Electric/hybrid cars for low mileage drivers

[NNadir]

22. I'm not generally amused when people tell me that their personal experience defines the whole world. The paper,...

Last edited Sat Oct 12, 2024, 04:22 AM - Edit history (1)

reports on the external cost associated with manufacture of batteries, for one example, and is a report of general findings, not a poll of someone's happy experience or what someone told them.

Again, it doesn't matter if someone drives a plugin hybrid car 1200 miles because they plug it in. What matters is how the electricity on the grid is generated, and even when it is generated, which was the point of Dr. Michalek's paper.

I really don't give a fuck if someone only burns some gasoline in their fucking plugin Volvo because they plugged it in. What matters to me is how the electricity is generated.

In my grid, the PJM grid, which at roughly 400 grams CO₂/kWh is the same as that very dirty antinuke hellhole in Germany, an electric vehicle is dirty, because like Germany, our grid includes electricity generated by the combustion of coal.

There is no doubt that plugging in an electric car in almost any place on this planet dumps CO₂ on future generations, generations we clearly hold in contempt with our cheap little carbon shell games, almost in as much contempt as we hold for the laws of thermodynamics.

Electricity is, in general, a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, overwhelmingly produced by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels with the waste dumped directly into the atmosphere. The carbon intensity of dangerous natural gas when used to generate electricity, is roughly 500 grams CO₂/kWh, coal double that, roughly CO₂.

I note that the external cost of that piece of shit wind industrial park off the coast of Massachusetts, all the carbon dioxide dumped for the barges that hauled the carbon intensive steel and concrete out to sea, all the external cost of the fiberglass blades, is now rotting in a once benthic wilderness now littered with plastic debris, the shuttered Vineland Wind facility.

I note that the engineers - I was informed in this space that wind engineers were geniuses for making bigger and bigger and bigger wind turbines something I found laughable - are "trying" to figure out the problem with the already unreliable systems.

It is now also understood that these pieces of crap will be even more unreliable than originally understood because of wake effects:

Experimental evaluation of fatigue in wind turbine blades with wake effects, Engineering Structures, Volume 300, 2024, 117140.

From the paper's conclusion:

Based on the developed procedure for blade fatigue assessment, the present work analyses the variation of the accumulated fatigue damage at blade roots for wind turbines placed within the wake region of an upstream turbine in a distance of 10 rotor diameters. Based on it, the following conclusions can be drawn:
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For the flapwise direction, the damage accumulated at the root of the blades at downstream wind turbines is significantly higher compared to the wind turbine that receives the undisturbed flow;
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The damage at the edgewise direction increases for the downstream wind turbine, but less significantly than for the flapwise direction;
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Total energy output decreases by more than 15 % due to wake effects.

There is obviously an energy cost associated with building an industrial wind park with lots of wind turbines in former wilderness beyond the external cost of putting this crap there in the first place, especially if the crap blows apart, which it seems to be doing.

I am told by people who excuse this sort of thing, that nuclear energy is "too expensive" because wind and solar are so great and so cheap. I actually believe something quite different, that the extreme global heating we are now observing as a result of the 3 card Monty game played by advocates of so called "renewable energy" - dependent on fossil fuels as a function of its extreme unreliability - is "too expensive." Given the extreme costs driven by extreme weather driven by extreme global heating, I think any other conclusion should be regarded with nothing less than complete disgust.

We are facing trillion dollar scale climate losses year after year despite having squandered trillions of dollars on solar and wind in the last decade alome, all of it lipstick on the fossil fuel pig.