So you're not going to be satisfied until some arbitrary, indefensible requirement is met?

For comparison: The Nissan LEAF alone sold more in its first four years than the Toyota Prius in its first four years. EVs in total have sold roughly a third as many vehicles in four years as the *total* Prius sales in the past eighteen years. (536K[1] vs ~1.4M[2])

I don't think anyone could make a credible argument that the Prius was/is a failure, and EVs are on a trajectory to overcome them in market share despite naysayers, FUD and lack of availability.
=Smidge=

[1] http://insideevs.com/monthly-p...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

There are no 2-dollar iPhone batteries because you can't (officially) replaces the iPhone's batteries :)

You're also dealing with different types of batteries here. The chemistry used in consumer electronics isn't the same as those used in (most) electric cars... only Tesla uses commodity cells.

An EV battery is also pretty much the equivalent to buying in bulk. If you purchased 500 iPhone batteries (~27kWh worth) at once you might possibly get them for $2 each.
=Smidge=

About 3% US market share of similarly-priced vehicles ($25K+) in just 4 years, despite many models being unavailable outside a handful of key states.

That's a far cry from "utter shit" for market penetration of a product that's significantly out of the norm and facing strong opposition.
=Smidge=

http://fiaformulae.com/en/live...

You're welcome.
=Smidge=

Then perhaps they're not really a fan of racing as such, but a fan of noise and foul odors.

For those people, there's always going to be monster truck rallies.
=Smidge=

Is your car's engine 760HP?

And your car gets 22 km per liter (52MPG)?
=Smidge=

The battery is fully integrated into the vehicle and is part of the structure. It can't be easily removed. Not for lack of want, though. Swappable batteries are under development, but it will likely mean compromises in the chassis construction.

I'm more annoyed that there is a *minimum* pit time, meaning drivers have to wait and get penalized if they leave the pits too early.
=Smidge=

It's also important, as I understand it, that the cars all be the same so they can limit the number of unknowns when evaluating performance and engineering of the vehicles.

My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is they're too gimmicky with the "Fan boost" thing.
=Smidge=

No. For two reasons:

First, it's an IR telescope. The reason they're putting it in space is to get it away from Earth's atmosphere, which is opaque to the IR wavelengths it's designed to detect. Earth would look like a light bulb for all the IR it gives off and there is zero chance of seeing the surface.

Second, even if it could somehow be used to see through the opaque atmosphere, it couldn't make out anything. The James Webb telescope has a claimed resolution of 0.1 arc-seconds. It's going to be put into the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million km from the Earth. At that distance and resolution, each pixel of the image would be ~730 meters square... just under half a mile. Useless for any kind of surveillance.
=Smidge=

That makes sense if you're building devices directly on the wafer, but wouldn't the three sacrificial layers interrupt that?

=Smidge=

Except that, with the exception of natural gas, you have a lot of other combustion products to deal with. CO2 emissions from cement production are the result of baking the carbon out of the calcium carbonate, and it's relatively pure and therefore easier to deal with.

There are also only ~100 cement plants in the US, versus thousands of fossil power plants.

-The US produces about 5,500 million metric tons per year of CO2.
-Cement production releases about 1.25 tons CO2 per ton.
-The US produces about 68 million tons (2011) of cement per year.

68*1.25 = 87.5 million tons CO2 per year for cement production. That's 1.5% of the total.

33-57% of that which is released during production.

Good job cherry picking the worst possible number instead of the one that actually applies. You even went out of your way to quote the article so carefully!

The part you quoted is for tropical zones and peatlands. So how much of the US is in a tropical climate zone, exactly? Hawaii and a little bit of Florida?
=Smidge=

The total US Hydro generation capacity is ~80GW. 12GW more would be an increase of 15%. I ball parked it at a conservative "at least 10%."

A relative handful of plants produce the majority of that power, but that doesn't change the numbers.
=Smidge=

CO2 generation isn't an impossible challenge. Since the concrete production is centralized, it can be sequestered on site, and concrete naturally re-absorbs that carbon over the decades. Even if you don't address the immediate emissions, since concrete production is a mere 1% or so of total CO2 output by the US and the entire lifecycle emissions (including construction, operation and decommissioning) for hydro is a tenth that of natural gas, you're still coming out way ahead.

=Smidge=

To US Energy Dept. estimated, in 2012, that there is ~12GW worth of power that could be tapped from existing, non-power-producing dams. That's handily 10% more hydro than what we've got now.

That same report estimates a potential for 65GW of new hydro power installations (85GW if you allow trampling of federal protected lands).

The reason hydro isn't talked about is because of uninformed people like you who think there's no additional capacity.
=Smidge=

It's called spinning reserve, and it's the reason electricity is often so much cheaper at night. Large thermal power plants can take days to shut down and restart, so they need to keep them running anyway.

The problem can be mitigated through various means; and as problems go this is a pretty good one to have.

Storage is the obvious solution. It doesn't even need to be high quality storage, but to reduce over-generation you just need a place to dump the excess energy. You could just dump this energy as heat but optimally you'd want to recover some of it. You don't even need enough storage to carry you through the night, just absorb the over generation and shave peak. Thermal storage would work fine for that, would be relatively inexpensive and could work with existing thermal power plants. Encouraging domestic battery storage, even a few kWh worth, would also help. Almost any existing hydro could be retrofitted for axillary pumped storage.

Less obvious is to tinker with the solar panels themselves, tuning the orientation so you are optimized for late afternoon capture rather than maximum kWh/day generation. That makes the "dip" in the graph shallower and lowers the slope of the ramp.

Retire old plants that are too inflexible to meet variable demand efficiently. In other words, ditch coal.

Add usage penalties (aka "demand charges") during the ramp-up period. There are already demand charges for peak power, but spreading the demand charge out would incentivize energy efficiency and time of use habits.

Basically, there is nothing here that can't be managed with existing technology, but commercial power producers are scared shitless they'll be out of a whole lot of money. Solar is a direct threat to baseline generation (coal and nuclear) as it pushes the usefulness of peak shaving generation (gas turbine) farther into the night hours and makes baseline generation all but obsolete.
=Smidge=