[FRIAM] Hybrid cars
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Apr 6 10:34:37 EDT 2021
Jochen & Other EV/Hybrid enthusiasts-
Do you know where you electricity comes from?
When I got my Volt (Ampera to you) I had to acknowledge to my purist
friends that I was driving a "coal fired" vehicle (since my Electric
Coop is still mostly coal-fired). Of course, free (or not always so
free) markets are driving them to phase out the major coal plant in the
4 Corners area (where I apparently export *my* fossil fuel pollution and
cause the extraction of so much groundwater to sluice the coal from
mine to plant that the land is literally settling). I shook my tiny
fist at my Cooperative only to find that they were constrained by a
Public Regulatory Commission form building and operating their own
renewable sources (yup, we have a lot of sun and wind) until 2025.
MegaCorp regional electricity corp has a monopoly on providing them (and
me) power through that date.
I had the option of buying salvage panels (originally from Germany!) at
$.10/watt ($30 for $300W) which is a *fraction* of the new cost of such
things, and at least doesn't drive the extractive market, although it
*does* relieve the burden on the primary industry for handling a
gigantic waste stream (for operations and maintenance efficiency it
seems commercial installations of PV has a refresh cycle closer to 10
years rather than the 20+ quoted to home users)).
- Steve
On 4/6/21 3:16 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> We have leased a new BMW 330e "plugin hybrid" now which will replace
> our old BMW 1 series at the end of the month. There are not enough
> charging stations at the moment for a pure electric car like the BMW i3.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation
>
> I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of
> my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph. But the next will be all
> electric!
>
>
>
> P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company. They’ve gone
> public but they have no product yet!
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation
>
>
>
>
>
> Marcus wrote:
>
> Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy. Or we
> might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over
> everything. With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big
> and direct approaches, myself. I would be happy to drive around
> 1000hp electric hummer. More motive to get fusion working!
>
> I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to
> LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the
> (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I
> have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could
> stand back up if they fell over.
>
> Regarding a 1000hp Hummer: My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive
> (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor
> or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big
> iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of
> Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we
> want"). Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or
> hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast
> enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the
> Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.
>
> Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation: There is one HUGE fusion
> reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation
> (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an
> atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness
> for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...
>
> A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny
> battery in a day of good sunshine... your Hummer is not going to get
> the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?). In
> the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed
> thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls
> to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)... *free
> energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in
> just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity
> needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping
> scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose
> the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the
> power-generation... eventually they were shown to be destroying
> (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja
> CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat. Thermal fusion power
> plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.
>
> Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get
> around that problem. More tech is always the most obvious answer to
> the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech. Maybe Iron-Man
> class of miniaturization?
>
> Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the
> enemy and they is the Red Queen"
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com>
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation
>
>
>
> Marcus wrote:
>
> That was Glen. (My explanation is just that we have limited
> short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation
> than terribly compressed forms. So it is hard to gain
> confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely
> in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very
> effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.
> The natural world has no such hesitation.)
>
> <not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does*
> have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here... and suggest
> that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life". We
> fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known)
> apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of
> tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold
> more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our
> heads"). Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond) and
> proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our
> progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to
> expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.
>
> Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the
> urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a
> particular type of self-organization?
>
> </not snark>
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
>
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