I was never accepted into the original Proposition. I did not get any money or advice. But my elevator pitch was good enough to convince me to go through with it anyway. And I'm hardly "floating in the software graveyard."
> The lead-acid grid lattice design, still the...errr...gold standard when it comes to the most amount of joules stored per buck, was invented in 1881.
Li-ion has caught up. If you have $400 to spend on batteries both li-ion [1] and comparable lead acid [2] (deep discharge, long cycle life) cost around 3 Wh/$.
Those are still pretty spammy and often full of misinformation. Wirecutter's flashlight recommendations have always been terrible and so I have no faith in them at all.
Hi! To expand on #20 there is a lot of stuff going on but like you said most of it is SEO spam.
It is further hampered by planned obsolescence and the increasingly fast pace that new products are released at. It is very difficult and expensive to maintain actual experience with everything in a product space.
It can't be crowd sourced either because most people are overly attached to their purchases and can't give objective comparisons between something they don't own.
There are plenty of other lithium ion chemistries that use no cobalt. If push comes to shove we use them instead. I already use LiFePO4 everywhere I can.
Depends on the li-ion. There are chemistries out there right now that are good for 20,000 cycles like LTO. And a substantial amount of li-ion research is extending cycle life.
It doesn't matter how good hydrogen becomes. Battery tech will continue to improve faster than hydrogen tech. H2 will never catch up.
While that is extremely light, it still weighs as much as 3x18650. Breakeven point would be after four days of perfect 100% utilization of solar power.
Is it practical even then? I'd gladly carry a few extra batteries so that I don't have to sit around camp and keep adjusting the panel every hour.
Your efficiency calculation is wrong. It isn't 25% of 300Wh, 300Wh is the output. The input is 400Wh, with 25% loss or 100Wh. Not 75Wh as you have. And you have a bunch of other mistakes too.
Along the length of the road, that is 21kWh. At 75% efficiency, that is 7kWh into the road surface per car. Roughly 2.4GWh of energy ($200k worth of electricity) per day lost as heat into the roadbed in total. Assuming 4 lanes and a 3.7m lane width, route 60 is 1.7 million square meters of asphalt and that is 1.4kWh per square meter. (8x more than your number.) Still comparable to solar irradiation though. Asphalt might get a little soft on a busy summer day when everyone is also running their AC but it wouldn't be a molten puddle. If the chargers are only embedded in a narrow strip down the middle of the lane, that section might get very soft.
So at 75% I guess it is practical. But 75% is going to be extremely hard. And the first place this should be installed is Route 1, because it would be a highway-sized snow-melter that also happens to power vehicles.
Now ask yourself why we don't have defrosted highways. Installing roadbed chargers is going to be even more difficult.
Not practical though. Every time someone has done the math for a fully scaled up system (assuming magic technology that doesn't exist) it always has the same answer: Unless the power transfer system is nearly 100% efficient, using it on a typical highway results in the the highway turning into a molten puddle in less than a day.
If you want to run the numbers yourself a Tesla uses 300 watt-hours per mile on the highway. California route 60 sees 337000 cars per day and is 70 miles long. And an amazing power transfer system might be 75% efficient.
They aren't worth the money or the weight. You are almost always better off bringing the equivalent in spare rechargeable batteries. I've written an article on it:
No, parasitic is accurate for most affiliate sites. The majority are content mills who are better at SEO than the retailers. People google "best foobarbaz" when doing christmas shopping and end up at an affiliate content mill. If the affiliate content mill didn't exist, google would have taken them straight to amazon. This is highly evident by the numbers shared in affiliate forums - 90% of annual revenue often comes from November and December. (If you have useful content and are appreciated by the community, this does not happen.)
Then there are blogs who happen to use affiliate links. These guys are content creators who don't want to show ads. If you go this route you have to be careful to avoid becoming (or looking like) a content mill. But generally these are people doing good, tasteful work and only writing about products they've actually bought and put through the wringer.
Finally, in distant third, are the companies affiliating because they want to fix the online shopping experience but don't have the capital to compete directly. Camelcamelcamel is the best example of this. My own site is also a fair example.
There are many shades of gray in the affiliate spectrum. It mostly comes down to how many "best practices" (aka dark patterns, like making all images go to affiliate links instead of larger versions) you choose to use. If someone says their operation is parasitic, they are probably right.
I was never accepted into the original Proposition. I did not get any money or advice. But my elevator pitch was good enough to convince me to go through with it anyway. And I'm hardly "floating in the software graveyard."
But I am glad you enjoy my site ^_^