53 ms·

We can do better than “same, but electric”

287 points by gk1 5y ago

yellowapple 5y ago
The article doesn't mention it, but another example of the "electric makes things better" mentality is trains. Trains are in some respects easier to electrify than even trucks, let alone ships, by virtue of them being on fixed tracks (no need for batteries on electrified tracks except as a backup in case of power outages) and by virtue of train cars being readily swappable (so even on not-yet-electrified networks, trains could swap their depleted battery cars for fresh ones at the station). Plus, freight trains support intermodal containers just like container ships do, so they can share the same sorts of battery-in-a-container idea.
- aembleton 5y ago
  I was thinking you could have a battery in a train, that is charged by pantographs at the station. Accelerating out of the station will use a lot of energy so for a mile or so there could be pantographs and then they won't be needed for a few miles whilst the train runs off the battery. The battery can be charged when slowing down for the station using regenerative braking and charged whilst idling at the station. This might be more complex and expensive though than just having the pantographs the full length of the line, but I thought about it recently when my local line was closed as a tunnel on it was too small to fit the pantographs through and had to be rebuilt.
  - audunw 5y ago
    Some are doing this with buses on fixed routes. There are even experiments with trucks and pantographs, electrified rails and even wireless charging on limited sections of highways (in Sweden and Germany I believe). So should be feasible with trains too
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the fuel to generate electricity, which is then utilized to drive electric motors
tempestn 5y ago
My only quibble is that electric lawn mowers today are rather better than "same, but electric". Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. And my Ego push mower will also fold up to store vertically, which is great with limited garage space. Plus it starts every time at the push of a button, no trips to the gas station, maintenance, tough starts, etc.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.
  - winrid 5y ago
    There are some people who are "nerdy" in a different way, and actually like the noise, for example. Different strokes for different folks :)
    - jeddy3 5y ago
      And live in a neighborhood were everybody else is "nerdy" about the noise?
      - winrid 5y ago
        Nobody ever said there was a neighborhood :)
        jeddy3 5y ago
        Fair enough.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    two stroke mower? Where do you live? In the US, the only major brand selling two stroke motors was lawn boy, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. They were always a bit odd. Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.
bambax 5y ago
> A cheap electric cooktop is a lot like a gas stove, except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive. No. Well, yes, a "cheap" electric cooktop that simply produces heat (coil or IR) is worse than burners, and less responsive. But that's not what you want. You want an induction cooktop: safe, efficient, beautiful, and more importantly, more responsive than burners.
- LesZedCB 5y ago
  and finer control - lower lows
- moistly 5y ago
  Much discussion about induction cooktops here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30654693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30654693
- LunaSea 5y ago
  Induction cooktops are however not compatible with self-consumption of electricity produced by solar panels. The required draw is too high.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    That's a very categorical statement for a comparison of two quantities, both of which vary (cooktop power and solar power). And ultimately if you're using a lower-power cooktop it .. won't cook properly. The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.
  - YATA0 5y ago
    I've ran our induction range on our solar panels for about five years now. This is news to me.
    - LunaSea 5y ago
      What solar capacity did you have installed? If I remember correctly, my comment was based on an average household with about 4 to 5 KW installed in western Europe. This represents about 12 panels which is roughly the maximum amount of panels a regular house has space for.
ghostpepper 5y ago
A great counter-example: the 2022 BMW i4 M50 uses a lot of parts from the gasoline version, including the "transmission tunnel" aka the thing that protrudes up from the floor in the backseat and prevents the person sitting in the middle from resting their feet comfortably at the same height as the other two passengers
DeathArrow 5y ago
I like how everybody talks about how to make everything electric using only solar and wind energy (hydro and nuclear energy are not deemed as "green"). But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so, no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future. No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment. It seems many are replacing critical thinking and science with passion and ideology.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Can you provide some numbers? While still polluting surely it will be less polluting tgan now?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  We have this conversation on this forum a lot, and many of us are emphatically pro nuclear power. I’m not sure what you’re talking about tbh.
- VintageCool 5y ago
  Hydro is great. Most of our hydro resources have already been tapped. Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.) Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too. I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.
- Zedseayou 5y ago
  I don't know who you're reading that you say "no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so". I feel like people think about these costs all the time - it is the comparison to costs of continuing GHG trends and climate change impacts that is really staggering.
elihu 5y ago
I'm skeptical that onloading and offloading containers of batteries is something that can be done quickly and easily on average. Suppose you're using batteries (probably lithium iron phosphate if it's based on current tech) that can charge at 1C. That means you can fill all the batteries completely in an hour just by charging them from external power (assuming enough current is available). I don't know how long loading an unloading take, but I assume most ports would have lines of ships waiting to use the cranes, and if you can't get everything done in under an hour you're better off just charging them on the ship. Suppose you're a coastal city that wants to setup a charging facility for passing local ships. You can either build a full seaport (which might not be practical depending on geography) with a crane and battery storage and charging facilities, which can handle ships one at a time, or maybe two or three if you have the dock space. Or you can run a high voltage line out to a buoy, and ships can hold position out in the water and connect to the power receptacle at the buoy for an hour and charge. If you want to have ten ships be able to charge at once, you run ten high voltage lines out to ten different buoys. I would suggest that the latter option is probably cheaper and easier. It's also not out of the question to have HVDC lines that connect continents to each other for power sharing (i.e. buying and selling solar power based on where the sun is shining), and if such cables exist across oceans it's not much of a stretch to imagine a string of charging stations at regular intervals for passing ships to use, even across the Pacific. Even better would be some system where you can have a continuous connection to power, like the pantographs connecting to overhead lines in electric street car systems, but I have no idea how you would do that at sea.
- m463 5y ago
  "if you can't get everything done in under an hour you're better off just charging them on the ship." Why not both? charge on-ship batteries while swapping off-ship batteries.
  - elihu 5y ago
    Because in the time it takes to physically swap some batteries and charge others, you could have just charged them all and that would be simpler and easier. One of the things that's counterintuitive about batteries is that if a battery is twice as big it still takes the same time to charge, not twice as long. (That's assuming you can supply enough power to charge at the fastest rate the batteries can handle.)
fareesh 5y ago
Does anyone the difference of the environmental impact a between fuel powered thing like a car or lawnmower versus an electric car or lawnmower powered by a coal fired power plant? (assuming typical manufacturing methods for the battery as of 2022)
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The Union of Concerned Scientists has a map that calculates the MPG equivalent of an EV car for real local grid carbon intensities. The bottom line is, they're already better everywhere today, and the grid is only going to get cleaner.
- csours 5y ago
  There are several different ways to slice this. "Pollution" should be characterized by effect - CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes global warming. We need local and global strategies to reduce it and replace systems that create it. Other pollutants have a direct effect on human health. Some pollution has a very fast effect, some pollution has a delayed or chronic effect. We need to replace systems that create this pollution immediately. For small tools like a two stroke gas engined lawn mower, weed eater or chainsaw, you have an immense immediate benefit from not having the particulate, unburned gas and oil, NOx, and carbon monoxide in your lungs. This immediate benefit to human health makes the transition worth it at almost any cost. For larger things like vehicles or heat pump based home heating, you need to consider the pay off time. The pay off time is shorter (better) when replacing less fuel efficient vehicles (as low as 20,000 miles). If you have an existing vehicle that gets decent mileage (35+ mpg) and your local electricity is coal powered it can take much longer (50,000 miles or longer). But there is always a finite payoff time for any realistic scenario.
evilotto 5y ago
Two problems with electric everything: 1. At least for now, the power still goes out. Maybe I'm still smarting from a week-long power outage this past winter, but in the US, our electric grid is fragile in many places, and we are probably decades away from it being more resilient, so more dependence on electricity is more reliance on large utility providers. Dirty fossil fuels are still better at being able to be moved around in bulk - gasoline has 50-100x the power density of batteries. Electricity has more potential for being decentralized, but we are far away from that. 2. Electricity tends to mean miniaturization and computerization. That tends to mean more difficult to repair; someone related to me a story about a small village somewhere in Africa that was reliant on a gas-powered pump for the well. They had to get gas for it of course, but if it broke down it was simple enough that nearly any person in the village knew how to repair it. A solar-powered pump would eliminate the need for gas, but no one had the tools or knowledge to repair it if it broke. Additionally, with manufacturers desiring ever more control through embedded DRM, it leads to a future where even if the electric power is available, we might not be able to use it because we didn't pay the licensing fees. These are perhaps very dystopian concerns, but recent world events somehow make these sorts of concerns more realistic.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  The US grid is indeed a bit of a mess. Not exactly world leading but still better than some third world countries. IMHO that situation will actually accelerate changes in the US. Because it is so bad, people are taking control of the situation and there are lots of solutions to reduce your dependency on the fragile grid that are getting popular. Burning gas/oil is the stupidly expensive solution (especially recently). Saving on that cost is what any entrepreneur worthy of the name would gladly spend on. And the US is famously very entrepreneurial. Solar, wind, and batteries are not that complicated. If you are handy, you can buy some cheap stuff on ebay and wire it together yourself or you can pay some people in your area to do it for you. Different set of skills than maintaining an ICE engine but not fundamentally a lot harder than that. There are plenty of people handy with that sort of stuff that are busy electrifying everything they can get their hands on. There's no basis for your paranoia here.
