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 ...
in the meantime, gas is over $5/gallon, and people still tailgate me when I drive the speed limit to get the most out of my $5/gallon gas. and then they stay there, like I’m going to speed up once I get reminded of how impatient they are. Hahahahahahahahahaha!
“Electricity is going up, taxes the Grid, and origin of that Charge plug is coal, less often nuclear. The plan is Mass Transit, tax those miles to bring you into compliance. Electric will be a blip to get to Mass Transit.”
Just to add to that, expect the suburbs to look like neighborhoods in Detroit, where middle-class people used to live, but vacated - with their homes no longer on this planet, but instead the land reverted back to either its pristine state, or farmland (or both, not sure). This was due to crime driving out people. The few stragglers were relocated.
People in the Globalist/Neocons future will virtually all in high-rises, at least the vast majority, driven out of their homes by energy prices, prevented from driving individual vehicles again by carbon rationing (applying a price to carbon for literally every good and service you buy, with the big hitters being energy and meat - exceed your ever-tightening carbon ration, you pay big taxes - exceed it more, your electronic wallet starts to limit what you can buy. It is the ONLY way that the planet can be saved, in their minds, short of wiping out many billions of people.
Ironically, it may be Russia that prevents, or at least slows, their plans - if Russia doesn’t play ball and keeps selling energy and food to the rest of the world.
Will need 10 factories and lots of mining to fill the demand in US. Ok so environmentalists will be OK with that type of earth destruction but gas/oil/fracking bad for the earth.
Unreal.
Sounds like maybe another start up idea where they ask Fed for billions of funding only to have it fail and they take off with the money, like Solyndra.
And watch, we will have to agree , it will be a hate crime, to
say anything bad about Muslims, Islams, rape, murder in order to get batteries, minerals from Afghanistan. Maybe they would demand billions of dollars in repayment for the war in return.
Probably hasn’t installed his in home charger yet.
> takes a hit
and turns to -hit
“The cable was running from his garage to the truck.”
He prolly hooked into a 220v line. This should charge his EV truck quicker. At any rate charging it at night should work out fine.
My cousin has a Prius and gets very good MPG on highways. 48-50 or so. Due to the Prius 95 Horse power engine. I believe newer Prius are designed to have the electric motor kick in too when you want to pass someone or driving up an incline.
Hybrids are a great idea, especially in the city or if you get a lot of stop and go traffic on your highways. EV’s are radically different due to no gasoline engine. EV’s driving 1000 miles — You need to map out your charging stations and pray. And pack some sandwiches for lunch.
You missed the S key on your keyboard?
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.
Fifty years have come and gone since 1970 and in my area, it's still Natural Gas and Fuel Oil No. 2 that is generating our electricity.
As I said batteries don't make energy. They are just energy storage devices.
And adding to what I said, all those rich suburban Teslas driving around are storing Natural Gas and Fuel Oil No.2 generated energy in their dirty, expensive batteries whilst the rest of us here store our car energy in our cheap and cleaner gas tanks.
Ha ha ha. What a dope. Well, I mean he's smart as grifter playing on the fears of the sheep and getting rich.
Cheap and cleaner gas tanks? The gas tanks themselves may be clean, but the gasoline they run on is expensive as hell. Maybe with better government policies, you could get $2/gallon instead of $5/gallon (”peak oil” is the Malthusianism of energy), but the whole point of what I wrote is that solar power is NOW cheaper than fossil fuels. (Fifty years ago, oil and coal were #1 and #2 electricity producers; in 2020, natural gas and nuclear were #1 and #2; renewables is likely to be #2 next year).
Ironically, the top reason solar power isn’t being built out faster, because the price is coming down so quickly, why build at today’s higher rates when you could wait a few years, and build it cheaper with better technology. Meanwhile, coal has declined so quickly that last year, Nuclear ALMOST topped it.
Let’s just pause a moment and appreciate that there are 100 million tons of lithium identified already, enough for 5 billion cars to run indefinitely. That’s a lot BETTER than our oil reserves, which could match our rate of consumption for 45 years. We already have lithium batteries’ technological replacement, for when lithium and cobalt cease to be so incredibly inexpensive. (Cobalt’s actually the bigger limiting factor.)
(To be clear: Cobalt shortages will not kill the battery industry. Manganese will probably replace it very soon.)
Manganese is Replacing Cobalt: How This Mineral Is Saving the …
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/386143
Sep 17, 2021 · Martin Kepman, CEO of Manganese X Energy Corporation at Battery Hill in Canada lists three core reasons why manganese is a more viable, more sustainable alternative to the rarer
Cutting battery industry’s reliance on cobalt will be an …
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/...
Jan 05, 2020 · Its batteries, thought to contain higher levels of manganese, could cut cobalt costs in half, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy …
In fact I do, “Golf Carts” is a derogatory term for EV’s.
Read how they actually work in the real world and it becomes obvious they are a Failure.
They work fine for local trips, but so do old golf carts.
Cost vs benefit bases makes an old golf cart a much better deal.
Even better to just keep driving ICE cars.
Not now, but it was widely covered Here at the time.
Of course his disciples made contorted excuses for him similar to what the D’s do for Biden.
As I said, in my area, electricity only comes from natural gas and fuel oil. So in my area, if gasoline is expensive to run ICE engines, so is the fuel oil and natural gas that is needed to power EVs.
No, you don’t. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and you sound ignorant. I’m on my second Tesla and it’s not just my commuter car, we’ve taken it on long road trips, as I did with my first Tesla many times.
Go ahead and buy yourself a golf cart, but if you think that it’s equivalent to the performance and range of a Tesla, then you’re smoking more crack than Hunter Biden.
Fuel oil doesn’t supply ANYONE’S electricity anymore. It makes up 1/4 of 1% of electricity production. Hasn’t really been a thing since the late 70s/early 80s.
fix = ice
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.