Yes, thank goodness fires at gas plants are so rare compared with battery plants. Why, I had to go all the way back to *seven whole hours ago* to find a story about a gas plant fire.

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/ta...

There's a third and fourth reason too:
1. Fewer charges per year. It's a minor but still useful additional convenience to only have to plug in once a fortnight instead of once a week
2. Fewer charge-discharge cycles per year, so the battery should last longer

No one is ever going to convince you to get an EV, and I'm not trying. I'm answering the specific point you previously raised, about whether the cars will last 15 years or not.

And it makes no sense to say "80%" isn't good enough. It all depends on the starting range. If the starting range were 10,000 miles, you'd be fine with 8,000 miles. If it were 10 miles, you wouldn't be OK with 100% or 80%. And anyway, among the many reasons you'd never look at a Zoe, it's only 80% of the size of a Camry. I'm just saying these calculations demonstrate how EVs can be expected to last the years.

No. Retiring carbon meaning retiring carbon. If I'd meant outsourcing to other states, that's what I'd have written, obviously.

Here in the UK, these guys have a great reputation for battery repairs:
https://www.cleevelyev.co.uk/

And they work their own vehicles pretty damn hard and they've stood up to the test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I am very confident such vehicles will be available when they've been on the road that long, because the maths is pretty basic to work through. For my previous car, a Renault Zoe:
- 245 mile range at time of purchase
- Likely to hit 80% state of health (ie only delivers 80% of 245, ie 200 miles) after about 750 full charge-discharge cycles
- ((200+(45/2))*750 = 167,000 miles
- UK average mileage per day is about 20 miles
- 167,000/20 = 8350 days = 22+ years before the battery drops to a 200 mile range
Lots of variables in there, but all of it supports the truism that the batteries are going to outlast the chassis for most EVs

Interestingly, it turns out that even though early Leafs had shitty BMS, not that many have been scrapped.

The UK has detailed data on which cars are on the road from which years. It's a bit tough to work your way through it, even with the help of this clever website (https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/family/nissan_nissan_leaf?make=nissan#tax), but it turns out that 73% of all the Leafs registered between 2011 and 2013 in the UK are still around today. That's not as good as a comparable ICE vintage car like the Ford Focus (89% remaining), but it's not too bad given this is a badly engineered primitive model with a tiny battery and lots of cycles. My previous EV, the Renault Zoe, with an equally tiny battery but much better BMS, does comparatively better but isn't quite as old -- 88% of the Zoes from 2013 to 2014 are still in use today. So much for the batteries "failing" after 8 years. Looks like even these early EVs will reach the same average age at scrappage as a typical ICE vehicle in the UK -- 14 or 15 years.

I know that on-site solar has benefits -- I'm a big proponent. It's just not a silver bullet. Thinking of energy systems in terms of a silver bullet is fundamentally misconceived in my view, anyway -- there are so many benefits from having a heterogenous approach, above all resilience. We massively benefit from diverse supply, storage, the ability to flex demand, etc.

We need a less centralised grid than today, but we still need plenty of large solar and wind projects.

Wind, because it’s roughly counter-cyclical with solar so it improves supply stability and cuts storage requirements (which remain more expensive).

Solar, because there’s plenty of uses that can’t be served by on-site solar (skyscrapers, for one). And large solar farms are substantially better bang for buck than on-site.

There’s room for it all, and we need all of it.

1. Early Leafs were notorious for shitty battery management. Literally no other car had the same issues. I bought a Renault Zoe in 2015, just two years later than that guy. It was a tiny 5 door hatchback with a puny 80 mile range, so it needed charging all the time. It did, however, have a robust battery management system. I sold it in 2018, and it had the same battery life as the day I bought it.

2. The reason prices don't appear to have dropped more is that OEMs have used cheaper prices and greater energy density to stuff bigger batteries with longer ranges into cars at roughly the same price. So my third gen Zoe, bought five years after the first, had the same dimensions, but a 52kWh battery instead of 20kWh and a range of 245 miles instead of 80, all for the same price.

3. That Leaf guy got, as we say in the UK, done over like a kipper. The one thing that a Leaf has going for it is the modular battery design, which means that only the fraction of a battery that's truly irretrievable needs to be replaced. If you do need to replace an entire battery, it costs $15k to get a new one, just like you said (well, £12k). But... that's for a 62kWh battery, ie nearly triple the original capacity. (And you can a 40kWh battery for £8k). So prices have come down substantially

You absolutely do not need to build storage capacity to supply 20GW for several days. That would assume calm conditions, including offshore, with no sun, for several days across all California. When was the last time that happened? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, it's a direct question to you: when did the whole of California last experience multiple consecutive days of no sun and no win including offshore (and many nights of no wind too)?

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.