- theshrike79 5y ago
stevage 5y ago
Is there somewhere to read more about electric container ships? I'm really curious about the battery infrastructure they have in mind. If a battery is the size of a container, is it really worth even swapping them out mid-journey? I mean, if you're carrying a thousand containers, what's a few more containers of batteries? (And considering all that fuel storage space now available...)
h0l0cube 5y ago
> Conventional wisdom has long held that battery power is infeasible for ocean shipping. There was an article on HN a while back about using lifting gas (specifically blimps) as a way to reduce shipping costs. I naively wonder how feasible it is to at least lighten the load of ships using hydrogen gas? https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting-gas/ https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting...
newyankee 5y ago
I always wondered whether Giant ships could have floating solar that they haul as well as solar panels covering 1.5 the ship area. Sounds impractical from perspective of current port design but I am sure some clever engineering can solve these issues. Combining this solar + kite/ sails based power + some batteries I am sure one can provide at least 50% of the energy needed for shipping. The bottleneck initially is just the cost of non standard designs being brought into an industry that makes its money off economies of scale and standardization.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  why? there’s more than enough land for solar panels and the ocean is incredibly harsh this is a similar flaw with things like “solar roads” or “solar sidewalks” it’s just unnecessary complexity
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I think many people underestimate just how harsh ocean is. Salt doesn't do great with electronics such as connections. Plus you would probably use pretty low barges which suffer from waves and rough seas. Also keeping the right angle will be massive pain for optimal energy gathering. Ships tend to travel in ways that the angle of sun isn't constant. Not to forget drag and what it means to actually drag something at even speed current cargo ships travel. Traditionally my understanding is that barges are used at much lower speeds.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      Right, when it comes to the ocean you also have to remember that hundreds of full containers a year are just swept off of a ship and lost. Floating panels would be outright annihilated in rough seas, and a system to stow them would add a fair amount of complexity. And again, all of this is overshadowed by the fact that there's enough open unused space on land to power the entire planet with solar by multiple orders of magnitude. You could power 100 earths with ground-based solar and still have room left over.
robertlagrant 5y ago
> Tesla didn’t build “a car, but electric”; they created a novel, prestige product that became wildly successful without having to reach price parity. I was going to say, isn't this thesis already exemplified by Tesla?
weinzierl 5y ago
BMW tried with the i3 but failed miserably. Not surprising in hindsight. When we look back in time we see that new technologies very often tried to emulate the old technology that they were about to replace. Cars used to look like horse carriages, computers used the desktop metaphor and smart phones skeuomorphic design. The time isn't ripe for better than “same, but electric”.
- aembleton 5y ago
  > i3 but failed miserably Did it? I see plenty of them around. Over 227k sold world wide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3#Global_sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3#Global_sales
- theshrike79 5y ago
  The i3 REX especially was a fantastic car. It was just weird AF from the outside and didn't attract "normal" car people.
  - llampx 5y ago
    I remember when "everyone" pinned the success of the Prius on it looking different from normal cars. Many articles said that if the Prius had looked like a normal car it wouldn't have had sales from people who wanted to show that they were forward-thinking and ecological. Then Tesla came along and now everyone says that their success is because of the cars looking like normal cars. shrug. I think the look takes second place to the technology and how well its implemented.
giva 5y ago
A bit off topic, but I always find it funny when people talk about electric motors and batteries as if they were invented to solve the shortcomings of internal combustion engines, when it is quite the opposite.
PennRobotics 5y ago
Napkin math: If a cargo ship carries 3,000 tons with 7 MWh need[1], while an Ambri molten salt battery pack is 10 tons and 0.1 MWh[2][3], it seems small cargo ships can theoretically be electrified (although the battery would be a significant percentage of weight). Then again, is it wise to install liquid metal on an unstable vessel surrounded by water? [1] https://electrek.co/2021/08/25/worlds-first-autonomous-7mwh-electric-cargo-ship-to-make-voyage-with-zero-crew-onboard/ https://electrek.co/2021/08/25/worlds-first-autonomous-7mwh-... [2] https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/getting-a-charge-out-of-liquid-metal-batteries/ https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/getting-a-charge-out-of-... [3] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/slideshow-update-on-ambris-liquid-metal-grid-scale-battery https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/slideshow-updat...
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  You are looking at this wrong by basically translating a vehicle concept that is designed for the fuel economies of bunker fuel to electric. Bunker fuel is expensive so you want to ship a lot of containers to maximize the fuel economies. That's how containers evolved. They minimize loading/unloading overhead and you can ship thousands of them on huge ships. Each ship burns tonnes of fuel just to get out of the harbor but that's OK because you can spread the cost over a load that has a value measured in hundreds of millions or more. The whole point is that you can ship that huge value for a few percent of that value in cost. It makes sense to do that because fuel is expensive. For the same reason, a lot of those ships are already electric actually. Sure, they burn fuel but only to drive a generator that drives the engine. Electric engines that size are just better. You get a better range of torque across different speeds and maximize the fuel economy for the generator. The maintenance is simpler. They last longer. Etc. So electrifying is a lot easier than you think. Basically containerize batteries, park a few on the ship, bypass the generator and you have a nice hybrid container ship. Now you can sacrifice useful load for a vastly cheaper fuel (electricity). It becomes a cost equation. Battery electric changes that game. Most of the transport cost is fuel. Fuel is expensive. Electricity is not. It's all about the cost of fuel. When you burn millions of $ of fuel, fuel economies are very interesting to shipping companies. The main reason for large container ships is the fuel cost. Decimate that cost and that reason goes away. You could do the same volume with a lot of smaller ships instead. As for liquid metal, batteries are probably a lot easier to clean up than oil and fuel spills. There's no question about how devastating oil spills are. Plenty of recent incidents with oil ships and container ships sinking regularly to prove that. Even just burning fuel produces a lot of pollution. Bunker fuel is the nastiest fuel imaginable and most ships actually have to switch to alternate fuels when they get close to population centers because poisoning the locals is a bit problematic.
kkfx 5y ago
That's just a dream without reasoning: - can we build enough batteries just for private cars? I really doubt. Not because the absence of a developed and battle-tested supply chain like we have for oil, a supply chain can be made and developed it advantageous or anyway needed it's just a matter of time, but in terms of natural resources. Actually we do not know how to recycle batteries, that's is. In an EV they last 5 years of intense usage (after the vehicle might still run, but not suited for intense usage), or 8 years for normal usage, the tag of 10 years is mostly for a very light usage in good conditions; - we can change actual logistic chain, for instance (re)develop far more rails (electrified) with a network dedicated to transport only non-perishable/non-urgent/storable goods that operate only when the electricity grid can give enough surplus power from renewables, that's still not solve anything, just reduce fossils usage though; - we can develop WFH at maximum, designing an entirely new society, far spread than now with significant dense urban agglomerate just for campus/research, factories that need a certain scale, military stuff, political stuff etc while most other live spread in single-family homes not more dense that the local territory capacity to satisfy basic needs (water, foods just at the level of minimal self-sufficiency, commerce as usual for comfort and well-being), maintaining only local and minimum road networks, privileging aviation for the rest, since despite people-who-not-compute-TCO claims is the cheapest option for quick non-local human travels (and substantial development of flying things for human transport is a good proof of that); - we can change whole scale production systems from very lengthy supply chains to shorter ones in a far less concentrate production, witch is also good for environmental reasons. All the above offer ways to consume less, once built, all the above offer flexibility to evolve and change even rapidly, all the above might needed to adapt to climate change since rising see levels, subsidence's phenomena, soil liquefaction's, hydrogeological instability in general likely demand big relocations and a new civil infrastructure to correct errors and horrors of the actual one BUT still do not solve the most basic problem, being really "renewable". For industry we still need too much energy, so we need nuclear where classic hydropower can't be used orthographically. For shipping we can use nuclear, French not-much-rich uranium naval reactors might be a good answer. Still no solution to replace fossils for: - metallurgy, steel/iron in particular - lubricants - electrical insulators, hydraulic seals etc - generic polymers production on scale from elastic tissues to packaging We have alternatives, yes, but nothing developable in a large scale sustainable manner. Long story short, even in theory we know how to design a new society for transition to something still unknown.
ttiurani 5y ago
Agree with the general sentiment that moving to electric is a great place to rethink the whole design. However a "make it electric" mentality doesn't address the fact that a big chunk of the "its" (at least in the global North) are just overconsumption that shouldn't exist at all, if we ever want to find balance with nature. So instead of changing to an electric car that has a massive material footprint and takes up the same amount of space on the road as a petrol car, buy a bike (and vote for investments in bike lanes and public transport). Instead of living in a huge house and needing a lawnmower, move to an apartment (and vote for more compact housing zoning). Instead of buying vanity gadgets that relies on ocean cargo traffic, don't (and work less as you then need less money).
- missedthecue 5y ago
  what would make such a decline in my personal standard of living worth it?
  - helmholtz 5y ago
    Let's begin with the notion that a biking world is a decline in personal standard. A car makes you fat and poor. A bike makes you fit and rich. You'll be healthier in bed with your wife. If not, women will check you out as you walk past them in your toned fit body. Living in a compact city means you'll meet friends more, you'll do more things. Your weekends won't be in front of a TV. They won't involve a 100 mile round trip to the strip mall. You'll hear the planet sing like a bird to the tune of your bike's bell. Fishes in oceans will celebrate MissedTheCue day and drink to excess in your memory. Polar bear will giving sermons holding you up as a shining beacon of hope.
    - abakker 5y ago
