California is famous for having different emission regulations. They have an exemption from the national law that they’re allowed to make stricter emissions and gas mileage regulations. None of those should prove to be a burden for anyone who wants to sell a battery EV in California, because there’s no standard that applies only in California to EVs.

Kia pulled its EV6 GT, which basically did not sell well in the US. They only manufactured that particular top tier trim level in Korea, but the other EV6 trim levels continue to be manufactured and sold in the U.S. (Wind, GT-Line). Kinda stupid that they named their top of the line the GT and the one just below that the GT-Line, but brands can be stupid with naming schemes sometime.

now both Hyundai and Kia have stopped selling EV models last year solely in the US

They’re basically one company and they stopped importing EVs. They still build and sell plenty of new EVs in the U.S., made in their plants in the state of Georgia. They’re also currently expanding capacity at their plants, in the hopes of catching more of the growing electric SUV market.

So they no longer sell the top of the line trim level of the Kia EV6, or the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but they’re still building and selling very similar models on the same platform. The Kia EV6 still exists in the lower trim levels, and the Ioniq 6N and the Ioniq 5 and 5N, and their smaller EVs (Kia Niro, Hyundai Kona) are still available, too. Both brands launched their 3-row electric SUVs in the US, too (Hyundai Ioniq 9, Kia EV9).

A lot of companies are slowing down their EV rollouts, but I wouldn’t say that Hyundai/Kia is the best example of that.

Average new car price has gone up a lot because the average new car has been purchased by rich people who demand high performance and luxury features. And rich people have been doing great the last 50 years, so the top of the market has totally run away with high prices.

If you actually dig into specific models and what they go for, you see that the most basic cars have only gone up slightly in price, but are also much higher performing (0-60 times, quarter mile times, braking distance), more efficient (better highway/city gas mileage), more reliable (more miles/years to failure), and have a lot more standard features that used to be expensive add-ons (automatic transmissions, power windows/locks, power steering), and are generally better constructed (smaller panel gaps, better sound proofing/vibrations), and much, much safer by pretty much every measure.

Today’s cars, even the cheapest ones, are much better than the cars from the 90’s, much less the cars from the 70’s (5-digit odometers because getting past 100,000 miles wasn’t necessarily expected, bodies that rusted within a decade of normal use).

So if a first generation Honda Civic in 1974 cost $3000 in 1974 dollars (inflation adjusted to $21,000 today), we should compare what that car was, compared to what a Honda Civic is today (starting at around $25,000 for the barebones model, $30,000 for a few nicer features). Compare torque/horsepower specs, actual performance at 0-60/quarter mile, gas mileage, all of that. I’m not entirely convinced that the people of 1974 were getting a better bargain on their cars than today’s new economy car buyer.

I hate that cars have gotten so big, and that the SUV is basically the American default at this point. But I don’t think that car prices have actually gone up that high in the 30 years I’ve been driving. And cars from before I was driving just…sucked.

being an insignificant player in the broader Geo space.

The broader geo space is insignificant right now. We have about 4.0 GW of capacity nationwide.

But people are excited about the future. USGS and the Department of Energy estimate that about 90GW of capacity is achievable by 2050.

Fervo’s IPO filing claims that it will have 100 MW online next year, with up to 400 MW from the Cape Station site targeted for 2028.

The pace of development (with techniques learned from oil and gas fracking and horizontal drilling) means that we’ll know soon just how feasible this will be. I think it’s almost certainly going to be more cost effective than nuclear, and has the best prospects of providing dispatchable carbon-free energy around the clock in the near future.

If you don’t like oilprice (and I don’t love their reporting generally), you can read more from Canary Media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would still depend on a non-renewable resource that needs to be mined

One thing to point out is the energy density in nuclear fuel, even before reprocessing, is higher than all the energy that will pass through the same amount of lithium processed into rechargeable batteries, over the entire life cycle of that battery. A typical 1GW plant consumes an average of 70 kg of fuel per day, at a 90% capacity rate. So that’s 24 hours x 90% x 1000000 kW, divided by 70 kg, for about 300,000 kWh per kg of fuel.

Meanwhile, LFP batteries are about 10% lithium and have 150 Wh per kg of battery weight. Let’s say the battery can get through 10,000 charging cycles before recycling. That’s 15,000 kWh per kg of lithium.

Obviously lithium can be recycled and uranium fuel can be reprocessed. We can also compare the very inefficient extraction of either element (uranium or lithium) from the actual natural ore pulled out of the ground. And the very involved manufacturing processes of turning that ore into useful fuel or batteries.

But either way, the overhead of mining physical stuff to support the supply chains of things that get used up, even reusable/recyclable durable goods, will always be there. Uranium genuinely is special in its energy density and requires closer examination of the calculations.

Yeah, one of the issues I’ve read about happening for concrete failures was that some construction crews are under enormous pressure to salvage concrete that had been mixed too early, or delayed in pouring, or whatever, and where the concrete pouring characteristics cause issues (or crews add unauthorized water or things to slow down curing and then alter the characteristics of the poured concrete without the engineers’ awareness).

It’s wildly counterintuitive to those of us who don’t work in the space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, the most prominent examples:

Motorola spun off its cell phone division (despite being the company that invented the cell phone and the clamshell cell phone) and sold it to Google, who sold it to Lenovo. So Motorola phones, under the Motorola Mobility name, don’t have anything to do with the radio and electronic equipment company that is currently known as Motorola Solutions.

Volvo spun off its car division and sold it to Ford, who sold it to Geely, and kept the truck business. So Volvo trucks are made by a different company under different ownership from Volvo cars.

River sand is the right amount of jaggedness to where it can pour and settle into the right density in cement to have the right strength in the finished concrete. Ocean/beach sand works, too, but needs to be rinsed with fresh water, and is usually pretty valuable where it is (for beach resorts and what not).

They’re testing for how to use different types of sand (desert sand, manufactured sand, recycled sand) and testing the pouring characteristics and resulting concrete strength, so that they can make reasonable decisions on when it’s worth using substitutes.

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

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

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

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

They are clearly mathematical.

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

I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments.

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

Exactly.

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

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

I think it’s much more important what the big economies do that don’t have that option: Europe, China, India, Africa.

It’s worth pointing out that China in particular uses an enormous amount of coal.

Electrification is good, as both a bridge to cleaner energy and as a way to reduce dispersed pollution from many different fossil fuel sources (like almost every vehicle on the road). But electrification is only one step that needs to happen. The other is to decarbonize the grid itself.

So China burns more coal than anyone else in the world (with India at the number 2 spot), and is dramatically increasing its renewable power generation, but the overall increase in overall energy and their strategic interest in energy security and energy independence has them continuing to not only mine coal, but to continue constructing new coal power plants, and to slow down the actual decommissioning of old coal plants.

So although disruption to the global oil market will cause most countries to rely less on fossil fuels, the countries with domestic production of fossil fuels (Chinese coal, American oil) won’t feel the pressure as much.

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

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

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