Posted on 06/12/2022 9:32:13 PM PDT by dennisw
JB Straubel has spent the past two years covering a hillside with solar panels and rigging them up to cryptocurrency projects in his Carson City, Nev., mansion. Much of the equipment is essentially junk—the panels were all but worthless when the 46-year-old Tesla co-founder got them from a Texas solar plant, after a hailstorm voided their warranties.
He’ll work on them alone for whole weekend, spooling wire and rigging hardware in the rolling scrubland. Sometimes he thinks through his company’s latest engineering obstacles while he works. Other times he daydreams how best to divert cascades of photons from the sky, convert them, and suddenly there’s sunlight singing through the electrical grid, charging up cars, spinning a complete, beautiful system around and around: unlimited energy, for everyone, forever.
“What are you doing?” an employee said to Straubel once, arriving at the house to find him hauling solar panels outside. “You need to be getting ready for an interview right now.”
Straubel’s day job has attracted attention: he’s trying to head off a looming shortage of materials the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. Institutional investors last year signed over $775 million for his new venture, Redwood Materials, and in April the U.S. Senate called Straubel to give expert testimony on resources needed for the energy transition. He doesn’t much like the spotlight, though. “The engineering challenges are the fun part,” Straubel says in an interview. “This is more difficult.”
We need massive quantities of batteries to power a global energy transition and avert cataclysmic climate change. To produce them, we will need to mine more metals like lithium and cobalt than have been extracted in all of human history. U.S. companies have started planning huge new battery factories, but Straubel thinks we won’t have enough materials to supply them,
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
The Volt was or is a good match for country drivers that just need something to give 30 or so miles and plug into a standard old wall socket. I keep my 15 mpg pickup parked till I need it to haul something and all the little 7 mile hops to the post office and country store the Volt handles fine. At 5 bucks a gallon it saves a lot of green.
Interestingly, China, Russia and India aren't "transitioning away from fossil fuels", because their countries aren't being run by marginally intelligent globalists.
“I hate electric vehicles. It’s gotten personal.”
The oversized electric golf kart fanbois will tell you how you must own something inferior, and cannot go 0-60 like a golf kart. he is very defensive about the damn things.
Don't forget the other rare-earth metals.
...which mining operations will be halted forever to protect the delicate habitat of the Nurovian bivalvous twitching caterpillar.
A neighbor was charging his brand new electric truck today. The cable was running from his garage to the truck. To me, what would seem like a novelty would wear out real fast.
Also if all the neighborhood was charging their vehicles, the neighborhood would experience a brown/blackout.
“Overpriced golf carts?” You have no idea what you’re talking about, and you’ve clearly never driven a Tesla.
The end goal is 200 million people on earth, no independent transportation/no individual ownership of anything/no freedom of movement, and total control of 100% of a person’s thoughts and beliefs.
True totalitarianism —
The EV phase is a short grooming phase.
Got any link for that?
Battery ABCs:
Always be charging.
for them to be that price, they’ll have to withstand US Crash testings.
I doubt they will
“Everything Joe touches takes a hit.”
You’re missing an “s”...
I had the same problem. battery not charging. I had the yellow and green light solid on the charger. I took the male connector plug of the charger and quickly plugged it into the electrical socket and quickly pulled it out. Repeated this several times and the battery flashed red and started to charge. Did this with two other batteries and got them to charge. When the batter gets to a low voltage it goes to sleep and may not be dead. The electrical shock awakes it up. Give it a try. May have to repeat the procedure many times. If this does not get the battery to charge then it is dead.
“So do I. It’s called INTERNAL COMBUSTION.”
We transitioned from electric cars around the turn of the century back in 1900...
... sounds to me like the Tesla silent partner has been hitting the bong a bit much ...
Batteries allow renewable energy to be portable. You’ve been conditioned for (if you’re old enough) six decades to see solar energy as a sh!+storm waste, because of starry-eyed doomsayers telling you it’s the way to go before it was economically feasible. But the price of solar energy has been dropping for decades.
It’s as if someone told you in 1970 that they have the world’s greatest phone-camera-gaming device... except it requires 16 GB of memory.
It makes sense if the government doesn’t have to fund it or manipulate regulation to create a captive market.
“My Ryobi battery refused to be charged. Amazon has good prices on replacements and substitutes.”
Careful with substitutes. Yes, they have excellent ratings on Amazon, but no, they’ve sucked for me, at least on power tools. Wound up disposing of all of them. Assuming you have the money, make sure your needs are covered by OEMs, before buying extras.
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