      I think this answer does as much to ignore the car owners POV as they are ignoring yours. Bikes are of course great, and fitness is great. But, here in Colorado, even an E bike is impractical for the vast majority of simple errands simply because of distance. If you respond with "move to a city" you are failing in empathy. The existence of long distance trips with probably bad weather make bikes not the right answer for the vast majority of people outside of major cities in America. The right answer probably does include public infrastructure at a vast scale, but, our government cannot afford it, and it is not a foregone conclusion that the environmental impact of major construction of infrastructure is better than that of electric cars. The reason this is not a solved problem is because simple answers like "buy a bike" are not actually answers, they are deflections. As are the answers like, "there is no solution except a pickup truck". edit: removed sarcastic comment.
Reason077 5y ago
> “dragging 100 feet of extension cord.” Actually, electric lawnmowers have come a long way in the past 10-15 years. They have batteries now! No need to drag a cord.
notacoward 5y ago
Kind of surprised that the OP didn't use urban planning, zoning, etc. as a central example. No number of electric vehicles, no matter how good, whether privately owned or publicly, will do as much to reduce fossil-fuel dependency and its associated ills as much as undoing the "car-first" way we (especially in the US) allocate land. To the author's point, "same but electric" can't hold a candle to modern urban design which is not only less polluting but also more convenient, equitable, healthy, social, etc. IMO it's the perfect example of how we need to reconsider the entire model of how we do something instead of just swapping in different parts.
ineedasername 5y ago
>but in several years of driving a Bolt, I have literally never had to charge it away from home That just means that haven't been more than about 120 miles away from home in 2 years. An especially easy feat when a large part of that was COVID shutdowns. In general, easy access to rapid charging on the road is a luxury of urban & suburban areas. That's where most people live, so electric will be okay for most people, but this is a bit too much cheerleading on the subject of charging convenience if the comparison is ICE. We're not there yet. Also the Bolt may not be the best example to use in the context of how electric can be better. I agree with the sentiment, but Chevy had to recall every Bolt ever made prior to the 2022 model year due to battery issues, requiring batteries to be replaced. It still hasn't replaced all of them. During this time, to avoid fires, owners were temporarily advised to only charge to 90% and not go below 70 miles of range, nerfing range to about 165 miles. Also not charge overnight in a garage and in some cases park 50 feet away from other vehicles. A firmware update has since removed those last restrictions in favor of a semi-permanent range nerf to 210 miles until the battery is replaced. Yes, we can do better than "same, but electric" but we're not quite there yet in a lot of ways, and the Bolt excellently demonstrates some of them. It seems like in terms of battery safety engineering we're at the Ford Pinto stage, but maybe catching up faster?
- belval 5y ago
  GM is replacing all the batteries with better, newer ones. You can be pessimistic about it, but I have yet to find a Bolt owner that isn't happy with their replacement.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I'm not pessimistic about the general EV outlook. Bolt simply isn't a good poster child for how much better they are. Why wouldn't Bolt owners be happy with their new battery? The new battery isn't the issue, it's what made it necessary that is the problem. With 100 mile reduction in range and safety issues I wouldn't have kept mine long enough to get the replacement. It wouldn't have been possible for me to keep it under the limitations imposed. And I doubt the many thousands of Bolt owners still waiting for a replacement are not very happy about it. On a much smaller scale, I was happy when I got about $200 in a class action settlement from Apple for it's faulty iPhone liquid sensors. I was still pissed off that I'd had to pay for a replacement years earlier. And years before the settlement I had already switched away from Apple as a result.
apatheticonion 5y ago
As an Australian, I would take "same but electric". I'd also take a power outlet in my apartment garage (which the building manager says they cannot install).
ambyra 5y ago
I always thought electric cars “filling up” at “electrical gas stations” was bizarre. If the major roads were electrified, electric cars wouldn’t need as much range, would be cheaper, lighter, better on the environment, wouldn’t need to sit for hours at a charging station. It’s a new and different technology hobbled by old ways of doing things.
- kristjansson 5y ago
  Whatever motive force drives cars around is necessarily energetic and transmissible. It wants to dissipate, badly, and we've managed to trick it into doing useful work for us in the process. If we're going to have our mode of transport integrated into the human environment, enormous care has to be put into ensure that potential energy does not find it's way into humans, animals, buildings, etc. Electricity is no different. Enough current (or exploding gasoline) to move a car is concerning enough to be around in the enclosed package of an engine. Enough current to move a road's worth of cars just hanging around on a third rail, or pantograph, or whatever is downright terrifying.
- dr_spicy 5y ago
oppositelock 5y ago
I would not immediately dismiss current designs as archaic. Lawn mowers, cars, whatever, have had a century of little improvements to make them easy to use, safe and affordable. There is a lot of accumulated wisdom in these products. Sure, make new ones, see if you can do better, I'm all for that, but it's a safe, conservative move to recreate what works.
goda90 5y ago
>However, changing principles is a double-edged sword. When you throw out decades of real-world experience, you start over at the bottom of the learning curve. I experienced this with the battery lawn mower I bought. Because it was electric, they could do two smaller motors and have twin blades. Sounds fancy. But I don't love it. It can't accommodate a side-chute, leaving me only with mulching and bagging. Those are fine until I leave the lawn long and then things get real slow. The twin blades also sometimes leave a little bit of uncut grass down the middle, which wouldn't happen with a single blade. This might be a product of only being 40V rather than the blade design, but it also seems to have less "suction" to pull up the grass to be cut than I've noticed in traditional gas mowers.
alex440440 5y ago
Where the materials for all the batteries will come from?
davidw 5y ago
We just got a utility bike and... wow. Cut our daily car trips in half, and it's a lot of fun to ride. It's got a seat on the back, so we can haul kids around, or carry groceries.
darksaints 5y ago
I've been really excited for the electric revolution exactly because of all of the things that can be done differently. A huge example in my mind is the X-57 concept plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell Lightweight electric motors allow for a couple of noteworthy improvements: * With the reduced weight of electric motors, they can now be placed at the ends of wings, with props that can then be used to counter the wingtip vortices and combat induced drag. * The simplicity of electric power distribution means that propulsion can be done all along the wing's length, which can enhance lift coefficients by actively overcoming boundary layer conditions that lead to stalls. * The increased wing lift coefficients mean that smaller and lighter wings can be used, which reduce structural weight as well as parasitic drag. I'm not sure if we'll see production aircraft like this, but this is a great example of rethinking design decisions that were standardized under an entirely different regime of design constraints.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Electric planes are also quite a lot quieter than jet planes! Electric planes also favor more, smaller planes due to weight/energy-density constraints and the economics of jet engines vs electric motors: a small jet engine isn't dramatically cheaper than a big jet engine, so airlines prefer larger planes with big engines; however, electric motor costs scale more linearly so a smaller electric planes are not significantly less economical than big electric planes (even excluding energy density concerns). With more, smaller flights, we could well see significant changes in the flight network. Rather than big flights between hubs, we may instead see more flights between smaller regional airports.
dpedu 5y ago
> Electric cars are sort of like gas cars with new motors… but actually, in many ways, much better. They have amazing pickup, the heater comes on instantly, many have extra storage (the “frunk”), there’s no exhaust to stink up your garage. Hmm. Sorry, but I'm not impressed. Faster acceleration is fun but it doesn't improve the trip from point a to point b. If anything, it could make the ride less comfortable and safe. The heater coming on instantly is nice, but it's at the cost of mileage whereas in an ICE the heat is free (in that it is otherwise wasted). If you're using the heater it's because you're in cold weather and you will lose significant range because of the battery's lower performance in the cold (to the tune of up to 40%!) or the battery's heaters keeping it in a performant temperature range. I'd call this a trade-off rather than an improvement. Storage space in some models makes sense. Same with exhaust in garages, if you have a garage and want to idle the car inside it. However, talking about all this without mentioning the biggest step backwards with electric cars seems pretty disingenuous; this step backwards being the shorter distance electric cars are capable of traveling in the same period of time as ICE vehicles due to their significantly longer refueling times and decreased range in cold weather.
- mjamesaustin 5y ago
  It's not a huge step backwards, the time spent charging on a road trip. That occasional cost pales in comparison to the benefits and conveniences I experience every day by driving electric. Here's an example: I save 5 mins a week not having to fill up at the gas station, which is 260 mins a year. On a typical road trip I spend about 30 mins charging each way. So even after 4 road trips in a year, I've still saved 20 mins. My electric car is hands down my favorite purchase ever, and those I know who have gotten one tend to feel similarly.
  - dpedu 5y ago
    This is a common misconception in the discussion around electric cars. You've selected a use case that they do have benefit in. There are others that don't. If it works for you, great, but what you've described doesn't work if you're traveling greater distances or in bad weather or a variety of other reasons ICE vehicles have no problem with.
turtlebits 5y ago
If you don't want same- energy prices (water too) need to raised so there is a "cognitive pause" before you do anything that requires a high consumption. IMO, this will really induce change, instead of minor inconveniences to your pocketbook.
EricE 5y ago
A pro and con I haven't seen discussed too much so far: Huge Pro - since there is no active heat source unless there is pan, nothing happens if the controls get accidentally turned on. With older parents I'm very happy they have an induction stove - my dad always hits the controls when cleaning and he can't hear the beeps. Luckily after a few seconds, without a pan, the cooktop just turns itself off again. A significant con - matching pan to hob (burner) size. The more mismatched, the louder/more high frequency squealing you get. It drove me crazy enough I'm seriously considering something like a Gaggenau 400 Series that will auto detect the pan size and location.
moralestapia 5y ago
Nice article, but ... >Apparently, most shipping routes tend to hug the coast and make cargo or maintenance stops anyway, and so this won’t really be a big change from current practice. This is not true.
- deelowe 5y ago
  I'm not sure how true the bunker fuel thing is these days either. Many countries have been working to address this.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  For the amount of ships this may be true, but not for the amount of TEU shipped.
- tlb 5y ago
  Do you have more information? Like what fraction of total TEU-miles are on short routes?
  - krasin 5y ago
