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Zero-emission vehicles, their batteries & subsidies/rebates for them.- No politics regarding the subsidies!

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Timcognito

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Elsewhere, from a recent and reputable source, it was written that 1% of them global-warming byproducts can be attributable to California.
Not seeing the whole reputable article I'll say 1% is pretty good for the world's 5th largest economy and also a vanguard auto fuel efficiency and air pollution regulations leading to many health benefits
 

pseudoid

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I was a net electric energy producer in 2022
Aren't such credits for solar panels going away to provide credits for something else?
I've heard accusations of 'bait-n-switch' against the PUC for those who compounded their net-production (back into the grid) as a means of justifying the amortization for solar panels purchase...

ADD: Same seems to be on the horizon for our electric bills... as if they were not some of the highest in nation.
 

Timcognito

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Aren't such credits for solar panels going away to provide credits for something else?
I've heard accusations of 'bait-n-switch' against the PUC for those who compounded their net-production (back into the grid) as a means of justifying the amortization for solar panels purchase...

ADD: Same seems to be on the horizon for our electric bills... as if they were not some of the highest in nation.
Yes it has been so popular and successful that the incentives have been cut dramatically but I still made more than I used so no cost for juice. Class A here I come...Not.
1678229727255.jpeg
 

blueone

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There was a lot discussion on taxes, deficit spending, and EV subsidies. Just laying some groundwork on the the international tax situation. Just background for my post #3046. A lot of nice electric vehicles coming out of N. America, Asia and Europe all having different tax structures and types of assistance from disparate governments.
Nonsense. The fraction of a country's GDP that goes to government spending has nothing to do with EVs or subsidies. And quoting the Tax Policy Center? You might as well have taken some pages from Bernie Sanders' website.
 

Timcognito

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Nonsense. The fraction of a country's GDP that goes to government spending has nothing to do with EVs or subsidies. And quoting the Tax Policy Center? You might as well have taken some pages from Bernie Sanders' website.
Another shoot the messenger response. So governments that finance auto factories for their companies and supply public health services don't disadvantage US auto companies who pay those costs. I said it was background to the subsidy and tax posts earlier.
 

Timcognito

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I think that the subsidy issue is a bit of red herring to whole issue the burgeoning EV and clean electric power generation technology. The whole world has decided to make a space race kind of effort to bring it forward for a host of reasons, cost, profit, climate change, the finite supply of fossil fuels, efficiency, jobs, and competition. Frankly the Japanese really spearheaded this new mode of powering transportation and brought it to scale that was profitable before any US subsidies and I am unaware of how it was financed in Japan. The US has used subsidies for farm crops, oil and gas exploration, pubic universities and heath programs, transportation, pollution control to name a few. There are many here are against subsidies for EV and clean electric power generation technology and others say we need to move that direction so my tax dollars are being well spent. But arguing over it (for which I must own and admit to giving and taking the bait) is unproductive to conversation because once you say you are for or against or on the fence about subsidies that's it. They are here, maybe too much or too little, maybe an affront to your view capitalism or just how capitalism works. From here on I plan to TRY to avoid arguing about something that I can not change and as a mechanical engineer stick to the things that interest me on the technical side. I designed and built a passive solar house 1984 and expanded it in 2005 so my leanings are clear and have had and modified ICE vehicles for performance starting from age 17 and have a deposit on a 2023 Volvo V60 Recharge PHEV, not exactly a Prius when it come to saving the planet. I respect all who post with honest and technical points of view, even if not my own.

Edit: will not be getting any tax credit as the Volvo is not made in the US
 
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blueone

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Another shoot the messenger response. So governments that finance auto factories for their companies and supply public health services don't disadvantage US auto companies who pay those costs. I said it was background to the subsidy and tax posts earlier.
I'm not buying it. Far and away the most valuable car company on the planet is Tesla, so if GM, Ford, and Stellantis are suffering because other auto companies happen to be in economically less efficient countries with nationalized services, there's very little supporting evidence that country location is a primary determinant of success. For one thing, state and local governments in the US subsidize factories of all kinds. BMW's largest factory by production volume in the world is in the US, so the situation can't be too terrible.

