Koemul · HackerTrans

Germany doesn't have too much solar power, some of it just needs to be moved to the evening.

This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse.

However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead.

If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...

Koemul

há 2 anosdiscuss

Germans are already buying batteries:

According to [1], the installed battery capacity in Germany went from 6.7GWh in 2022 to 12GWH in 2023.

Given the growth and falling cost of battery storage, I expect that more and more solar will stored during the day and consumed in the evening, pushing out coal and gas.

[1] https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-boomin...

Koemul

há 2 anosdiscuss

Just a note regarding battery longevity: LFP batteries like in the Helixx can be charged 0-100% with hardly any impact on battery lifetime [1].

Even NCM or NCA batteries can be charged 1-100%, because the battery management system doesn't actually fully charge or discharge the battery, even if the car shows zero or 100% charge. However, 20-80% or 10-90% charging does increase live time.

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/abae37/... Page 6, Figure 3, graphs 'd' shows the number of cycles until the battery can only hold 80% of a charge for LFP, NCM, and NCA batteries. Note that electric cars have a battery management to prevent the most damaging situations in those graphs (too hot/cold, full charge/discharge, too fast, etc.).

Koemul

há 2 anosdiscuss

Nio offers battery swapping, so the idea is that you do your daily commute with a small 40-80kWh battery and only swap to a gigantic 150kWh battery if you do a road trip.

For other cars this kind of battery size makes not much sense, which is why the vast majority of electric cars sold in the world have a battery sizes between 40 and 80 kWh [1].

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electric-vehicle-sales-by-m...

Koemul

há 3 anosdiscuss

According to the article, it uses 2GB more than last year.

Koemul

há 3 anosdiscuss

Summary: Samsung includes the losses from the 1024<=>1000 conversion into the system size, making it appear much larger than it actually is.

This also explains why OneUi occupies more space on phones with more storage: 69GB are lost on this conversion on 1TB models, whereas only 9GB are lost on the 128GB model.

Koemul

há 3 anosdiscuss

If you keep the charge between 20 - 80%, your battery will last for far more cycles than when charging 0 - 100%. So you'll only get 60% of the kWh per cycle, but the battery will do 3-6 times as many cycles.

In fact, the battery management system won't even let you fully charge or discharge the battery for exactly this reason. When it shows 100%, there will still be 1-2 kWh empty and the same for a zero percent charge.

For example, a Toyota Yaris use a tiny (0.7 kWh) lithium ion battery and it gets charged/discharged constantly while breaking/accelerating, but it still last a long time because the charge is kept at about 50%.

Koemul

há 4 anosdiscuss

Do you have any source that you need a license and insurance to ride with a Waymo car?

Because according to the Waymo One public service rules [1] you need to be 18 or older to use the app and order a Waymo, but they don't mention anything about requiring a license or insurance.

It would also be a weird requirement, since you sit in the back and couldn't control the car even if you wanted to.

[1] https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9197501?hl=en

Koemul

há 4 anosdiscuss

Why do you focus on a state that has one of the dirtiest electricity production and one of the lowest rates of EV sales in the US?

If we focus instead on electricity production by source in the USA between 2011 and 2021: Electricity produced...

with oil: 42TWh => 35TW (-16%)

with coal: 1730TWh => 900TWh (-48%)

with gas: 1010TWh => 1580TWh (+55%)

with solar: 2TWh => 164TWh (+8900%)

with wind: 120TWh => 378TWh (+215%)

with nuclear: 790TWh => 780TWh (-2%)

with hydro: 310TWh => 250TWh (-20%)

So not only was 600TWh of dirty coal replaced by cleaner gas, the amount of electricity produced with fossil fuels dropped by more than 200TWh. Meanwhile, electricity production by renewables significantly increased.

Or in other words, if you had bought an EV in 2011 and driven it until now, it would have gotten cleaner every year, which is not going to happen with an ICE.

Source: our world in data, numbers slightly adjusted for readability.

Koemul

há 4 anosdiscuss

Exactly.

The article suggested that the west should "compete with the two leaders in global nuclear construction: Russia and China" to "not only decarbonize, but bring greater prosperity to the world".

So I wanted to show that even if the west emulated China by slashing regulation, outlawing the greens, and dramatically increased our skill at huge construction projects, we still would focus far more on renewables than on nuclear.

(I ignored Russia, because they produce most of their electricity with fossil fuels, and only 18% with nuclear, which is probably not something the west wants to emulate [1]).

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/russia-electricity...).

Koemul

há 4 anosdiscuss

To put it in numbers (actual production per year, not capacity) [1] [2]:

  China nuclear 2010: 75 TW/h
  China nuclear 2021: 408 TW/h (+333 TW/h)
  Worldwide nuclear: 2768 => 2800 (+32 TW/h)

  China solar 2010: 0.7 TW/h
  China solar 2021: 327 TW/h (+326 TW/h)
  Worldwide solar: 34 => 1033 (+999 TW/h)

Luckily, nuclear doesn't really care about solar, since they complement each other perfectly (wind is a different story and it is already much bigger than nuclear).

However, China is a country that is pretty much perfect for nuclear: Little unnecessary regulation, no green party, expertise in nuclear technology, and excellence in constructing large scale construction projects.

So if nuclear is getting overtaken by solar even in China, then I don't see how it will be able to compete in the west against wind and solar.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#nuclear-energy-gen... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy#solar-energy-gen...

Koemul

há 4 anosdiscuss

According to [1], there were about 20 million cars registered in Australia in 2021. If we turn them all electric, with an average battery size of 50KW/h, we'll get about 1TW/h of storage that can be charged during periods of overproduction and feed part of their capacity back to the grid when needed.

Electric car sales are currently low in Australia, with ~2% of new cars sold in 2021. But they are growing exponentially: ~2000 electric vehicles were sold in 2018, ~7000 in 2019/2020 and ~20'000 in 2021. [2][3]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/632547/australia-registe... [2] https://electricvehiclecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/202... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/31/new-elec...

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