    You can get a sense by looking at the interactive map here: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/25/11503152/shipping-routes-map https://www.vox.com/2016/4/25/11503152/shipping-routes-map
    - elihu 5y ago
      It's hard to get a sense of what the majority is from that, but it seems like there's a lot of ships that are hugging the shorelines and a lot that aren't.
      - moralestapia 5y ago
        Here you go, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_transport#/media/File:Shipping_routes_red_black.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_transport#/media/File... Hope that's clear enough.
krasin 5y ago
The author does not consider nuclear shipping vessels, while this is the right electric for long routes, such as Trans-Pacific: it allows for good utilization of reactor output, shave delivery times at no additional operational costs and it's nearly free from CO2 emissions (direct or indirect). China is building a number of new nuclear ships starting with icebreakers but container ships are in the plans: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3155860/china-develop-new-heavy-icebreaker-polar-silk-road https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3155860/ch...
- Angostura 5y ago
  I'm sure the Somalian pirates can't wait.
- Shared404 5y ago
  To my layperson self, it seems like that would be a bad idea. We know how to secure a reactor on land, but the sea is a big, dangerous place - and it's only a matter of time before some cost cutting idiot blows up a ship because they wanted a bigger bonus.
  - yellowapple 5y ago
    Nuclear reactors are arguably a lot safer (in terms of meltdown risk) on the ocean than they already are on land, seeing as how they're in ships that float on a giant planet-wide heatsink that also happens to be exceptionally good at confining radiation. The more pertinent risk would be piracy and the like; if thorium ever catches on, it'd probably help make that less of an issue.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    We already have nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. The popular joke is that all military/navy/etc equipment is built by the lowest bidder. On the bright side: if a nuclear reactor melts down in the middle of the ocean, there’s basically nothing around to be inconvenienced by that event.
    - 5y ago
jotm 5y ago
FFS, it would be easier and more environmentally friendly to use wind
- snek_case 5y ago
  Assuming you mean for shipping containers, I think one issue there is that sailboats tend to tilt a lot, which you can't do if you have a lot of containers on your deck. Might be possible to design container ships where all the shipping containers are inside the ship instead.
  - jdrc 5y ago
    what if the sailboat is towing the containership
    - snek_case 5y ago
      Maybe that could work. You would lose a bit in terms of aerodynamics I think though. Container ships also don't have very sleek hull designs.
  - RajT88 5y ago
    This company seems to think they have a solution: https://www.theoceanbird.com/ https://www.theoceanbird.com/
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      Good, but I wonder if there isn't still a moment/torque reaction to cause some tilting, and those towers also preclude packing the deck with containers.
    - chrismartin 5y ago
      I've seen vaporware like this since I was a kid in the 90s. Talk is cheap, slick renderings are cheap. Is there _any_ mostly-wind-powered vessel in active, revenue-generating, trans-oceanic cargo service? Container or otherwise? Maybe something like the Maltese Falcon / Black Pearl? Yes, there are also cargo ship kites, but those only work as a small adjunct to a big diesel engine.
smileysteve 5y ago
To go back to the lawnmower; 4 wheel drive is something that is entirely possible with electric, where most have 2 wheel (front wheel is cheapest) open drive. Come to an angled hill and they slip. Electric and a small computer for the wheels and you can lock a differential or 2 without causing irreversible load on the single motor. There induction stove improves compared to the gas stove, but touch buttons go too far. Ebikes and scooters are definitely capable of reimagining transportation, if we can get the scary cars reduced on the same infrastructure.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
golemiprague 5y ago
asiachick 5y ago
Tangent, It would be funny to me if the root of trunk was runk as in "tail-runk" -> trunk "front-runk" -> frunk
- natch 5y ago
  Nice. "under-runk" -> urunk. Pronounced awkwardly "uh-runk."
  - m463 5y ago
    in rv's they call it "the basement"
    - asiachick 5y ago
      should rename it basement-runk -> brunk
  - asiachick 5y ago
    the glovebox would be the dash-runk -> drunk The center console storage would be center-runk -> crunk
thehappypm 5y ago
I fundamentally disagree with this premise. Electric is the future. Everything can be electric AND good. Bought a house a year ago. The house (oddly enough) had a huge propane tank out back wired exclusively for the two stoves.. in addition to oil heat. So, when I moved in, my house had oil, propane, and electric service. No gas line. (Eastern Massachusetts, so, winter low temps around 0F but rarely below 5F). My propane tank emptied after a month and the company said the tank itself was at end of life. A new tank would not be cheap. So I decided to cut the cord and replace my two stoves with electric ones.. and they’re awesome! I don’t think they’re quite as good as gas, but I can boil water in minutes, and I won’t blow my house up. The safety trade off is worth the reduced responsiveness. Heat- installed a heat pump and it’s WAY better than the oil heat radiators. So much quieter and I can control each room independently. I like my office at 72, my wife at 68, that’s completely doable. Oh, and I’m saving a fortune on oil, plus I get air conditioning.
- jen20 5y ago
  What kind of stove do you now have? I’ve had coil (trash), ceramic (still trash) and induction (amazing, and way better than gas, at the cost of needing compatible cookware) - I’d never voluntarily to back to gas.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It’s resistive. Not sure the exact tech. All I know is, I’ve had electric stoves that suck ass, and this one does not. It heats up fast, and I’m not noticing a huge performance difference over my old gas range. The biggest difference is that you can nor just cut the power like gas. You need to (horror of horrors!) move the pan off the heating element to dramatically cut the heat.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      This is going to be a continuing issue for companies unless they agree on some proper tech branding. (I don't get why they haven't yet) There's a ridiculous difference in various types of electric stoves and people with good/bad experience with them rarely say which one it is beyond "electric". But with the available options it feels like "I had a yellow car, and really liked / didn't like it". Modern induction stoves really are a massive leap from things you could get a decade ago. You can even get ones that work with woks. A trip through a few newer airbnbs on an island with very few gas lines was a serious revelation for me. From the article: > except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive Which basically ignores modern induction stoves which also don't heat up and are more responsive for thick-bottom pans! Which is the essence of the article - going further than "we'll make the job hot but with electricity".
asperous 5y ago
Why not hydrogen? Hydrogen's weakness is volume and cost; but for shipping neither of those is a huge concern. Batteries are more efficient but given the scale for shipping that may not be as much
- coderenegade 5y ago
  Shipping is more likely to use methanol, which is derived from hydrogen, than anything else. Cargo ships are already in the process of being converted over.
- aembleton 5y ago
  With this concept, you could replace the shipping containers containing batteries with ones containing hydrogen fuel cells. That way, as the technology improves the source of power can change.
paxys 5y ago
Agree with the general principle, but it is important to identify what aspects of a current product's design is shaped specifically by fossil fuel dependency and what evolved independent of it. If you threw away all preconceived notions of how a car should look and feel and spent an unlimited amount of time and money to design a new perfect one based around electric power, it would...still look very similar to any other car on the market today. The reason is that the design of a passenger car (and all of the infrastructure around it) has evolved over many centuries independent of its power source – from a horse drawn carriage to a Ford Model T to a Tesla.
- sdoering 5y ago
  This reminded me of a classical example of Chesterton's Fence [0]. I like the distinction between the sources that shaped a development. [0]: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
- afiori 5y ago
  > still look very similar to any other car on the market today Cars on the market looks wildly different compare a Smart (the brand) car with the new GMC humongous pickup truck.
  - grp000 5y ago
    Barring the power source, you'll still have a beefy suspension and a bed in the back with a squashed looking frontend to keep the exterior dimensions reasonable on a truck.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Part of the reason why all cars seem to look the same nowadays is that maximizing aerodynamics, passenger safety, interior volume, and comfort doesn’t leave the designer a lot of room to work with. Very little of the “sameness” is driven by the propulsion mechanism; EVs are already becoming similar but with a frunk.
- gedy 5y ago
  Yes and honestly, I think many people are not interested in buying and driving around in a "weird looking" electric car. Tesla, Ford, et al have been improving this and consumer acceptance. (Well unsure about the Cybertruck)
spacexsucks 5y ago
Electric is the future. But I am worried about EMPs and the single reliance on electric. Is my worry non-existant?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Electric and electronic are not the same thing.
- viraptor 5y ago
  To put it in context, are you spending as much time thinking about gas line explosions? Because those happen quite often.
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Yes. I do. And the oil spills.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Electro Magnetic Pulses? The thing that requires us to detonate a nuclear weapon to create at any meaningful scale? No. I wouldn’t worry about that at all. Besides, if we somehow managed to create an EMP above your city and not set off a full scale nuclear war, your gasoline car and gas pump wouldn’t work either. Those also have computers in them that are critical to their functioning.
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Thank you all for the genuine answers. As an electronics engineer, i know only about that.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    It doesn’t have to be a nuclear emp. Anyone can make an emp that will total a car.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
alexfromapex 5y ago
One thing I find annoying about the argument for heat pumps helping to reduce global warming is no one considers if the refrigerant leaks. R-410A, R-13A, etc. refrigerants have a pretty high global warming potential (GWP) and it seems like likelihood of a leak is decently high, especially if there is a car crash.
- chrismartin 5y ago
  That problem appears mostly solved these days. Household refrigerators and freezers now use propane. Many (most?) new vehicles now use 2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Refrigerants_with_very_low_climate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Refrigerants_with_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
- ip26 5y ago
  With proliferation of AC in every house, that ship is already sailing, and heat pumps replace AC.
- hlieberman 5y ago
  We /can/ do better than those refrigerants, though. R-1234yf has a tiny global warming potential compared to even some of the green choices out there like propane or isobutane. There's also the old solutions like CO2, or even ammonia (though that I wouldn't expect anywhere but industrial environments).
- skykooler 5y ago
  Even for those refrigerants, the GWP should be considered in context - an AC unit only holds a few pounds of refrigerant, which has a similar GWP to the tailpipe emissions of a typical gas-powered car over three months or so.

