PSO is asking people to turn their thermostats down.
- Thread starter TUMe
- Start date
I didn’t say that the only thing people will be driving will be electric, just that you won’t be able to replace your old car with anything other than electric in most cases.
At a certain point, I’d rather they just be able to race two independent cars on the same team, relay style. Just get rid of the pitting altogether since you’ve shaved so much time that it effectively doesn’t matter as much anymore.
So...
Where are we going to get all of the rare earths to make all these batteries..
And
where are we going to put all the dead batteries?
I understand that refining rare earths is tricky too (think Picher, Oklahoma on a global scale)..
Where are we going to get all of the rare earths to make all these batteries..
And
where are we going to put all the dead batteries?
I understand that refining rare earths is tricky too (think Picher, Oklahoma on a global scale)..
I enjoy the pit strategies. It always seemed to happen that the Chevy's from Hendrix always dominated on pure speed but Gibbs racing had the pit strategy and quick stops down to the point they easily gained 5-6 seconds per race on their competition just from that alone. Add to that I think Gibbs has the best drivers in NASCAR and you win a lot of races that way. There's only 2-3 drivers not in a Gibbs car that I can think of competing based on skill alone....Harvick being the best of them.
I used to love NASCAR.. but they have made the races unwatchable with all the stages, playoffs, and car changes..
Texas used to be a twice annual campout, but, it became so boring with all the changes.
I’m more interested in things like F1 or off-road rally races. I can’t force myself to watch people go in a circle for however many hours. I’d rather watch drag racing or something lol.
After around 1983 Formula One went over a cliff. Paris to Dakar was always interesting to read about. But that’s all in Saudi Arabia now because Mauritania won’t outlaw slavery. With out the cross border complexities, I could care less. NASCAR is wrestling with better sponsorship deals and an occasional death.
That's kinda where I was going with it. We're far from the only country that's after these resources, and they will be in use on a much larger scale than just car batteries. Don't know that it will be possible to produce the batteries at the kind of scale necessary for these plans, especially affordably, for quite a while.
That’s why pumped hydro storage will become a huge thing. It’s essentially a battery without the need of those elements. You can even do it semi-closed loop where you just have two closed reservoirs with no true outlets (except for emergencies) and you pump back and forth between them, replacing the evaporative losses as you go...
I dig the Baja California / South American / African races.
Slightly unrelated, but I always enjoyed the top gear adventure episodes. I’d love to see more stuff like that. I don’t care how fast your stock car can get around 200 miles of track. I want to see you get through the Sahara in a souped up 92 Ford Fiesta.
BTW, the Texas power grid operators are now saying that lost wind turbine capacity was the smallest element of lost capacity that caused this problem with the (independent) Texas power grid. They’re attributing it to freezing elements, gauges, etc... at natural gas / coal fired plants as well as a shortage of available natural gas volumes due to production disruptions in west Texas related to the weather.
This is partially because Texas has underinvested in their personal grid.
This is partially because Texas has underinvested in their personal grid.
Btw, can't wait to bring democracy to Africa as we move from needing just oil to needing oil and precious metals
You’d have to assume that they have some stores of rare earth metals there.... lol... they may just have trouble getting at them.
Out here I was running my heat at full tilt all day long on Sunday and the warmest it got it ever got in my house was 64. High was 8, wind chill of -25. Mine is NG baseboard heating. But we get a cold snap like this most every year and the power and NG supply is ready for it.
It's not surprising when this kind of cold hits a place that isn't accustomed to it and it causes mayhem on the electric and NG supply.
I remember a line from a documentary sometime ago that followed the guy that was the chief engineer behind the Ford Explorer and the Hummer. He didn't believe in global warming at all. And he was in charge of the design of the Chevy Volt. When asked why he was designing such a radically different kind of car than what he was known for, he responded something close to: I design what the consumers expect and will buy. People expect GM to field a competitive electric car, and if we don't start working on this technology we will be behind the curve when it start to mature
Not an exact quote, but that was the spirit of it.
Translation: the Clinton government provided incentives for pickups and SUVs in the 90’s and I got rich off that. The Obama/Biden governments provided incentives for electric cars so I’m getting richer off that so I can retire and my kids and grandkids won’t have to work unless they want to.
Nothing like a little cold to spark the need to invest billions in rural power and heat to cool the jets on a fossil fuel hostile new administration eager to spend those billions on research and pork projects for favored companies to put Texas out of business.
Never ceases to amaze me the number of people who look at me in shock when I tell them the largest untapped oil reserves in the world, is same country with one of the largest supplies of military critical natural resources, and they love America and despise the EU, China and the Middle East nations because we refuse to condemn their failure to completely outlaw slavery. (They did some lip service around 2007). A lot of Americans are gonna get filthy rich in Mauritania in the next four years. Algeria too.
https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2021/02/15/dallas-winter-storm-freeze.html
It looks like a lot of the problem in Texas isn’t a lack of capacity so much as it is a failure to winterize. 34,000 MW of generation taken offline because the equipment couldn‘t handle the cold. This isn’t a green energy vs. fossil fuels debate at all, it’s a preparedness issue.
Edit: There’s a decent argument to be made that given how rare these events are, it isn’t worth the expense of winterizing everything. But I think some in between is reasonable. You don’t need to winterize every single generator across the state, but making sure some critical amount of them are would be prudent. If you could have had half that capacity stay online instead of go down, it would have given power to over 1 million homes.
It looks like a lot of the problem in Texas isn’t a lack of capacity so much as it is a failure to winterize. 34,000 MW of generation taken offline because the equipment couldn‘t handle the cold. This isn’t a green energy vs. fossil fuels debate at all, it’s a preparedness issue.
Edit: There’s a decent argument to be made that given how rare these events are, it isn’t worth the expense of winterizing everything. But I think some in between is reasonable. You don’t need to winterize every single generator across the state, but making sure some critical amount of them are would be prudent. If you could have had half that capacity stay online instead of go down, it would have given power to over 1 million homes.
As far as I understand, and I could be wrong, rare earths are relatively evenly spread throughout the crust. I am sure there is some variation, but it's a bit of a misnomer.
But they aren't ever concentrated into ores the way iron and other useful materials are. It's like panning for gold when you dig up a cubic meter of rock and soil to try and get at the gram or so of rare earth metals it contains. So the reason China supplies so much of the world's supply is that they have the fewest compunctions about starting a massive program to do deep pit mining and destroying large tracts of land for any other usage.
Not sure what the answer is, because these materials definitely have a material impact on the environment, which means electric cars do too. I think it is an open question which is really worse for the environment, but I would lean toward fossil fuels. My logic is that most of these materials can be recycled once extracted, and they often are. Also, deep pit mines have the potential to be rehabilitated, Pitcher notwithstanding... Oil and coal, not so much. You burn it once and that carbon goes into the atmosphere for a very long time.
You are right. The rare earths aren't really rare. China just has a monopoly on them because they undercut our mines in the early 2000's.
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