Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

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Kriegsspiel
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu Jan 26, 2023 7:03 pm

I'm leaning more towards Pointedstick's POV on the fully electric house with solar panels, especially in the "prepper" aspect. I don't know if it makes sense everywhere, but in the Southwest, where the sun shines constantly, it just seems like such a good deal. Combine it with a wood burning stove, and that's an incredibly resilient house. Combine the solar/electric house, the woodstove, and a couple acres of woodlot, and you're sitting really good, energy-wise.

Pointedstick wrote:
Thu Jan 26, 2023 11:52 am
The final tipping point arrived when I got an EV. Since I had sized the solar array to accommodate an EV in the future, my monthly gasoline costs vanished too, and the electric bill didn't budge. So I've been basically driving for free over the past 3 years. Literally my only operating and maintenance costs have been a tire that needed replacement after I drove over a screw. Also the car's large 66 kWh battery doubles as a stealth non-gas-burning generator so we can ride out power outages without drawing attention to ourselves, which I've done and it's marvelous. I don't identify as such anymore, but this setup is a prepper's dream, really.
An EV that doubles as a battery seems like a good idea. I'm thinking that PHEVs are the best choice right now though. I think when the Leaf came out, the idea was that people don't really drive more than 50 miles a day or thereabouts, so the Leaf's 70 mile range (?) was all they would need. PHEVs take that idea, and then add a regular ICE vehicle's range on top of it. Electric seems better for local (especially city) driving, and ICE for long trips.

Plus, at the macro level, distributing the battery material needed to go 300 miles among 10 PHEVs, where the full battery is utilized every day when the car drives 30 miles round trip to work and back most of the time, instead of one vehicle that rarely utilizes the full capabilities of the battery seems like a better use of resources.
You there, Ephialtes. May you live forever.
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Mark Leavy
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Mark Leavy » Thu Jan 26, 2023 7:37 pm

Pointedstick wrote:
Thu Jan 26, 2023 11:52 am
...
Also the car's large 66 kWh battery doubles as a stealth non-gas-burning generator so we can ride out power outages without drawing attention to ourselves, which I've done and it's marvelous.
...
Pointed, you don't have a battery wall for your excess solar, but instead pump it back into the grid?
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Pointedstick » Thu Jan 26, 2023 8:07 pm

+1 for a wood stove, for sure. We have one of those too. We got religion during a winter power outage back while we still had a gas furnace and ICE vehicle, and despite the availability of natural gas, the furnace didn't work because its blower and electronics needed electricity. No generator, no batteries, no heat. That was a real eye-opener. And my wife loves the wood stove more than probably any other upgrade we've made to the house, so it has multiple benefits!

A PHEV is probably the most practical type of vehicle today, yeah. Zero-cost electric driving 80-90% of the time, gas engine available for road trips. Not as good as a BEV for being an emergency generator, since its built-in battery is smaller, but regardless, there's a lot to love about a RAV4 or Pacifica PHEV. If I hadn't been ready to make the jump to a full BEV, one of those would have been next in line. No regrets about the Bolt, though. It's fantastic.

Mark, yeah, my solar system is grid-tied, so when the grid is up, I use it as a battery. The EV's own battery is only connected to household loads (via a simple 12v 1kW inverter) during power outages. I looked into a whole-house battery system to ditch the grid, but the economics didn't make sense, especially since I already had a large battery capacity in the car.
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Feb 01, 2023 6:48 pm

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Thu Jan 26, 2023 7:03 pm
Plus, at the macro level, distributing the battery material needed to go 300 miles among 10 PHEVs, where the full battery is utilized every day when the car drives 30 miles round trip to work and back most of the time, instead of one vehicle that rarely utilizes the full capabilities of the battery seems like a better use of resources.
Toyota's saying the same thing, both from a lithium supply angle, and from a carbon emissions one:
So Toyota isn’t anti-EV, but it believes in a diversified approach and it’s predicting a global shortage of lithium, which is the most important material used in today’s lithium-ion batteries found in pure EVs, hybrids, and plug-in hybrids.

Gill Pratt and his team concluded that to lower carbon emissions as much as possible, it makes more sense to spread the limited supply of lithium among as many cars as possible, electrifying as many cars as possible.

He hypothesized a fleet of 100 internal combustion engine cars with average emissions of 250 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer traveled. Now, assuming a limited supply of lithium, there’s only enough of it to make 100 kilowatt-hours of batteries. Toyota’s Chief Scientist says that if it were used for a single, big battery, the average emissions of the whole fleet would drop by just 1.5 g/km.

But if the small amount of lithium were spread among smaller, 1.1-kWh batteries, it would be possible to make 90 hybrid cars, which would still leave 10 traditional combustion cars, but the average emissions of the theoretical fleet would drop to a much lower 205 g/km.
. . .
According to Automotive News, Gill Pratt was inspired to dig deeper into the battery question by his own family’s experience with a Tesla Model X, which has over 300 miles of range, but the car is typically driven less than 30 miles a day, which means 90 percent of the battery is “dead weight”. link
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Feb 01, 2023 7:24 pm

That's marketing talk. :) A company selling PCs with only 2 GB of RAM could try to justify it by promoting the idea that "unused RAM is wasted RAM" but people who understand computers can see through that kind of nonsense.

Toyota wants people to buy PHEVs because the bread and butter of their business consists of vehicles that have both a combustion engine and a battery. Remember when this was revolutionary 25 years ago? But today BEVs are the revolutionary tech and Toyota doesn't want people to demand it and buy it because they just don't have any compelling offerings to sell.

Toyota under-invested in BEV technology following a disastrous bet on hydrogen being the basis for the vehicle of the future, but neither market demand nor a fueling infrastructure for hydrogen vehicles ever emerged, so all that money just went into stranded assets. now they have to invest billions to play catch-up to their rivals during a time when the markets and governments of the world are turning away from the products they already sell. All the legacy automakers are in this boat to a certain extent, but it's worst for Toyota and Honda who got into the game latest. Honda still sells no BEVs, while Toyota only has the BZ4X (the same thing as the Subaru Solterra) which is an expensive and underwhelming vehicle that only came onto the market less than a year ago.
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Mark Leavy » Wed Feb 01, 2023 8:23 pm

Pointedstick wrote:
Wed Feb 01, 2023 7:24 pm
That's marketing talk. :)
That marketing talk works for me. A plug in Hybrid with a ~40 mile non combustion range sounds about ideal. It covers all of your daily city driving. Plug into the garage at night. Don't even need a 220v outlet. Regenerative braking for the stop lights.

Whenever you need to go further father, you have good old high energy density hydrocarbons. Nothing beats hydrocarbons for energy density.

Timewise: Recharge at home is overnight in the garage while you sleep. Recharge on the road is a few minutes at the gas station.

Honestly, how much more could you optimize that? I mean, besides a 5 speed manual transmission.
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Re: Renewable electricity sources are now a no-brainer

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Feb 01, 2023 9:14 pm

I agree, PHEVs are pretty great.

They're not optimized for mechanical reliability with their more complex dual powetrains, though. They're also not optimized for zero tailpipe emissions. They still need oil changes. They still have sludgy automatic transmissions. They still need fuel, which means trips to smelly gas stations. You have to "exercise" the engine every so often to keep it in good condition, which is a thing to remember to do if it's a secondary car--or if the engine isn't being used 95% of the time you drive it.

Not everyone cares about those kinds of things, of course; preferences differ. Which is why PHEVs exist and that's cool too. A world with only PHEVs would be amazing.
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