287 points by gk1 5y ago

The article doesn't mention it, but another example of the "electric makes things better" mentality is trains. Trains are in some respects easier to electrify than even trucks, let alone ships, by virtue of them being on fixed tracks (no need for batteries on electrified tracks except as a backup in case of power outages) and by virtue of train cars being readily swappable (so even on not-yet-electrified networks, trains could swap their depleted battery cars for fresh ones at the station). Plus, freight trains support intermodal containers just like container ships do, so they can share the same sorts of battery-in-a-container idea.

aembleton 5y ago
I was thinking you could have a battery in a train, that is charged by pantographs at the station. Accelerating out of the station will use a lot of energy so for a mile or so there could be pantographs and then they won't be needed for a few miles whilst the train runs off the battery. The battery can be charged when slowing down for the station using regenerative braking and charged whilst idling at the station. This might be more complex and expensive though than just having the pantographs the full length of the line, but I thought about it recently when my local line was closed as a tunnel on it was too small to fit the pantographs through and had to be rebuilt.
- audunw 5y ago
  Some are doing this with buses on fixed routes. There are even experiments with trucks and pantographs, electrified rails and even wireless charging on limited sections of highways (in Sweden and Germany I believe). So should be feasible with trains too
thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the fuel to generate electricity, which is then utilized to drive electric motors

tempestn 5y ago

My only quibble is that electric lawn mowers today are rather better than "same, but electric". Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. And my Ego push mower will also fold up to store vertically, which is great with limited garage space. Plus it starts every time at the push of a button, no trips to the gas station, maintenance, tough starts, etc.

ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.
- winrid 5y ago
  There are some people who are "nerdy" in a different way, and actually like the noise, for example. Different strokes for different folks :)
  - jeddy3 5y ago
    And live in a neighborhood were everybody else is "nerdy" about the noise?
    - winrid 5y ago
      Nobody ever said there was a neighborhood :)
      - jeddy3 5y ago
        Fair enough.
- StillBored 5y ago
  two stroke mower? Where do you live? In the US, the only major brand selling two stroke motors was lawn boy, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. They were always a bit odd. Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.

bambax 5y ago

> A cheap electric cooktop is a lot like a gas stove, except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive. No. Well, yes, a "cheap" electric cooktop that simply produces heat (coil or IR) is worse than burners, and less responsive. But that's not what you want. You want an induction cooktop: safe, efficient, beautiful, and more importantly, more responsive than burners.

LesZedCB 5y ago
and finer control - lower lows
moistly 5y ago
Much discussion about induction cooktops here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30654693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30654693
LunaSea 5y ago
Induction cooktops are however not compatible with self-consumption of electricity produced by solar panels. The required draw is too high.
- pjc50 5y ago
  That's a very categorical statement for a comparison of two quantities, both of which vary (cooktop power and solar power). And ultimately if you're using a lower-power cooktop it .. won't cook properly. The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.
- YATA0 5y ago
  I've ran our induction range on our solar panels for about five years now. This is news to me.
  - LunaSea 5y ago
    What solar capacity did you have installed? If I remember correctly, my comment was based on an average household with about 4 to 5 KW installed in western Europe. This represents about 12 panels which is roughly the maximum amount of panels a regular house has space for.

ghostpepper 5y ago

A great counter-example: the 2022 BMW i4 M50 uses a lot of parts from the gasoline version, including the "transmission tunnel" aka the thing that protrudes up from the floor in the backseat and prevents the person sitting in the middle from resting their feet comfortably at the same height as the other two passengers

DeathArrow 5y ago

I like how everybody talks about how to make everything electric using only solar and wind energy (hydro and nuclear energy are not deemed as "green"). But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so, no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future. No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment. It seems many are replacing critical thinking and science with passion and ideology.

aero-glide2 5y ago
Can you provide some numbers? While still polluting surely it will be less polluting tgan now?
ashtonkem 5y ago
We have this conversation on this forum a lot, and many of us are emphatically pro nuclear power. I’m not sure what you’re talking about tbh.
VintageCool 5y ago
Hydro is great. Most of our hydro resources have already been tapped. Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.) Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too. I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.
Zedseayou 5y ago
I don't know who you're reading that you say "no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so". I feel like people think about these costs all the time - it is the comparison to costs of continuing GHG trends and climate change impacts that is really staggering.

elihu 5y ago

I'm skeptical that onloading and offloading containers of batteries is something that can be done quickly and easily on average. Suppose you're using batteries (probably lithium iron phosphate if it's based on current tech) that can charge at 1C. That means you can fill all the batteries completely in an hour just by charging them from external power (assuming enough current is available). I don't know how long loading an unloading take, but I assume most ports would have lines of ships waiting to use the cranes, and if you can't get everything done in under an hour you're better off just charging them on the ship. Suppose you're a coastal city that wants to setup a charging facility for passing local ships. You can either build a full seaport (which might not be practical depending on geography) with a crane and battery storage and charging facilities, which can handle ships one at a time, or maybe two or three if you have the dock space. Or you can run a high voltage line out to a buoy, and ships can hold position out in the water and connect to the power receptacle at the buoy for an hour and charge. If you want to have ten ships be able to charge at once, you run ten high voltage lines out to ten different buoys. I would suggest that the latter option is probably cheaper and easier. It's also not out of the question to have HVDC lines that connect continents to each other for power sharing (i.e. buying and selling solar power based on where the sun is shining), and if such cables exist across oceans it's not much of a stretch to imagine a string of charging stations at regular intervals for passing ships to use, even across the Pacific. Even better would be some system where you can have a continuous connection to power, like the pantographs connecting to overhead lines in electric street car systems, but I have no idea how you would do that at sea.

m463 5y ago
"if you can't get everything done in under an hour you're better off just charging them on the ship." Why not both? charge on-ship batteries while swapping off-ship batteries.
- elihu 5y ago
  Because in the time it takes to physically swap some batteries and charge others, you could have just charged them all and that would be simpler and easier. One of the things that's counterintuitive about batteries is that if a battery is twice as big it still takes the same time to charge, not twice as long. (That's assuming you can supply enough power to charge at the fastest rate the batteries can handle.)

fareesh 5y ago

Does anyone the difference of the environmental impact a between fuel powered thing like a car or lawnmower versus an electric car or lawnmower powered by a coal fired power plant? (assuming typical manufacturing methods for the battery as of 2022)

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a map that calculates the MPG equivalent of an EV car for real local grid carbon intensities. The bottom line is, they're already better everywhere today, and the grid is only going to get cleaner.
csours 5y ago
There are several different ways to slice this. "Pollution" should be characterized by effect - CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes global warming. We need local and global strategies to reduce it and replace systems that create it. Other pollutants have a direct effect on human health. Some pollution has a very fast effect, some pollution has a delayed or chronic effect. We need to replace systems that create this pollution immediately. For small tools like a two stroke gas engined lawn mower, weed eater or chainsaw, you have an immense immediate benefit from not having the particulate, unburned gas and oil, NOx, and carbon monoxide in your lungs. This immediate benefit to human health makes the transition worth it at almost any cost. For larger things like vehicles or heat pump based home heating, you need to consider the pay off time. The pay off time is shorter (better) when replacing less fuel efficient vehicles (as low as 20,000 miles). If you have an existing vehicle that gets decent mileage (35+ mpg) and your local electricity is coal powered it can take much longer (50,000 miles or longer). But there is always a finite payoff time for any realistic scenario.

evilotto 5y ago

Two problems with electric everything: 1. At least for now, the power still goes out. Maybe I'm still smarting from a week-long power outage this past winter, but in the US, our electric grid is fragile in many places, and we are probably decades away from it being more resilient, so more dependence on electricity is more reliance on large utility providers. Dirty fossil fuels are still better at being able to be moved around in bulk - gasoline has 50-100x the power density of batteries. Electricity has more potential for being decentralized, but we are far away from that. 2. Electricity tends to mean miniaturization and computerization. That tends to mean more difficult to repair; someone related to me a story about a small village somewhere in Africa that was reliant on a gas-powered pump for the well. They had to get gas for it of course, but if it broke down it was simple enough that nearly any person in the village knew how to repair it. A solar-powered pump would eliminate the need for gas, but no one had the tools or knowledge to repair it if it broke. Additionally, with manufacturers desiring ever more control through embedded DRM, it leads to a future where even if the electric power is available, we might not be able to use it because we didn't pay the licensing fees. These are perhaps very dystopian concerns, but recent world events somehow make these sorts of concerns more realistic.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
The US grid is indeed a bit of a mess. Not exactly world leading but still better than some third world countries. IMHO that situation will actually accelerate changes in the US. Because it is so bad, people are taking control of the situation and there are lots of solutions to reduce your dependency on the fragile grid that are getting popular. Burning gas/oil is the stupidly expensive solution (especially recently). Saving on that cost is what any entrepreneur worthy of the name would gladly spend on. And the US is famously very entrepreneurial. Solar, wind, and batteries are not that complicated. If you are handy, you can buy some cheap stuff on ebay and wire it together yourself or you can pay some people in your area to do it for you. Different set of skills than maintaining an ICE engine but not fundamentally a lot harder than that. There are plenty of people handy with that sort of stuff that are busy electrifying everything they can get their hands on. There's no basis for your paranoia here.
theshrike79 5y ago

stevage 5y ago

Is there somewhere to read more about electric container ships? I'm really curious about the battery infrastructure they have in mind. If a battery is the size of a container, is it really worth even swapping them out mid-journey? I mean, if you're carrying a thousand containers, what's a few more containers of batteries? (And considering all that fuel storage space now available...)

