Sure, but there's a limit to how much nuance I can fit in while ensuring the sentence is vaguely coherent. Plus, there's upside as well as downside variance, especially when you consider new chemistries are arriving fast.

In the last 10 years, battery price per kWh dropped by more than 80% from $780 to $139. https://www.statista.com/stati...

In the next 15 years, battery price per kWh is going to drop again, and significantly, because all the previous drops happened without the economies of scale or learning that are available now that EVs are selling in the order of millions per year. This isn't just theory -- the next few years' worth of enhancements are already in roadmaps, and they're all for lithium ion chemistries, not solid state or sodium or anything more speculative. Here's a quick overview: https://apple.news/AlTkZ0RI9RW...

So trying to figure out the specific costs of a replacement pack for 15 years down the line is difficult, but it will definitely be much lower than the costs today. My guess is that you're looking at something that costs $10k today costing $4k in today's dollars then. For a PHEV, it's probably more like $6k today, $2k then.

It's also how frothers got so frothy... they guzzle down the frothing from their favourite sources and then bilge it back up like a never-ending burp

They took the production offline five years ago because it was losing money. Two years after that, they looked at this defunct plant that was costing them money and realised they could re-use the site and make money instead.

I’d ask for them to up the dose, if I were you. It probably won’t help, but in your position, anything’s worth a shot

Cleaner buildings, roads and lungs where it really matters - where people live and work — is a more immediately obvious benefit of EVs cf CO2.

1. Your 42% number is still too high. It doesn't account for the reduction in electricity required to refine all the gasoline for all those vehicles. Plus 3mpkWh is a very low figure, eg:
- Model Y - 3.3 to 3.8
- Model 3 - 4 to 5
- Kona - 4.8
- Niro - 4.4
I know there's Hummers and Cybertrucks etc, but an average of 3 seems too conservative

2. This capacity was taken offline back in 2019. We need to retire carbon intensive capacity fast, and we need to expand less carbon intensive capacity even faster. New capacity that's less carbon intensive is definitely coming online faster than old capacity that's carbon intensive, but the rate of both needs to increase

The plant was shut off back in 2019, five years ago, for being uneconomic. It was already shut off well before Calpine decided to build the battery bank.

So this wasn't a choice between a ive CCGT plant and batteries; it was a choice between a dead CCGT plant and batteries.

The CCGT jobs were long gone.

That’s not true even for EVs, which is a very demanding application, much more than this. EV battery warranties are for replacement if state of health at 8 years is below 80%. That implies manufacturers expect batteries to last considerably longer, which is unsurprising, given they can do 1000 charge-discharge cycles before hitting 80%. And it’s not like they’re useless at 80%. They’re at 80%.

There are about 2 million crop workers who pick fruit and vegetables on American farms. It's not all done by massive machines!

I don't know enough of the history to know whether the laws were worded that way through malice or incompetence (or both). It seems entirely plausible that lobbyists got the laws worded like this to create the loophole for auto manufacturers, given that's a dance we've seen before in the US many times.

Yeah, I know the history of it. It's bitten them on the ass now

Ha! Yup

And they did it to themselves, too. US automakers didn't need to shape US consumer preferences in favour of vehicles that are on average much bigger than the rest of the world (especially trucks, which basically exist nowhere else). They could have pursued a global strategy and sought to focus 90% of their efforts on vehicles that would be popular across many markets. But instead, they turned the US market into a huge profitable niche where consumers behaved completely differently from Europe or Asia, and now they're up the tree in their pickup and can't get down.

I am just playing devil's advocate here, because I broadly agree with you. So I don't buy into what I'm about to write...

Presumably the argument is that EVs are meaningfully different from the wider market of consumer stuff in a few key ways:
1. The market for US EVs is not yet lost (cf, say, smartphones)
2. Automotive is more strategically significant than other sectors (cf, say, smartphones) -- more of GDP, supports more jobs, transport matters more, etc
3. Chinese state support for EVs is more extensive than support for other sectors (cf, say, smartphones but obviously not true for solar which is also subsidised by the Chinese state)