These are kind of small cars. I don’t quite understand why a large PD SUV and/or fire engine couldn’t just push them out of the way…?
Big if, especially considering that the current leaders in this tend to be people whose entire world view is “move fast, break shit, get it to market” rather than giving 2 shits about the safety of the public. As long as Silicon Valley is driving this, it’s gonna be a shit show and it’s gonna get people killed. I don’t see any serious move towards creating something that is actually safe and functional.
And it will not fix congestion, but will contribute to it.
Which is why we need to make public investments in rural public transit, as well.
But can’t do that, because someone has to make a profit off it everything in our society, because that seems to be the only “moral good” far too many of us Americans recognize anymore…
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Especially since one of the “benefits” listed for autonomous cars was that they wouldn’t have to park. The idea was that they would just circle the block until your appointment was over and they could pick you up.
Certainly! It wouldn’t be easy, but it can also be done incrementally. Every bus, train, and ferry we add makes the world better. This is a trivial problem to solve, honestly, compared to something like climate change where we have to fix everything everywhere all at once (pardon the cultural reference).
I agree it’s gonna happen. There’s so much concentrated wealth that wants it to happen that it will. I don’t feel that it should, but I agree that it will.
It just makes me sad that all that concentrated wealth isn’t going to something better, like grid storage research or safer nuclear power. Things the world desperately needs right now, rather than things rich people want so they can replace more human workers.
This is yet another example of why we have to tax the fuck out of the rich. Society should be spending that money on things that we need, not things CEOs want.
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I agree, it makes me sad too. But my day job is being a cleantech consultant, and I will just say that we really are starting to see large-scale investment in grid storage, and safer nuclear is a political (and downstream of that, a lack of investment in building the industrial infrastructure) rather than a technological problem. It would have been a heck of a lot cheaper and less damaging if we’d started this level of investment and scaling 20 years earlier for renewables and storage, and never gone off the rails with nuclear policy. But at this point it’s just a matter of time, and a sizable chunk of that time is inertia as companies catch up to the technological reality, and friction as governments still put way too many obstacles in the way of companies trying to build what we need.
Edit to add: To clarify on grid storage, if we ignore pumped hydro and compressed air (which are geographically constrained) what we’re seeing today are mostly 1-4 hr Li-ion batteries. That’s enough to increase wind and solar penetration, while almost completely eliminating the need for spinning reserves and some or most load-following. That will let operators run every existing power plant more efficiently, using less fuel. Li-ion might scale to 8-12 hrs deoending on future cost trends, but beyond that we’re seeing big cost drops in flow batteries, which once built can be gradually expanded at low marginal cost to longer durations. To get to true 100% renewables we’ll need ~4 day storage, but can tolerate low efficiency if the capex is low enough b/c we’ll only use that much a few times a year. Something like Form Energy’s iron-air batteries are a good possibility. (This is one area where electric vehicles with vehicle-to-grid would be a bonus - an electric car battery is basically a two day battery for one household, as long as we have the charging infrastructure by the 2030s to charge them when generating the power is cheap.) Despite the overhype, hydrogen is actually a good option for high industrial heat and for synthetic hydrocarbons, and also serves as a kind of storage while encouraging overbuilding of wind and solar, letting us get to higher penetration rates even without grid-scale battery storage, and I expect we’ll be seeing that scale up in the late 2020s to 2030s as well. It will happen in stages, and each stage will make economic sense as well as ecological sense.
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I agree but it’s a touchy subject around here, so I hedged my framing there. 
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I’ve stopped harping on it now that solar is the cheapest power almost anywhere in the world and has a pretty clear path towards <$0.02/kWh unsubsidized by the 2030s.
You seem very knowledgeable on this subject, so I’m curious on your take on this- my understanding is that we’re not going to get to zero carbon energy without nuclear to replace base load. The cheapness of solar means little without grid storage and a smarter grid that can manage it?
Correct on both counts, and ten years ago I was pretty worried about that. But with the rate at which we’re now seeing innovation and cost reduction in grid-scale storage options is making this look a lot more feasible. Not easy, not by a long shot, but plausibly achievable at a not-ridiculous cost over the next 2-4 decades as long as we work on the technologies we already know about and have proofs of concept and early commercial installations or late pilot demonstrations of. Right now costs are on the order of $100-500/kWh capacity for Li-ion. Claims and extant examples for flow batteries and metal-air batteries vary wildly but some have clear potential (based on materials and manufacturing fundamentals once scaled) to get to $15-$50/kWh. Getting from capex to “How does this affect what I pay for power?” is a messy headache and no two models do it the same way, but best-in-class storage, built in 2030, may end up adding <$0.10/kWh to solar-used-at-night. That would be more expensive than coal or gas or nuclear baseload, but since a majority of power is used in the daytime, and in summer, it could easily end up comparable or cheaper on net. And if we do end up building things-that-also-act-as-energy-storage like EVs with V2G, or green hydrogen production+storage+transport for use in industry or to replace liquid fuels, or gasifiers to convert municipal and agricultural organic waste to syngas, then that can greatly cut down how much grid-scale storage you need. An all-solar grid may need a 16-hr battery every day, a 1-day battery once a week, and a 4-day battery twice a year, but twice a year you may be able to use demand response to get factories to cut consumption or pay customers to drawdown their vehicle batteries or chemical energy stores instead. As you said, it’ll require smart grid tech to do effectively
I’d rather we also get (or have gotten) behind better nuclear tech, for sure. Decarbonization would be a heck of lot easier if we had a >50% nuclear grid. And if we really manage to get small modular reactors up and running for remote and isolated communities or facilities, that would be a big help because high renewables integration is harder for those conditions. In my wildest dreams I’d hope to see SMR-powered container ships instead of the methanol-fueled (synthetic from CO2+H2) ones we’re starting to see.
I’d also like to see a more interconnected grid infrastructure with greater use of HVDC. There have been days I get really annoyed that Edison and Westinghouse didn’t know about thyristors, making us throw away 4-10% of all our electricity compared to what we could have if we were building a brand new grid today (more now that so many things run on DC anyway). And I lament the made-sense-in-the-past use of frequency instead of voltage to manage grid stability in a world where the fastest growing renewables are all going through inverters for transmission. But at this point I think storage and generation costs are likely to drop fast enough that it isn’t worth diverting the time and money to really fight that fight too hard anymore, since doing it globally would require a huge amount of cooperation between governments, and lots of legal battles, and I’d rather we move faster with what can scale within a single house/city/country.
Once in a while I still see people (not you!) claiming things like “every watt of of wind and solar will need a watt of natural gas or battery storage to back it up.” (Yes, they say this even in a world where some places have gotten to > 60% wind and solar penetration and many more have 20-40% penetration without storage).
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