sparkyshocks

So it sounds like their current factory can produce 100 MWh of sodium ion batteries per year, and the new factory in Sacramento is expected to produce 40 times as much, 4 GWh per year.

Plus if they can line up American producers of cells, that should buy a certain amount of supply chain resilience against political shenanigans.

To be clear, the decline is in the first derivative. The industry is still growing, just at a slower rate than it was before.

Same as you can refuel diesel in your petrol car.

In the U.S., at least, diesel fuel dispenser nozzles don’t fit in a typical gasoline car. The engineers have intentionally designed standards to reduce human error.

That’s what should happen with any home electrical appliances, to reduce dangerous practices. It can’t be eliminated entirely, but things should be designed assuming that people don’t follow directions and don’t read the manual, have safety features that physically or electronically prevent power from going to the wrong place or in the wrong quantities.

Seems like the safest thing to do is to design products to fail safely even if the owner doesn’t follow the manual. Relying on the competence of end users alone is, in my opinion, not enough.

And you should plug only one into one current.

What happens when you plug in more than one? Is there some kind of safety circuitry that detects this and shuts it off?

Energy is energy, so I’ve long believed that being able to convert energy from one form to another has always had a proven use. So yes, green energy (generation, storage, use) is a huge market, but that’s because energy itself is an even bigger market, and green energy needs to compete with dirty energy in order to be sustainable long term. That’s what we’re seeing and what we should expect to continue to see.

Just tell us the model of the TV and the devices that work, and the devices that don’t.

If you want an answer to your question of whether this happens to old devices, yes, it does. And the way that it usually happens is that the old device doesn’t understand newer signal protocol versions.

That would explain why some devices work perfectly and some devices don’t work at all, because an all or nothing situation suggests something going wrong with a handshake or other signal negotiation protocol.

Some devices fall back to earlier versions, and some don’t. Some only fall back if instructed to, so even if it does support an old version it expects to be told.

Another point of failure could be the cable itself, where it won’t pass certain types of signals correctly and might screw up the handshake. Have you tried other cables?

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.

capital costs for the wire and components all along the way is massive

That’s true of pipelines, too. It’s just that the sheer quantity of energy contained in those chemical bonds of chemical fuel is massive, so amortizing the up-front capital costs across how much energy can actually move through that pipe or cable in its lifetime tends to favor a pipe full of chemical energy, on a per kWh (or per joule) basis.

Food energy tends to be measured in kcals though

Yes, the numbers change for shorter distances. There’s some loss in loading up a fuel tank and driving it to the station. But again, the high energy storage capacity of chemical energy still makes a huge difference.

If a loaded semi gets 8 miles per gallon of diesel, then moving a tanker full of 10,000 gallons of gasoline 200 mile (320 km) s will burn 25 gallons of diesel in order to transport 10,000 gallons of gasoline. Even with less efficient trucks (let’s say 6 mpg for 33.3 gallons of diesel burned), it’s still pretty efficient in terms of “losses,” of about one third of one percent of the original volume of fuel consumed. Of course, diesel is more energy dense than gasoline, especially gasoline mixed with ethanol, so the efficiency might drop to 99.5% instead of 99.7%, but we’re still talking about a pretty fundamentally efficient operation.

The real efficiency gains of electricity over fossil fuel (or any chemical fuel) comes from the more efficient motors. An electric car that goes 3 miles (5 km) per kwh is the equivalent of going 100 miles per gallon (42 km/L) of gasoline. A heat pump that has 300% efficiency only needs to transmit 1/3 as much electrical energy as would have been necessary for bringing fuel to a combustion-based heater.

So if you start breaking it down by actual use case, you might be able to make some gains back to mitigate the higher cost of transporting electricity across large distances. But it still remains that all the other methods are very efficient, too.

Pipelines are absurdly efficient because moving liquid or gas through a pipe is absurdly efficient per kilogram per kilometer, and the energy density of fossil fuels is absurdly high.

A Tesla supercharger v4 can deliver 500 kW of power. BYD has launched chargers that can deliver 1000 kW (aka 1 MW) to a single car. Naturally, each kW of power is capable of delivering 1 kWh per hour.

What is the equivalent flow rate in gasoline? 1 gallon of gasoline contains the equivalent of 33.4 kWh (1 L contains 9 kWh). So 1000 kW would be the equivalent of 30 gallons per hour (110 L/hr), or 0.5 gallons (1.85 L) per minute. That’s 5% of the rate of a typical gasoline pump in the United States.

Plus exposed high voltage wires need to be maintained in weather and around vegetation, so they have high operating costs. Then there’s higher capital costs of making sure that there are transformers and safety equipment that step the voltage up and down and sync with the rest of the grid.

In the end, it really is that power lines aren’t capable of carrying nearly as much energy as the chemical fuels that flow through a pipe, so on a per joule/kwh basis, there’s less economy of scale from power lines.