If you were already going to use the heat later in the day when fossil fuels are burning again, then whatever you can do to reduce that future consumption, through storing some thermal heat produced now, can still reduce that fossil fuel consumption overall. Water heaters, warming any living spaces that might need to be heated at night, etc.

It doesn’t even have to be efficient when prices are literally negative. All it has to do is be somewhat effective at reducing later consumption.

Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.

It can still be a useful sink at small scales. You could make ice at those times of day if you’re eventually going to need that ice later. It takes a lot more energy to chill something (especially water with its high specific heat and latent heat of fusion) that it takes to hold something at temperature in an insulated space. And then go on and use the ice later so that the need to chill something doesn’t have to be synchronized with the exact moment in time you’re drawing energy from the grid to run a refrigeration compressor.

Same with heating. Some smart water heaters can store thermal energy for later, too, and top off their energy usage for some times of day.

I’m not sure if the scale you’re imagining makes these ideas too small to be worth pursuing.

I was under the impression that giving the motors the ability to put torque back into the wheel doesn’t add any significant weight over the existing regenerative braking systems.

Plus there’s still plenty of moments where there is actually traction to spare, where being able to push each tire closer to its traction limits for a larger percentage of the time during a race would surely improve performance.

I can believe it might not be worth the tradeoff, but don’t believe that adding the capability would always categorically be a mistake.

We should always look to nature, yes. A lot of aerodynamic designs seem to look a lot like the world’s fastest birds. Trees really do seem to optimize for capturing solar energy in an easily encoded blueprint.

But also there are a few areas where we should recognize the limits of scope of the solutions nature has provided, or recognize the path dependency in how evolution might optimize for a particular pathway that no longer should continue to pose a restriction (the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example).

We’re allowed to mix and match. Just gotta be careful and recognize just how powerful billions of years of evolution is, as an optimization method.

The front tires have a finite amount of traction that needs to be reserved for cornering.

To borrow an analogy from computer RAM, unused traction is wasted traction. Yes, when cornering, all of the available traction should be devoted to steering. But for the straights, why not use the available traction for acceleration?

Hp is a fake number based on torque and RPM from ICE.

You can convert it to watts if you prefer, but it’s very much a real unit, denoting how much work it does per unit time. Torque alone is insufficient (just as force measured in newtons alone would be insufficient) for showing whether a particular machine is more powerful than another.

They are clearly mathematical.

Sure. But they’re also philosophical. The categories aren’t mutually exclusive. Basic set theory (which is both mathematics and philosophy).

I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments.

Wait do you think Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel weren’t making philosophical arguments?

Exactly.

HERE’S A THEOREM: IF IT’S PROVEN, IT’S TRUE EVERYWHERE, FOREVER

But at the same time, even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

Solar needs active maintenance, including personnel of varying skills. All projects have ongoing costs, especially if they’re gonna sit outside in the weather.

Better to just compare all costs, across the projected lifespan, and compare replacement costs if one source lasts longer than the other.

Doing all that tends to show that building new nuclear isn’t cost competitive. Not big reactors, not small reactors.

nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar.

Define “better.” Personally, I think nuclear is too expensive to be a current solution. Let all the existing nuclear plants continue out their useful lives, and extend them as feasible, but constructing new nuclear plants is probably not worth the cost, even compared to solar + enough grid scale storage to cover multiple nights of demand even when days are cloudy.

Terrapower just got approval to build their $4 billion, 345-MW reactor. That’s $11.6 million per MW.

NuScale canceled their 462 MW project in Utah when it became clear that the total cost was going to exceed $9 billion. That’s $19.5 million per MW.

Solar plants are about $1 million per MW. Grid scale 4-hour batteries are about $750,000 per MW.

And the costs of solar/batteries keep dropping, while nuclear tends to increase in cost over time.

Why?

The article says it’s at least partially caused by boat strikes in an especially dangerous area (low visibility, high boat traffic, bottleneck where whales and boats must go to enter or leave).

GAC Aion prices the Aion RT Super at 88,800 yuan (around €11,050), but excludes the battery from the base cost. Instead, the company requires customers to lease the swappable battery as a subscription, lowering the upfront price while adding ongoing monthly costs. The battery cannot be purchased separately for this model.

Oh I don’t like that subscription model one bit. What assurance does an owner have that their subscription price won’t change over the life of their vehicle?

That’s true, although a fuel tank is also really simple to build while a rechargeable battery and related charging controllers/equipment get pretty complicated to manufacture. Some of the complexity gets pushed elsewhere.

Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now.

It’s just always been hard to compare like for like, because pure EVs compete on different features than similarly priced ICE vehicles. Is a Tesla Model 3 more like a $30,000 Toyota Camry or more like a $60,000 BMW 3 series? Which is the nearest ICE competitor to the Rivian R1S?

In the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of new models released by different manufacturers, we’re also seeing more directly comparable models.

One interesting thing is that Toyota is soon releasing EV versions of vehicles they also offer as ICE vehicles. Sometime in the next month or so, the Lexus ES will be offered as either a pure EV or a hybrid, and the EV will actually be cheaper. And there’s an EV Highlander coming later this year, with a price comparable to the hybrid Grand Highlanders.

And obviously my comment is very much U.S.-centered because that’s the market I know, but most of the ICE manufacturers rely on global manufacturing and supply chains so that we can try to see patterns and trends more broadly. European brands like VW, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, etc., have also been pushing electrified models that sit somewhere in the long spectrum between cheap economy cars and expensive luxury/sport cars.

ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally.

I remember in the 90’s when a lot of carmakers were developing variable valve timing where the valve timing would adjust based on RPM, using the different parts of the camshaft for each cylinder’s timing, so that it could maximize performance/efficiency for a wider range of RPMs without trying a one size fits all approach for the whole range. And each carmaker used a slightly different approach, trying to do something to squeeze out just a little bit more performance out of the same size engine.

Or consider the nature of the transmissions, and the rise of the automatic transmission, which allowed carmakers to start going into 6-10 gears (or the continuously variable transmission) because shifting gears could be abstracted away from the driver’s perspective.

The history of a lot of the other engineered functions (getting power from the engine to 2 or 4 of the wheels while allowing different rotational rates, getting fuel into the cylinder, cooling and lubricating the engine, getting the fuel/air mixture right, etc.) shows that it’s so many different things to worry about just to make the car go, reliably and safely.

BMW even partnered with acclaimed composer Hans Zimmer to make custom sounds on certain of their more expensive EVs.

I wonder if there’s hysteresis where the slope of the curve depends on the prior charge history.

Like, if you charge from 1% to 100%, does the 20-80% part of the curve look different than if you discharged down to just 20 and started charging to 80 from there?

The signal to noise ratio problem is analogous to trying to pick out a specific voice in a crowded stadium. It’s too loud to be able to pick up one source.

So the desert is like that, where there’s a lot of background electrical noise that’s louder than the electrical signals that a human heartbeat makes.