Posted by cdrnsf 1 day ago
A EV and a home solar setup with a large battery bank, is the ultimate in self reliance.
I remember even 10 years ago you'd see the occasional right leaning homesteader talking about the benefits of being off grid with a solar setup.
Now days removing our dependencies on foreign powers is somehow a liberal conspiracy. O_o
Also my e-bike needs more maintenance than my EV. Go figure.
tow a trailer where? see above.
Pick up a load of dirt or lumber-- how did those materials get to the pick-up point?
And the road you are driving on, where did it come from?
Curious about your maintenance needs. I have a guy that comes out once a year for service and tunes it up for me. After 3 years, I replaced the chain. I've upgraded to hydraulic brakes by the same guy. Other than that, it's been smooth riding. Or are you saying your EV needs so little maintenance that even the low maintenance on a bike seem high?
I'm due for a cabin air filter change in another couple years.
So yes the bike is costing me more in maintenance! It is hard to compete with 0.
But speaking purely in terms of maintenance, costs are nearly 0.
Assuming I don't but a pot hole, the tires will last me 7-8 years at minimum (I drive a bit under 3000 miles a year).
Brakes are barely used with an EV.
Insurance + tabs is my largest cost.
I bought my EV cash a few years back when prices were super low thanks to hertz offloading their fleet.
Why are you carrying them? They should be self-reliant too.
I think the propaganda would be whatever said we're all against it, that's untrue. We just want both, no gas bans.
Nevermind that solar is why Texas has such cheap electricity prices.
> no gas bans.
I'm all for the free market.
Price into gas the expected increase in healthcare costs due to air and ground water pollution. Stop subsidizing it for non-critical uses.
Same for extra tire dust from EVs (that shit is toxic AF).
Right now I see astroturfing that EVs are why our electricity infrastructure is overloaded (rather than blaming 50 years of neglect), or that the cars burst into flame (no more than other cars and newer battery tech not any more).
Subsidizing EVs is interesting because it is obvious that EVs are the future (battery tech gets ~6% better year over year, compounding, ICE designs haven't seen improvements in decades), but recent removal of government support caused American car companies to basically give up on anything except the domestic car market, which spells their long term doom (which the Ford CEO has pretty much come out and admitted.)
You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?
It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.
It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.
good question but too often what we find is "not ready at all".
Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it.
We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel.
Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it.
P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.
In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.
And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources.
Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about.
I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily.
And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.
That, and I don't forgive the general populace either.
The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.
The refiners are running out of crude. Having more refiners wouldn’t solve the problem.
California has 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves [1] and imports 373 million barrels a year [2]. That's 5 years of imports in the ground. (At current rates, California depletes its proven reserves in 2040.)
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=R...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Solar panels are made in factories where energy and inputs are cheaper and then shipped on diesel cargo ships to the rest of the world.
Our cars run on gas, so we need new electric ones, but the ships and car carriers are themselves… not electric yet.
Because energy is more expensive, everything is more expensive, including electrification.
All I'll say for sure is the US shouldn't be involved, and shouldn't have taken such a one-sided approach during Israel's founding. None of this benefits us, we simply have traitors in our government.
However, you do pay the market price.
Not to mention natural gas and oil will always need to be shipped around. Whereas when you have enough renewables and a grid that can supply enough electricity, shipping panels and batteries drops by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite dogmatic about renewables (we have 2 EVs, pay more for various renewable options, aggressively recycle, avoid single-use plastics, etc). I'm just pragmatic in my outlook.
