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Here’s a piece of reality to show you how far away we are. There are 10s of millions of homes in the USA with < 100 amps and in many cases < 75 or 50 amps of se

Here’s a piece of reality to show you how far away we are. There are 10s of millions of homes in the USA with < 100 amps and in many cases < 75 or 50 amps of service. The transformers that route this power into these homes are often 40+ years old. In order to discontinue gas (many still run on oil!) these homes need service upgrades. If every electrician in the country was dedicated to this task it would take over 30 years to do. There are a lot of problems like this. The scale of the infrastructure is massive. I’m not saying it can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. In fact it is getting done. But it’s at least 40-50 years away. In the meantime it makes sense to make energy inputs as cheap as possible.

epistasis 2y ago
Oh come on, the free market is far more creative than that. You have a view of a part of the country with high winter energy needs and are basing the entire transition on that. If we were to get out of the way and let innovation rip, these things would get solved soooo quickly. The problem is that HVAC and grid folks are not used to adopting new tech and tend to be about 20-30 years behind what's available. We have had a massive, multi-year shortage of transformers in this country because the entire industry is so conservative that nobody on the supply side is willing to build out a tiny bit extra of capacity, and nobody on the buy side is willing to guarantee their demand enough to make the supply side invest in capacity. Just a bunch of absolute cowards in the industry. So please don't be so condescending about how far away from reality I am when you are not even giving me an accurate view of the situation. You're also treating it as an "all or nothing" when all of it is incremental. When EVs are in everybody's home, they suddenly have 50+ kWh of storage when they are home, which solves all sorts of other problems.

epistasis 2y ago

Oh come on, the free market is far more creative than that. You have a view of a part of the country with high winter energy needs and are basing the entire transition on that. If we were to get out of the way and let innovation rip, these things would get solved soooo quickly. The problem is that HVAC and grid folks are not used to adopting new tech and tend to be about 20-30 years behind what's available. We have had a massive, multi-year shortage of transformers in this country because the entire industry is so conservative that nobody on the supply side is willing to build out a tiny bit extra of capacity, and nobody on the buy side is willing to guarantee their demand enough to make the supply side invest in capacity. Just a bunch of absolute cowards in the industry. So please don't be so condescending about how far away from reality I am when you are not even giving me an accurate view of the situation. You're also treating it as an "all or nothing" when all of it is incremental. When EVs are in everybody's home, they suddenly have 50+ kWh of storage when they are home, which solves all sorts of other problems.