, I think it's safe to assume an upwards trajectory for solar + batteries [1].
I didn't know much about Nevada's electricity generation, but based on current data [1] there are enough alternative sources to support a sizeable increase in solar generation.
Still, I don't know how much solar will be deployed and I hope nuclear does drop in price in order to speed up the energy transistion. It's exciting to see so many great technological leaps in our lifetimes.
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
1 is not true, 2 maybe, but people haven’t bought EVs beyond the upper middle class segment too. 3 I don’t think it’s employees, but there’s definitely government involvement which has made innovation difficult.
Plus, there’s a question if pure EVs are the best, perhaps EREVs might be better.
There’s too much regulation here to compete. Drones are all Chinese too because of all the FAA restrictions on the technology.
For EVs, there were the EV mandates, and there are several restrictions on mining the rare earth metals here like lithium and cobalt that China does not do.
Also, the US is physically very large and spread out, with more long distance driving, which plays more into an ice vehicle’s advantages. Sometimes even cheaper and definitely quicker than fast charging on a road trip.
Personally I think plug in hybrids could work better, especially EREVs. My concern is governments leaping to the conclusions that full EVs, mandate them, and in so doing lock out promising technologies from improving
The US is big - but these GM EVs under threat all had 200kWh+ batteries and 500mi ranges.
The reason why EVs suck in the US comes down to high electric prices, scarce charging points, and the level to which EVs tend to be locked down and unrepairable.
I'm curious as to the scope of the problem, if html spec drops xslt, what the solutions would be; I've never really used xslt (once maybe, 20 years ago). In addition to just pre-rendering your webpage server-side, I assume another possible solution is some javascript library that does the transformations, if it needed to be client-side?
I was always bothered about how cars were either supposed to be all electric or all ICE. Working together is the smart way forward.
reply