h0l0cube 5y ago

> Conventional wisdom has long held that battery power is infeasible for ocean shipping. There was an article on HN a while back about using lifting gas (specifically blimps) as a way to reduce shipping costs. I naively wonder how feasible it is to at least lighten the load of ships using hydrogen gas? https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting-gas/ https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting...

newyankee 5y ago

I always wondered whether Giant ships could have floating solar that they haul as well as solar panels covering 1.5 the ship area. Sounds impractical from perspective of current port design but I am sure some clever engineering can solve these issues. Combining this solar + kite/ sails based power + some batteries I am sure one can provide at least 50% of the energy needed for shipping. The bottleneck initially is just the cost of non standard designs being brought into an industry that makes its money off economies of scale and standardization.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
why? there’s more than enough land for solar panels and the ocean is incredibly harsh this is a similar flaw with things like “solar roads” or “solar sidewalks” it’s just unnecessary complexity
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I think many people underestimate just how harsh ocean is. Salt doesn't do great with electronics such as connections. Plus you would probably use pretty low barges which suffer from waves and rough seas. Also keeping the right angle will be massive pain for optimal energy gathering. Ships tend to travel in ways that the angle of sun isn't constant. Not to forget drag and what it means to actually drag something at even speed current cargo ships travel. Traditionally my understanding is that barges are used at much lower speeds.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Right, when it comes to the ocean you also have to remember that hundreds of full containers a year are just swept off of a ship and lost. Floating panels would be outright annihilated in rough seas, and a system to stow them would add a fair amount of complexity. And again, all of this is overshadowed by the fact that there's enough open unused space on land to power the entire planet with solar by multiple orders of magnitude. You could power 100 earths with ground-based solar and still have room left over.

robertlagrant 5y ago

> Tesla didn’t build “a car, but electric”; they created a novel, prestige product that became wildly successful without having to reach price parity. I was going to say, isn't this thesis already exemplified by Tesla?

weinzierl 5y ago

BMW tried with the i3 but failed miserably. Not surprising in hindsight. When we look back in time we see that new technologies very often tried to emulate the old technology that they were about to replace. Cars used to look like horse carriages, computers used the desktop metaphor and smart phones skeuomorphic design. The time isn't ripe for better than “same, but electric”.

aembleton 5y ago
> i3 but failed miserably Did it? I see plenty of them around. Over 227k sold world wide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3#Global_sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3#Global_sales
theshrike79 5y ago
The i3 REX especially was a fantastic car. It was just weird AF from the outside and didn't attract "normal" car people.
- llampx 5y ago
  I remember when "everyone" pinned the success of the Prius on it looking different from normal cars. Many articles said that if the Prius had looked like a normal car it wouldn't have had sales from people who wanted to show that they were forward-thinking and ecological. Then Tesla came along and now everyone says that their success is because of the cars looking like normal cars. shrug. I think the look takes second place to the technology and how well its implemented.

giva 5y ago

A bit off topic, but I always find it funny when people talk about electric motors and batteries as if they were invented to solve the shortcomings of internal combustion engines, when it is quite the opposite.

PennRobotics 5y ago

Napkin math: If a cargo ship carries 3,000 tons with 7 MWh need[1], while an Ambri molten salt battery pack is 10 tons and 0.1 MWh[2][3], it seems small cargo ships can theoretically be electrified (although the battery would be a significant percentage of weight). Then again, is it wise to install liquid metal on an unstable vessel surrounded by water? [1] https://electrek.co/2021/08/25/worlds-first-autonomous-7mwh-electric-cargo-ship-to-make-voyage-with-zero-crew-onboard/ https://electrek.co/2021/08/25/worlds-first-autonomous-7mwh-... [2] https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/getting-a-charge-out-of-liquid-metal-batteries/ https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/getting-a-charge-out-of-... [3] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/slideshow-update-on-ambris-liquid-metal-grid-scale-battery https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/slideshow-updat...

jillesvangurp 5y ago
You are looking at this wrong by basically translating a vehicle concept that is designed for the fuel economies of bunker fuel to electric. Bunker fuel is expensive so you want to ship a lot of containers to maximize the fuel economies. That's how containers evolved. They minimize loading/unloading overhead and you can ship thousands of them on huge ships. Each ship burns tonnes of fuel just to get out of the harbor but that's OK because you can spread the cost over a load that has a value measured in hundreds of millions or more. The whole point is that you can ship that huge value for a few percent of that value in cost. It makes sense to do that because fuel is expensive. For the same reason, a lot of those ships are already electric actually. Sure, they burn fuel but only to drive a generator that drives the engine. Electric engines that size are just better. You get a better range of torque across different speeds and maximize the fuel economy for the generator. The maintenance is simpler. They last longer. Etc. So electrifying is a lot easier than you think. Basically containerize batteries, park a few on the ship, bypass the generator and you have a nice hybrid container ship. Now you can sacrifice useful load for a vastly cheaper fuel (electricity). It becomes a cost equation. Battery electric changes that game. Most of the transport cost is fuel. Fuel is expensive. Electricity is not. It's all about the cost of fuel. When you burn millions of $ of fuel, fuel economies are very interesting to shipping companies. The main reason for large container ships is the fuel cost. Decimate that cost and that reason goes away. You could do the same volume with a lot of smaller ships instead. As for liquid metal, batteries are probably a lot easier to clean up than oil and fuel spills. There's no question about how devastating oil spills are. Plenty of recent incidents with oil ships and container ships sinking regularly to prove that. Even just burning fuel produces a lot of pollution. Bunker fuel is the nastiest fuel imaginable and most ships actually have to switch to alternate fuels when they get close to population centers because poisoning the locals is a bit problematic.

kkfx 5y ago

That's just a dream without reasoning: - can we build enough batteries just for private cars? I really doubt. Not because the absence of a developed and battle-tested supply chain like we have for oil, a supply chain can be made and developed it advantageous or anyway needed it's just a matter of time, but in terms of natural resources. Actually we do not know how to recycle batteries, that's is. In an EV they last 5 years of intense usage (after the vehicle might still run, but not suited for intense usage), or 8 years for normal usage, the tag of 10 years is mostly for a very light usage in good conditions; - we can change actual logistic chain, for instance (re)develop far more rails (electrified) with a network dedicated to transport only non-perishable/non-urgent/storable goods that operate only when the electricity grid can give enough surplus power from renewables, that's still not solve anything, just reduce fossils usage though; - we can develop WFH at maximum, designing an entirely new society, far spread than now with significant dense urban agglomerate just for campus/research, factories that need a certain scale, military stuff, political stuff etc while most other live spread in single-family homes not more dense that the local territory capacity to satisfy basic needs (water, foods just at the level of minimal self-sufficiency, commerce as usual for comfort and well-being), maintaining only local and minimum road networks, privileging aviation for the rest, since despite people-who-not-compute-TCO claims is the cheapest option for quick non-local human travels (and substantial development of flying things for human transport is a good proof of that); - we can change whole scale production systems from very lengthy supply chains to shorter ones in a far less concentrate production, witch is also good for environmental reasons. All the above offer ways to consume less, once built, all the above offer flexibility to evolve and change even rapidly, all the above might needed to adapt to climate change since rising see levels, subsidence's phenomena, soil liquefaction's, hydrogeological instability in general likely demand big relocations and a new civil infrastructure to correct errors and horrors of the actual one BUT still do not solve the most basic problem, being really "renewable". For industry we still need too much energy, so we need nuclear where classic hydropower can't be used orthographically. For shipping we can use nuclear, French not-much-rich uranium naval reactors might be a good answer. Still no solution to replace fossils for: - metallurgy, steel/iron in particular - lubricants - electrical insulators, hydraulic seals etc - generic polymers production on scale from elastic tissues to packaging We have alternatives, yes, but nothing developable in a large scale sustainable manner. Long story short, even in theory we know how to design a new society for transition to something still unknown.

ttiurani 5y ago

Agree with the general sentiment that moving to electric is a great place to rethink the whole design. However a "make it electric" mentality doesn't address the fact that a big chunk of the "its" (at least in the global North) are just overconsumption that shouldn't exist at all, if we ever want to find balance with nature. So instead of changing to an electric car that has a massive material footprint and takes up the same amount of space on the road as a petrol car, buy a bike (and vote for investments in bike lanes and public transport). Instead of living in a huge house and needing a lawnmower, move to an apartment (and vote for more compact housing zoning). Instead of buying vanity gadgets that relies on ocean cargo traffic, don't (and work less as you then need less money).

missedthecue 5y ago
what would make such a decline in my personal standard of living worth it?
- helmholtz 5y ago
  Let's begin with the notion that a biking world is a decline in personal standard. A car makes you fat and poor. A bike makes you fit and rich. You'll be healthier in bed with your wife. If not, women will check you out as you walk past them in your toned fit body. Living in a compact city means you'll meet friends more, you'll do more things. Your weekends won't be in front of a TV. They won't involve a 100 mile round trip to the strip mall. You'll hear the planet sing like a bird to the tune of your bike's bell. Fishes in oceans will celebrate MissedTheCue day and drink to excess in your memory. Polar bear will giving sermons holding you up as a shining beacon of hope.
  - abakker 5y ago
    I think this answer does as much to ignore the car owners POV as they are ignoring yours. Bikes are of course great, and fitness is great. But, here in Colorado, even an E bike is impractical for the vast majority of simple errands simply because of distance. If you respond with "move to a city" you are failing in empathy. The existence of long distance trips with probably bad weather make bikes not the right answer for the vast majority of people outside of major cities in America. The right answer probably does include public infrastructure at a vast scale, but, our government cannot afford it, and it is not a foregone conclusion that the environmental impact of major construction of infrastructure is better than that of electric cars. The reason this is not a solved problem is because simple answers like "buy a bike" are not actually answers, they are deflections. As are the answers like, "there is no solution except a pickup truck". edit: removed sarcastic comment.

