LOL, a country roughly the size of Maryland (one of the smaller states) has more trains than USA.

Fortunately, didn’t get to misuse them. Just took a while to figure out what they really meant. When something is “all but impossible” it shouldn’t be taken literally. Actually just invert the apparent meaning and you get the actual one.

All but impossible and next to impossible.

Totally forgot about hydrogen. Using that technology in cars has proven to be possible in Norway, so clearly that’s an option too. When energy production exceeds demand, it makes sense to dump that energy into hydrolysis, and later use that hydrogen when the opposite happens. You could use that with industrial scale solutions and cars as well, so that seems like viable strategy.

China and Europe are probably going to be fully electric sooner than the rest of the world. Getting there is already quite a task for the entire production chain. Ramping it up will take decades, and I’m still not entirely sure we even have the resources for it.

I’ll take Germany as an example to see if the numbers make sense.

Annual electricity consumption in Germany is about 512 TWh/year, which means they use about 1.4 TWh every day. Let’s assume that all of it is produce by renewable means, and about 50% of the daily energy demand needs to be buffered in grid energy storage to balance the intermitent nature of renewable energy production. This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total. If we assume that the each car has about 100 kWh of storage capacity, you would need about 7 million cars like that. The population of Germany is about 83 million, so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.

It’s nothing crazy like 20 cars per one person. on the contrary, it looks surprisingly doable, given that Germany already has abouto 49 million cars registered. However, producing millions of batteries using NMC or NCA technology is a bottle neck. LFP would be cheaper, but it still requires lithium. Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too. Would there be enough lithium for all the LFP batteries we would need? Estimating that is very tricky due to the way mineral exploration works, but let’s not dive into that rabbit hole today.

Anyway, using the existing battery chemistries to take steps in this direction should be worth it because transportation and electricity production are major sources of CO2 emissions. I still don’t think these technologies are quite enough to meet the demand. We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.

EV batteries are not ideal for grid energy storage due to:

• Unnecessary features: High energy density is essential for vehicles but not for stationary grid storage. That feature doesn’t come for free, so why pay for it if you don’t need it. An industrial scale grid energy facility could be located outside the city where land is cheap. Who cares if the facility takes as much space as a paper mill or a mine site. Besides, these batteries aren’t going anywhere, so who cares if they weigh several tonnes each.

• Cost efficiency: EV batteries are expensive per unit of capacity. Grid storage requires massive amounts of cheaper alternatives. Various industries need a lot of energy, so the storage demand is also massive. This means that a battery facility of functional size that uses normal NMC batteries is going to cost a fortune. Cheaper alternatives such LFP would make more sense.

• Material scarcity: The rare materials used in EV batteries (like lithium) would be challenging to scale up for grid-level storage needs. Households are only a small slice of the pie, while factories and other types of industries take the rest. We really need to use materials that are dirt cheap and easily available, so even LFP isn’t going to cut it long term.

Current NMC and NCA batteries used in cars should be good enough for the energy needs of a single house, but the rest of society needs an industrial scale solution. There are several technologies that look promising, but they aren’t quite production ready just yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing how redox flow batteries develop in the future. There are also some interesting battery chemistries such as sodium-ion, oxygen-ion, magnesium-ion, and lithium-sulfur.

There are some interesting early pilot projects where long term energy storage is being tested.

Current EV batteries are not even close to being suitable for grid energy storage, so we need something completely different for that. It’s probably going to take a long time before anything viable gets mass produced, which means that at the moment we’re stuck with internment renewables and polluting fossil fuels.

Missed this line: “The agency did not elaborate on exactly how the money would be spent.”

Don’t you worry. They’ll burn plenty of coal, oil and gas to compensate for that.

Removed by mod

Things running smoothly. No disasters, catastrophes, accidents or major disruptions of any kind in my life. Basically just normal live, business as usual.

I guess the only notable thing was me gradually cutting my caffeine intake. Went from 15 g of coffee grinds to 7 g per day. Currently, tea is my only caffeine source.

I have a car, because I need it for going to distant places. I would love to live in a society where you don’t need to burn fossil fuels for anything, but we aren’t there yet. I prefer to think of the current solution as a “compromise”.

Sounds like in this case you need to switch a magnetic field on and off. That could be the bottle neck.

You can mitigate that issue to some extent by making the videos short. As long as the user count remains relatively small, the storage and bandwidth costs aren’t going to spiral out of control. Eventually you’ll have so many millions of active users that you’ll also need to figure out a way to get a steady source of revenue. I wonder how Loops will tackle that issues. Some mastodon instances already have a small yearly fee, so I guess video instances could do that as well.

Also the opposite can be infuriating. When a company asks you to install their app, you usually find that the website has more features. Looks like usually the app is just a bare bones version of the actual website with several core features missing.

Well, bullets are pretty small, but that’s not going to help when they travel so fast. Same applies to flying rocks too.

Most meteors that reach all the way to the surface are really small. Bigger impacts are rare, buy not impossible.

You could also list some long term average power draw instead of the peak.