And if you're going to argue the TPC doesn't present data with an intent to make political statements, I'm not convinced of your philosophical neutrality. Take this propaganda, I mean study, as evidence:

 

beefkabob

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I understand the desire of EVs' convenience and acceleration, but the antagonist in me has yet to acquiesce to the excessive claims of saving the planet by them.
I dispute the answer being from a selection of a binary choice (ice/ev).
So you're a global warming denier then?
Another sad casualty of our current insatiable EV appetite is the so-called "Car Culture":
Drive-ins, stick-shifts, back-seats, gear-heads, after-market, resto-mods, NASCAR, Route-66, fuzzy-dice, HotWheels, socket-wrenches...???
EVs can't go to drive-ins, have back seats, get worked on, have an aftermarket, be raced, drive on a road, hang dice from the mirror, be made into a hot wheel, or have bolts that sockets go on to? That many resto-mods are EVs is just my fantasy. But hey, I bet you want that BS stick-shift in an EV, and you run MS DOS because it's a real man's OS.
Along our path to that EV-nirvana, en-masse, another promising technology has also bit the dust: Synth-fuels?
It is becoming scorched-earth more scorched but such relevant discussions are being totally ignored.
Elsewhere, from a recent and reputable source, it was written that 1% of them global-warming byproducts can be attributable to California.
Synth fuels are horrifically wasteful and expensive to produce. Ethanol is a total boondoggle and environmental nightmare, but at least e85 has a high octane. amiright?
Let's let the above sink in for a bit and you may wonder if I am talking about politics/subsidies. Nyet.
I am back to the social costs of picking winners and losers (ice/ev ev/ice) and I am inclined to think that the cost of energy to the California consumers is over-bearing although the intent is not going to make a dent for the world's environmental/existential threat even if every Californian was to be limited to walking only.:eek:
You wanna pick your loser and call it a winner, that's all. You munch on the crusty booger and call it caviar? I guess we can't stop you or even get through to you.
 

Frank Dernie

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With my solar panels and whole house battery I was a net electric energy producer in 2022 including an electric dryer and I live 300 ft from the Pacific Ocean with lots of fog. New electric heat pumps are more efficient that NG furnaces and heat as well as cool. Non combusting sources of energy will dramatically reduce the pace of global warming.
I'm surprised by the tardy takeup of renewables in the USA which is ideally suited to them.
Perhaps years of expensive lobbying by the fossil fuel industry has distorted many residents perceptions.
 

Frank Dernie

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As for hybrids, they were efficient, but at best they were a bridge technology. I've even wondered if a slightly larger Atkinson cycle engine in a Prius wouldn't give about the same fuel economy without the complication.
The thing about the Prius hybrid system, whether plug in or not, is the simplicity.
That is what attracted me to it in the first place - I have run one since 2005. There is no clutch or multi ratio gearbox since neither are necessary in the layout.
From a reliability POV my first Prius, now 17 years old is still used by my daughter as their second car, though they prefer it to the big family people carrier for everything but holidays, and is still on its original traction battery.

Edit: The Atkinson cycle engine makes sense because of the E-CVT, with a conventional clutch and multi ratio gearbox not so much.

It is true all the other hybrid systems I have seen are crude and complex by comparison.
 
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Blumlein 88

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I'm surprised by the tardy takeup of renewables in the USA which is ideally suited to them.
Perhaps years of expensive lobbying by the fossil fuel industry has distorted many residents perceptions.
I think it more a function of fossil fuels being inexpensive in the USA versus much of the rest of the world. Plus renewables are economically viable now, but weren't always. So the benefits of it are better realized earlier with a higher population density and higher fuel costs while the USA is less densely populated with lower fuel costs.
 

MediumRare

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I'm surprised by the tardy takeup of renewables in the USA which is ideally suited to them.
Perhaps years of expensive lobbying by the fossil fuel industry has distorted many residents perceptions.
We are catching up. Solar accounted for over 45% of all new generating capacity in 2022, despite import constraints. Adding wind makes 69%. Important for the nuclear fans to note the scale: this is equal to 18+ new large nuclear sites. A year. Compare to the potential to build even 2 a year in the US - impossible.

1678284092035.png

 

blueone

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I'm surprised by the tardy takeup of renewables in the USA which is ideally suited to them.
Perhaps years of expensive lobbying by the fossil fuel industry has distorted many residents perceptions.
Not even a little bit. The fossil fuel industry doesn't have to spend a dime to get in the way of any renewable power projects. Our NIMBY attitudes here combined with laws that let practically anyone bring suit to block a project are more effective than any lobbying. In the US we are our own worst enemies when it comes to infrastructure. No one wants wind power anywhere near where they live. Ugly, noisy, kills birds, and takes a huge amount of land or water area per gigawatt. You can't even put turbines in the ocean without law suits because of view impairment. Now there's even controversy over whether turbines cause whale beaching. Even when wind power gets approved and built, building the transmission lines to conduct the power to cities is an arduous and hugely expensive process.

