How many miles per kwh do you get while towing at highways speeds, and how big is your battery? The article has reported that experience, so feel free to counter with your numbers, but saying “nuh uh” doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
I mean yes they have less solar potential but not that much less.
I wonder if population density plays into it. With a lot more people demanding a lot more electricity, is there enough physical space for wind and solar on a per capita basis?
It’s a great resource. I use it when seasons change to get a sense of when is the best time to charge my car, with whatever time of day and weather conditions that have high renewable generation and/or low demand so that I don’t feed into fossil fuel demand if I can avoid it.
From the article:
Our first trailer got about 1.0 miles/kWh towing at 65 mph (our ABRP reference figure). When we swapped to the 7,000-pound inTech, our efficiency dropped down to 0.9 miles/kWh. If you are doing the math at home, 0.9 miles/kWh means a 130 kWh battery pack (the standard “extended range” packs you find in trucks like the F-150 Lightning or Rivian R1T) will give you about 117 miles of total range from 100% to completely dead. A Tesla Cybertruck’s 123 kWh battery does a few miles less.
But out in the real world, you never drive from 100% to 0%.
If you had read the article, you’d also have second hand experience that 80 miles is the appropriate real-world range for towing RVs.
I have a friend whose apartment’s garage charger was installed and metered by a company that went bankrupt. Luckily, it fails gracefully by still providing electrical charge, without running a transaction on his credit card registered to a now-defunct service. Problem is that it still uses the apartment building’s main electricity, so all the building’s EV owners are nervous that one day the big corporate landlord is just gonna disconnect it when they eventually realize how much extra it costs on the landlord’s monthly electricity bill.
The reason why EV motors are so high power is that unlike internal combustion engines, an electric motor being capable of high power doesn’t make it less efficient during lower power use. So unlike a 1000 hp gasoline engine, an EV with 1000 hp can cruise around a city at low speeds using very little energy.
Another advantage of high power motors is that they are also high power generators for recapturing the kinetic energy in regenerative braking that charges the batteries.
They’re closed. The lid moves up and down to deal with changes in pressure as tanks are filled or emptied, without having to add air into the mix.
I like gas for certain types of cooking, especially those that involve actively flipping things in the pan. And even when I switch to induction some day, I’ll still have my outdoor pizza oven, charcoal/wood grill, and, if I’m not gonna have gas indoors, probably a gas wok burner.
For anything involving wet heat (boiling, blanching, braising, steaming), anything involving the oven, and even deep frying, I’m looking to switch eventually. But for now, I do enjoy cooking on gas.
Electrical ranges should be required to vent, too. The act of heating food to cooking temperatures already causes indoor air pollution, so ventilation should be required everywhere (not that would ever happen, especially retroactively to homes already built, but I can dream).
horsepower is a fake number generated by measuring torque and using a constant number.
It’s just a unit of power. You can calculate watts from force x speed, too, if you use metric units. Yeah, you can shift the whole thing to a rotational system with torque and rotational velocity (and then derive the linear equivalent force and speed from those units as the radius of the circle cancel out).
Only applicable to gasoline engines.
Power is power. By using similar units it makes it easier to compare different vehicles. If everyone wants to convert to watts, we can, but we’d still be making those comparisons.
That photograph is not the truck discussed in the article. The article (misleadingly, in my opinion) ran a 4-year-old photograph of a F-150 Lightning test model when it was wrapped up like that. And yes, that photo looks just like the current generation F-150.
They should’ve just run an article with other graphics, to avoid the confusion.
The Ford CEO has stated that they’ve learned a lot of lessons about reducing the bill of materials (specifically significantly reducing the sheer weight/quantity of wires and harness) from mistakes made with the Mach E and the F-150 Lightning. If they can pull off making it use less stuff and require less labor to build, I can believe that they can get things down in price.
I agree that buying fuel at those prices aren’t economically feasible. But, if we end up in a world where we have far more generation capacity than there is normal demand, that excess capacity might prove to be useful for energy-intensive chemical production, including making fuel.
Sustainable aviation fuel doesn’t need to come from biomass feedstocks (even if those are by far the most popular). There are pathways for purely synthetic hydrocarbon production, but most sustainable fuel comes from organic sources (crops, organic waste, or fossil fuel sources). Even some of the synthetic methods tend to still get stuff like syngas from processing coal or natural gas.
Still, developing the processes and the scale to bring prices down is important, and can be built upon with an eye towards replacing the biofuel feedstocks with CO or CO2 feedstocks, and can still spur on demand for more renewable energy (without the risk of the return on investment collapsing).
He said that governments had, through ICAO, targeted a 5% emission reduction by 2030 by using SAF. However, he cautioned: “To be blunt, there is no path to meet that outcome.”
The 2050 goal seems far enough away that success or failure can be hand waved away, from the perspective of the goals being announced in 2021. But they set a goal for 5% by 2030, and it is concerning that we haven’t seen sufficient advancement in scaling up production of sustainable aviation fuel.
I’m most interested in fuel production being an energy sink for excess solar power. If we can set up a system where we overbuild solar electricity capacity far more than what we’d need on any given day, but divert some of it to storage (for use at night) and use some of it to produce chemical fuels with stored chemical energy, a large enough operation might be able to support demand for solar panels without jeopardizing the grid with too much waste electricity (and the economic side effects of producing something fleeting that nobody wants to pay for in that moment).
I wonder if there’s an easy way to test them, other than actually driving out and trying it somewhere.
that 20000-30000 premium over ICEs
What currency are you using for this comparison? Definitely not USD.
A Tesla Model 3 runs for about $40k. A Camry runs for about $35k. Or if we want to go down market a Nissan Leaf is about $30k and probably comparable to a $25k Sentra.
Similar trim levels of vehicles offered as both EV and gasoline powered show minimal difference. Compare the Ford F-150 Lariat in both the gasoline ($75k) and the EV versions ($79k). Or the new Lexus ES, where the EV ($49k) is actually cheaper than the hybrid ($51k).
And if you go into the used market, EVs are starting to hit that market in real numbers, too. Plenty of options for under $20,000, and a handful of options for under $10,000.
Cars are expensive. EVs generally are close to that already expensive price.
A lot of the grid power still based on fossil fuels or coal
Even if you of a long tailpipe emissions analysis of pure coal power, the total emissions are still lower than a comparable gasoline powered engine.
Coal emits about 2.31 lbs (1.05 kg) of carbon dioxide per kwh.
Gasoline emits about 20 lbs (8.9 kg) of carbon dioxide per gallon burned.
So a car that gets 3.5 miles per kWh and is purely charged on coal emits about 0.3 kg of carbon per mile. A car that runs on gasoline and gets 30 miles per gallon is about the same.
In comparison, natural gas is about 0.96lbs of CO2 per kWh, so that EV charged on natural gas would emit roughly the same as a 74 mile per gallon vehicle.
Note that currently, in the US, coal is about 16% of electricity production, and natural gas is 41%. If you compare the emissions to the overall mix, you’ll get even lower numbers for the EV emissions.
Which adapter do you have?
Yes, if they describe their numbers but you refuse to describe yours.