Reason077 5y ago

> “dragging 100 feet of extension cord.” Actually, electric lawnmowers have come a long way in the past 10-15 years. They have batteries now! No need to drag a cord.

notacoward 5y ago

Kind of surprised that the OP didn't use urban planning, zoning, etc. as a central example. No number of electric vehicles, no matter how good, whether privately owned or publicly, will do as much to reduce fossil-fuel dependency and its associated ills as much as undoing the "car-first" way we (especially in the US) allocate land. To the author's point, "same but electric" can't hold a candle to modern urban design which is not only less polluting but also more convenient, equitable, healthy, social, etc. IMO it's the perfect example of how we need to reconsider the entire model of how we do something instead of just swapping in different parts.

ineedasername 5y ago

>but in several years of driving a Bolt, I have literally never had to charge it away from home That just means that haven't been more than about 120 miles away from home in 2 years. An especially easy feat when a large part of that was COVID shutdowns. In general, easy access to rapid charging on the road is a luxury of urban & suburban areas. That's where most people live, so electric will be okay for most people, but this is a bit too much cheerleading on the subject of charging convenience if the comparison is ICE. We're not there yet. Also the Bolt may not be the best example to use in the context of how electric can be better. I agree with the sentiment, but Chevy had to recall every Bolt ever made prior to the 2022 model year due to battery issues, requiring batteries to be replaced. It still hasn't replaced all of them. During this time, to avoid fires, owners were temporarily advised to only charge to 90% and not go below 70 miles of range, nerfing range to about 165 miles. Also not charge overnight in a garage and in some cases park 50 feet away from other vehicles. A firmware update has since removed those last restrictions in favor of a semi-permanent range nerf to 210 miles until the battery is replaced. Yes, we can do better than "same, but electric" but we're not quite there yet in a lot of ways, and the Bolt excellently demonstrates some of them. It seems like in terms of battery safety engineering we're at the Ford Pinto stage, but maybe catching up faster?

belval 5y ago
GM is replacing all the batteries with better, newer ones. You can be pessimistic about it, but I have yet to find a Bolt owner that isn't happy with their replacement.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'm not pessimistic about the general EV outlook. Bolt simply isn't a good poster child for how much better they are. Why wouldn't Bolt owners be happy with their new battery? The new battery isn't the issue, it's what made it necessary that is the problem. With 100 mile reduction in range and safety issues I wouldn't have kept mine long enough to get the replacement. It wouldn't have been possible for me to keep it under the limitations imposed. And I doubt the many thousands of Bolt owners still waiting for a replacement are not very happy about it. On a much smaller scale, I was happy when I got about $200 in a class action settlement from Apple for it's faulty iPhone liquid sensors. I was still pissed off that I'd had to pay for a replacement years earlier. And years before the settlement I had already switched away from Apple as a result.

apatheticonion 5y ago

As an Australian, I would take "same but electric". I'd also take a power outlet in my apartment garage (which the building manager says they cannot install).

ambyra 5y ago

I always thought electric cars “filling up” at “electrical gas stations” was bizarre. If the major roads were electrified, electric cars wouldn’t need as much range, would be cheaper, lighter, better on the environment, wouldn’t need to sit for hours at a charging station. It’s a new and different technology hobbled by old ways of doing things.

kristjansson 5y ago
Whatever motive force drives cars around is necessarily energetic and transmissible. It wants to dissipate, badly, and we've managed to trick it into doing useful work for us in the process. If we're going to have our mode of transport integrated into the human environment, enormous care has to be put into ensure that potential energy does not find it's way into humans, animals, buildings, etc. Electricity is no different. Enough current (or exploding gasoline) to move a car is concerning enough to be around in the enclosed package of an engine. Enough current to move a road's worth of cars just hanging around on a third rail, or pantograph, or whatever is downright terrifying.
dr_spicy 5y ago

oppositelock 5y ago

I would not immediately dismiss current designs as archaic. Lawn mowers, cars, whatever, have had a century of little improvements to make them easy to use, safe and affordable. There is a lot of accumulated wisdom in these products. Sure, make new ones, see if you can do better, I'm all for that, but it's a safe, conservative move to recreate what works.

goda90 5y ago

>However, changing principles is a double-edged sword. When you throw out decades of real-world experience, you start over at the bottom of the learning curve. I experienced this with the battery lawn mower I bought. Because it was electric, they could do two smaller motors and have twin blades. Sounds fancy. But I don't love it. It can't accommodate a side-chute, leaving me only with mulching and bagging. Those are fine until I leave the lawn long and then things get real slow. The twin blades also sometimes leave a little bit of uncut grass down the middle, which wouldn't happen with a single blade. This might be a product of only being 40V rather than the blade design, but it also seems to have less "suction" to pull up the grass to be cut than I've noticed in traditional gas mowers.

alex440440 5y ago

Where the materials for all the batteries will come from?

davidw 5y ago

We just got a utility bike and... wow. Cut our daily car trips in half, and it's a lot of fun to ride. It's got a seat on the back, so we can haul kids around, or carry groceries.

darksaints 5y ago

I've been really excited for the electric revolution exactly because of all of the things that can be done differently. A huge example in my mind is the X-57 concept plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell Lightweight electric motors allow for a couple of noteworthy improvements: * With the reduced weight of electric motors, they can now be placed at the ends of wings, with props that can then be used to counter the wingtip vortices and combat induced drag. * The simplicity of electric power distribution means that propulsion can be done all along the wing's length, which can enhance lift coefficients by actively overcoming boundary layer conditions that lead to stalls. * The increased wing lift coefficients mean that smaller and lighter wings can be used, which reduce structural weight as well as parasitic drag. I'm not sure if we'll see production aircraft like this, but this is a great example of rethinking design decisions that were standardized under an entirely different regime of design constraints.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Electric planes are also quite a lot quieter than jet planes! Electric planes also favor more, smaller planes due to weight/energy-density constraints and the economics of jet engines vs electric motors: a small jet engine isn't dramatically cheaper than a big jet engine, so airlines prefer larger planes with big engines; however, electric motor costs scale more linearly so a smaller electric planes are not significantly less economical than big electric planes (even excluding energy density concerns). With more, smaller flights, we could well see significant changes in the flight network. Rather than big flights between hubs, we may instead see more flights between smaller regional airports.

dpedu 5y ago

> Electric cars are sort of like gas cars with new motors… but actually, in many ways, much better. They have amazing pickup, the heater comes on instantly, many have extra storage (the “frunk”), there’s no exhaust to stink up your garage. Hmm. Sorry, but I'm not impressed. Faster acceleration is fun but it doesn't improve the trip from point a to point b. If anything, it could make the ride less comfortable and safe. The heater coming on instantly is nice, but it's at the cost of mileage whereas in an ICE the heat is free (in that it is otherwise wasted). If you're using the heater it's because you're in cold weather and you will lose significant range because of the battery's lower performance in the cold (to the tune of up to 40%!) or the battery's heaters keeping it in a performant temperature range. I'd call this a trade-off rather than an improvement. Storage space in some models makes sense. Same with exhaust in garages, if you have a garage and want to idle the car inside it. However, talking about all this without mentioning the biggest step backwards with electric cars seems pretty disingenuous; this step backwards being the shorter distance electric cars are capable of traveling in the same period of time as ICE vehicles due to their significantly longer refueling times and decreased range in cold weather.

mjamesaustin 5y ago
It's not a huge step backwards, the time spent charging on a road trip. That occasional cost pales in comparison to the benefits and conveniences I experience every day by driving electric. Here's an example: I save 5 mins a week not having to fill up at the gas station, which is 260 mins a year. On a typical road trip I spend about 30 mins charging each way. So even after 4 road trips in a year, I've still saved 20 mins. My electric car is hands down my favorite purchase ever, and those I know who have gotten one tend to feel similarly.
- dpedu 5y ago
  This is a common misconception in the discussion around electric cars. You've selected a use case that they do have benefit in. There are others that don't. If it works for you, great, but what you've described doesn't work if you're traveling greater distances or in bad weather or a variety of other reasons ICE vehicles have no problem with.

turtlebits 5y ago

If you don't want same- energy prices (water too) need to raised so there is a "cognitive pause" before you do anything that requires a high consumption. IMO, this will really induce change, instead of minor inconveniences to your pocketbook.

EricE 5y ago

A pro and con I haven't seen discussed too much so far: Huge Pro - since there is no active heat source unless there is pan, nothing happens if the controls get accidentally turned on. With older parents I'm very happy they have an induction stove - my dad always hits the controls when cleaning and he can't hear the beeps. Luckily after a few seconds, without a pan, the cooktop just turns itself off again. A significant con - matching pan to hob (burner) size. The more mismatched, the louder/more high frequency squealing you get. It drove me crazy enough I'm seriously considering something like a Gaggenau 400 Series that will auto detect the pan size and location.

moralestapia 5y ago

Nice article, but ... >Apparently, most shipping routes tend to hug the coast and make cargo or maintenance stops anyway, and so this won’t really be a big change from current practice. This is not true.

deelowe 5y ago
I'm not sure how true the bunker fuel thing is these days either. Many countries have been working to address this.
theshrike79 5y ago
For the amount of ships this may be true, but not for the amount of TEU shipped.
tlb 5y ago
Do you have more information? Like what fraction of total TEU-miles are on short routes?
- krasin 5y ago
  You can get a sense by looking at the interactive map here: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/25/11503152/shipping-routes-map https://www.vox.com/2016/4/25/11503152/shipping-routes-map
  - elihu 5y ago
    It's hard to get a sense of what the majority is from that, but it seems like there's a lot of ships that are hugging the shorelines and a lot that aren't.
    - moralestapia 5y ago
      Here you go, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_transport#/media/File:Shipping_routes_red_black.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_transport#/media/File... Hope that's clear enough.

krasin 5y ago

The author does not consider nuclear shipping vessels, while this is the right electric for long routes, such as Trans-Pacific: it allows for good utilization of reactor output, shave delivery times at no additional operational costs and it's nearly free from CO2 emissions (direct or indirect). China is building a number of new nuclear ships starting with icebreakers but container ships are in the plans: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3155860/china-develop-new-heavy-icebreaker-polar-silk-road https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3155860/ch...