Solar is less hated, but in many populated areas of the US the sun only shines about one third of the time. And the transmission line approval problem, combined with our fragmented and old technology grid, makes the US a relatively inefficient deployer of solar and wind power. Adding a bit of insult to injury, since many fossil fuel and nuclear plants are being taken off-line faster than renewable storage or nationwide transmission projects can be approved and built, some areas, like where I live, are likely to go through a period of widespread lower grid reliability (rolling blackouts during peak periods). Nothing like some rolling blackouts to give renewables a bad name, when the real blame is our lack of a national sense of urgency about building practically anything.

Where the fossil fuel industry spends much of its lobbying money is to resist cleaning up their extraction and pipeline operations. There's still a lot of gas flaring going on, though in some states regulation is tightening. Gas pipeline leak detection and repair still lags. Oil is a little better, because while gas leaks are invisible, oil obviously leaves a big stain. And every gasoline station I go to in any state here still reeks of gasoline fumes.


Why lobby against renewables when you can focus money on avoiding your own problems?
 

Frank Dernie

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Ugly, noisy, kills birds, and takes a huge amount of land or water area per gigawatt.
That is part of the propaganda IMO.

We have a lot of wind turbines here and they kill over 1000x fewer birds than domestic pet cats, for example.
My wife’s best friend‘s farm has 4 wind turbines on, reasonably close to the farm and I have never heard them, 3 of them are in line not that far apart and they make a lot of money from them.
Ugly is in the eye of the beholder - I quite like them.

They are about a hundred billion times less ugly than an oil well or coal mine.

I must say though I was shocked to see pretty well every visible ridge in the Pyrenees lined with wind turbines when visiting a friend in Spain.

I would have expected every desert metropolis to be using solar cells to power A/C it is a no brainier IMO.

A lot of the statements I see about EVs and renewable power generation look like swallowed propaganda to me.
 
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blueone

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That is part of the propaganda IMO.

We have a lot of wind turbines here and they kill over 1000x fewer birds than domestic pet cats, for example.
My wife’s best friend‘s farm has 4 wind turbines on, reasonably close to the farm and I have never heard them, 3 of them are in line not that far apart and they make a lot of money from them.
Ugly is in the eye of the beholder - I quite like them.

They are about a hundred billion times less ugly than an oil well or coal mine.

I must say though I was shocked to see pretty well every visible ridge in the Pyrenees lined with wind turbines when visiting a friend in Spain.

I would have expected every desert metropolis to be using solar cells to power A/C it is a no brainier IMO.

A lot of the statements I see about EVs and renewable power generation look like swallowed propaganda to me.
I'm glad you like turbines. They're generally hated and fought against in the US, so they're in remote areas. Like near Palm Springs, CA.


And then come the transmission lines...

You're pretty opinionated. So are the NIMBYs in the US who try to block important projects. I'm more on your side of the controversy, actually. There's a price for civilization and convenience, and generation facilities and transmission lines are part of the price. I'd rather have wind turbines and solar panels than a coal burning power plant, no question there. I wouldn't want to go back to the 18th century (I'd rather have a coal power plant than the 18th century), but rational thinking is rare here. Perhaps elsewhere too, but I live in the US, and our reluctance to tolerate critical infrastructure is frustrating and stupid.

BTW, the bird death controversy is difficult to put into perspective. For example, the US Sierra Club claims that cats kill up to four billion birds per year in the US. That's over 1000 birds per square mile of US total land area per year, just from cats. I can't even type it without chuckling. The entire conversation is silly.
 

Frank Dernie

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Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere in Europe.
I’m surprised they even work efficiently that close together!

This is our local wind farm
 

Timcognito

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And if you're going to argue the TPC doesn't present data with an intent to make political statements, I'm not convinced of your philosophical neutrality.
The data is from OECD and I did not research it much, as I said it was background.
 

ctrl

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I'm glad you like turbines. They're generally hated and fought against in the US, so they're in remote areas. Like near Palm Springs, CA.

Such an oppressive impact on the landscape would not be approved nowadays (at least I hope). The wind farm could have been founded around the year 1990-2000 - I have not found exact details.

However, these turbines do not have much in common with the current state of wind energy technology. On average, the 4000 wind turbines have a capacity of 0.09 MW each ( largest of these windmills stands 150 feet tall).

For comparison, here is a modern wind farm near my home with one of the largest on-shore wind turbines in the world - 246 m (807 ft) tall and 6 MW capacity per turbine.
1678304000539.png
The wind turbines must not be so close to each other at all, as they will locally reduce the wind speed and take energy away from each other if they are placed too close.
 
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