Angostura 5y ago
I'm sure the Somalian pirates can't wait.
Shared404 5y ago
To my layperson self, it seems like that would be a bad idea. We know how to secure a reactor on land, but the sea is a big, dangerous place - and it's only a matter of time before some cost cutting idiot blows up a ship because they wanted a bigger bonus.
- yellowapple 5y ago
  Nuclear reactors are arguably a lot safer (in terms of meltdown risk) on the ocean than they already are on land, seeing as how they're in ships that float on a giant planet-wide heatsink that also happens to be exceptionally good at confining radiation. The more pertinent risk would be piracy and the like; if thorium ever catches on, it'd probably help make that less of an issue.
- Swizec 5y ago
  We already have nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. The popular joke is that all military/navy/etc equipment is built by the lowest bidder. On the bright side: if a nuclear reactor melts down in the middle of the ocean, there’s basically nothing around to be inconvenienced by that event.
  - 5y ago

jotm 5y ago

FFS, it would be easier and more environmentally friendly to use wind

snek_case 5y ago
Assuming you mean for shipping containers, I think one issue there is that sailboats tend to tilt a lot, which you can't do if you have a lot of containers on your deck. Might be possible to design container ships where all the shipping containers are inside the ship instead.
- jdrc 5y ago
  what if the sailboat is towing the containership
  - snek_case 5y ago
    Maybe that could work. You would lose a bit in terms of aerodynamics I think though. Container ships also don't have very sleek hull designs.
- RajT88 5y ago
  This company seems to think they have a solution: https://www.theoceanbird.com/ https://www.theoceanbird.com/
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    Good, but I wonder if there isn't still a moment/torque reaction to cause some tilting, and those towers also preclude packing the deck with containers.
  - chrismartin 5y ago
    I've seen vaporware like this since I was a kid in the 90s. Talk is cheap, slick renderings are cheap. Is there _any_ mostly-wind-powered vessel in active, revenue-generating, trans-oceanic cargo service? Container or otherwise? Maybe something like the Maltese Falcon / Black Pearl? Yes, there are also cargo ship kites, but those only work as a small adjunct to a big diesel engine.

smileysteve 5y ago

To go back to the lawnmower; 4 wheel drive is something that is entirely possible with electric, where most have 2 wheel (front wheel is cheapest) open drive. Come to an angled hill and they slip. Electric and a small computer for the wheels and you can lock a differential or 2 without causing irreversible load on the single motor. There induction stove improves compared to the gas stove, but touch buttons go too far. Ebikes and scooters are definitely capable of reimagining transportation, if we can get the scary cars reduced on the same infrastructure.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

golemiprague 5y ago

asiachick 5y ago

Tangent, It would be funny to me if the root of trunk was runk as in "tail-runk" -> trunk "front-runk" -> frunk

natch 5y ago
Nice. "under-runk" -> urunk. Pronounced awkwardly "uh-runk."
- m463 5y ago
  in rv's they call it "the basement"
  - asiachick 5y ago
    should rename it basement-runk -> brunk
- asiachick 5y ago
  the glovebox would be the dash-runk -> drunk The center console storage would be center-runk -> crunk

thehappypm 5y ago

I fundamentally disagree with this premise. Electric is the future. Everything can be electric AND good. Bought a house a year ago. The house (oddly enough) had a huge propane tank out back wired exclusively for the two stoves.. in addition to oil heat. So, when I moved in, my house had oil, propane, and electric service. No gas line. (Eastern Massachusetts, so, winter low temps around 0F but rarely below 5F). My propane tank emptied after a month and the company said the tank itself was at end of life. A new tank would not be cheap. So I decided to cut the cord and replace my two stoves with electric ones.. and they’re awesome! I don’t think they’re quite as good as gas, but I can boil water in minutes, and I won’t blow my house up. The safety trade off is worth the reduced responsiveness. Heat- installed a heat pump and it’s WAY better than the oil heat radiators. So much quieter and I can control each room independently. I like my office at 72, my wife at 68, that’s completely doable. Oh, and I’m saving a fortune on oil, plus I get air conditioning.

jen20 5y ago
What kind of stove do you now have? I’ve had coil (trash), ceramic (still trash) and induction (amazing, and way better than gas, at the cost of needing compatible cookware) - I’d never voluntarily to back to gas.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  It’s resistive. Not sure the exact tech. All I know is, I’ve had electric stoves that suck ass, and this one does not. It heats up fast, and I’m not noticing a huge performance difference over my old gas range. The biggest difference is that you can nor just cut the power like gas. You need to (horror of horrors!) move the pan off the heating element to dramatically cut the heat.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    This is going to be a continuing issue for companies unless they agree on some proper tech branding. (I don't get why they haven't yet) There's a ridiculous difference in various types of electric stoves and people with good/bad experience with them rarely say which one it is beyond "electric". But with the available options it feels like "I had a yellow car, and really liked / didn't like it". Modern induction stoves really are a massive leap from things you could get a decade ago. You can even get ones that work with woks. A trip through a few newer airbnbs on an island with very few gas lines was a serious revelation for me. From the article: > except with electric heating coils instead of burners. Better for indoor air quality, doesn’t do that click-click-click thing, but less responsive Which basically ignores modern induction stoves which also don't heat up and are more responsive for thick-bottom pans! Which is the essence of the article - going further than "we'll make the job hot but with electricity".

asperous 5y ago

Why not hydrogen? Hydrogen's weakness is volume and cost; but for shipping neither of those is a huge concern. Batteries are more efficient but given the scale for shipping that may not be as much

coderenegade 5y ago
Shipping is more likely to use methanol, which is derived from hydrogen, than anything else. Cargo ships are already in the process of being converted over.
aembleton 5y ago
With this concept, you could replace the shipping containers containing batteries with ones containing hydrogen fuel cells. That way, as the technology improves the source of power can change.

paxys 5y ago

Agree with the general principle, but it is important to identify what aspects of a current product's design is shaped specifically by fossil fuel dependency and what evolved independent of it. If you threw away all preconceived notions of how a car should look and feel and spent an unlimited amount of time and money to design a new perfect one based around electric power, it would...still look very similar to any other car on the market today. The reason is that the design of a passenger car (and all of the infrastructure around it) has evolved over many centuries independent of its power source – from a horse drawn carriage to a Ford Model T to a Tesla.

sdoering 5y ago
This reminded me of a classical example of Chesterton's Fence [0]. I like the distinction between the sources that shaped a development. [0]: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
afiori 5y ago
> still look very similar to any other car on the market today Cars on the market looks wildly different compare a Smart (the brand) car with the new GMC humongous pickup truck.
- grp000 5y ago
  Barring the power source, you'll still have a beefy suspension and a bed in the back with a squashed looking frontend to keep the exterior dimensions reasonable on a truck.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Part of the reason why all cars seem to look the same nowadays is that maximizing aerodynamics, passenger safety, interior volume, and comfort doesn’t leave the designer a lot of room to work with. Very little of the “sameness” is driven by the propulsion mechanism; EVs are already becoming similar but with a frunk.
gedy 5y ago
Yes and honestly, I think many people are not interested in buying and driving around in a "weird looking" electric car. Tesla, Ford, et al have been improving this and consumer acceptance. (Well unsure about the Cybertruck)

spacexsucks 5y ago

Electric is the future. But I am worried about EMPs and the single reliance on electric. Is my worry non-existant?

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Electric and electronic are not the same thing.
viraptor 5y ago
To put it in context, are you spending as much time thinking about gas line explosions? Because those happen quite often.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Yes. I do. And the oil spills.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Electro Magnetic Pulses? The thing that requires us to detonate a nuclear weapon to create at any meaningful scale? No. I wouldn’t worry about that at all. Besides, if we somehow managed to create an EMP above your city and not set off a full scale nuclear war, your gasoline car and gas pump wouldn’t work either. Those also have computers in them that are critical to their functioning.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Thank you all for the genuine answers. As an electronics engineer, i know only about that.
- chasd00 5y ago
  It doesn’t have to be a nuclear emp. Anyone can make an emp that will total a car.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago

alexfromapex 5y ago

One thing I find annoying about the argument for heat pumps helping to reduce global warming is no one considers if the refrigerant leaks. R-410A, R-13A, etc. refrigerants have a pretty high global warming potential (GWP) and it seems like likelihood of a leak is decently high, especially if there is a car crash.

chrismartin 5y ago
That problem appears mostly solved these days. Household refrigerators and freezers now use propane. Many (most?) new vehicles now use 2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Refrigerants_with_very_low_climate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Refrigerants_with_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
ip26 5y ago
With proliferation of AC in every house, that ship is already sailing, and heat pumps replace AC.
hlieberman 5y ago
We /can/ do better than those refrigerants, though. R-1234yf has a tiny global warming potential compared to even some of the green choices out there like propane or isobutane. There's also the old solutions like CO2, or even ammonia (though that I wouldn't expect anywhere but industrial environments).
skykooler 5y ago
Even for those refrigerants, the GWP should be considered in context - an AC unit only holds a few pounds of refrigerant, which has a similar GWP to the tailpipe emissions of a typical gas-powered car over three months or so.