> The batteries bite into freight capacity and completely fuck up the economics of trucking in America.

They kinda don't because weight limits are higher for battery electric trucks for exactly this reason, and by the time you eliminate the fuel (200lbs), engine with accessories (3000lbs) and transmission (1000lbs) and add the batteries back in (up to 10000 lbs) minus the 2000lb additional weight allowance for EVs and you're not losing much if anything.

> So the relatively small reduction in capacity from adding a battery completely blows all of the calculations out of the water and breaks the system.

It absolutely does not. While it would be ideal to do so, not that many trucks routinely operate right at their max GVW. Again, electric long distance hauling is already a thing and has been for a few years now. Clearly the industry/reality knows something you don't.

> To be honest I don't follow things closely enough

Or at all, seemingly.

You still didn't touch upon the "specialized applications" comment though. What were you referring to when you said that?
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> So besides a handful of extremely specialist scenarios electric semis or a no-go.

Define "specialist scenarios"

The majority of freight moves under 250 miles per trip. About 73% by weight according to the BTS. So longer trips by truck - over 250 miles - are the exception not the rule. So what "specialist scenarios" are you referring to, since it obviously isn't relatively short trips that are the majority of use cases?

And before you answer, be aware that all-electric long-haul semi trucks have been successfully operating in Europe for years, so any reasons you might come up with why it can't or won't work are immediately scuttled by the fact that it's already being done.
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You realize that the refrigerator unit on those trucks are entirely separate units, right? Whether the truck itself is electric or not, the refrigeration module is going to be an diesel powered unit fitted by a secondary company.

That's true whether a semi-trailer or box truck.
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> Adding more battery always adds more weight which reduces range

Adding more battery increases range, not reduces. Adding more battery increases weight, which reduces cargo capacity. That's the problem for trucks, which have a total weight limit and you want as much of that weight to be stuff you're getting paid to move.

> At some point, you are at a flat stage where more battery adds the same amount of range as it reduces.

This is literally never true in practice. To get to a point where more battery = less range, you would need to have a vehicle that is barely able to move its own weight. Even then it's questionable if you'll actually reach an inflection point.

The practical limits on battery size is cost first and foremost, and physical space after that.
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> After they practiced doing it wrong for an hour at home as their first exposure to the idea? Great plan with no drawbacks!

No, they would not be practicing anything for the first time at home. The whole point is they review the lecture/reading materials/youtube videos or whatever on their own in a way that suits them and the application of that knowledge happens in class.

> There's not one right way for students to learn, because different people learn best in different ways

Which is exactly why you let them do that, at home, and monitor their progress in the classroom and make corrections as needed.
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There's long been a school of thought that the homework should be the learning portion of the curriculum, and the classwork should be the practice portion. The exact opposite of how it's currently done. Students can read the assignments or learn at their own pace using whatever methods they find suits them, and then can demonstrate their understanding and practice their new knowledge under supervision of a teacher who can help them with any difficult spots and recommend tools/methods that might work better.

This also solves the "cheating" problem because you can't copy someone else's knowledge without actually learning it and an LLM can't learn it for you either.
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Couple things here.

First; The amount of heat rejected to the atmosphere for all of human production would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what is already reaching the Earth from the sun; over 170,000 Tera-watt hours of energy in the form of sunlight per hour, which is roughly how much energy all of humanity consumes per year. All of human energy use is ~0.01% of the energy the Earth receives from the sun.

Second, we're already adding that energy to the atmosphere. How do yo think coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power work? Even solar and wind capture energy and turn it into heat. The point is to not produce CO2 in the process, because;

Third, the heat gain is more than offset by the reduction in greenhouse gasses that keep that heat from radiating back out into space, which is what causes the warming in the first place.
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> Not sure about the geothermal(does it scale outside of special cases?)

Depends on what you mean by "scale." It's geologically limited, as in you need to find the right spot to build them, so in that sense they do not scale well... but otherwise the Earth has a functionally unlimited amount of heat energy to tap, so in that sense they scale better than nuclear since we have a definitely finite (if large) amount of nuclear fuel on this planet.

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Yeah but if you drive into a lake, even without the panic and well practiced motions, untangling yourself from a seatbelt could delay your escape by 5 to 10 seconds; a significant portion of the estimated 30-45 seconds you'll have to escape a sinking vehicle. You'll probably say something like "It doesn't take me even 5 seconds to undo my seatbelt" so I'll just point out that every time you've done so to date, your car was not nose-down like an amusement park ride.

> Its air bags I object to having to pay for. Have never been in a situation where they would have been an advantage, and that includes 62 years of driving.

Good for you. Unfortunately for your argument, the entire point of a safety device is that you hope to never need it. Have you ever been in a collision bad enough that the seat belt broke a rib or at least left bruise marks across your chest? If not, you have also never been in a situation where a seatbelt would have been an advantage... but you seem to at least understand their efficacy, because you wear them. Meanwhile, airbags save an order of magnitude more lives than the number of people who drive into bodies of water, let alone die as a result.

The fact that drowning in a sinking car is so rare is what makes the national news almost every time it happens. Someone gets into a severe collision and the airbags and seatbelts keep them alive is so common it hardly gets mentioned as part of a local traffic report.

Yet here you are arguing against airbags, yet for rear windows based on some hypothetical advantage they might offer in an already rare occurrence... despite protocol for rescuing people from sinking vehicles not involving rear windows because dragging someone over/between the front seats in near zero visibility in a moment where every second counts is far worse an option than busting out the side window and opening the door. It is the definition of irrational.
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> it generates only a tenth of what the car consumes

Surely they generate more than a tenth of the approximately zero watts it consumes while parked?

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You're one of those people who doesn't wear a seatbelt either, aren't you?

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Whether or not they could afford a different vehicle is irrelevant.

The point is the vehicle they chose, regardless of the reason, is way below average performance in this use case and is not representative of the average experience.
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> EV's for long trips aren't great. I have a Chevy Bolt 2023 EUV. Cross-state trips take 50% longer than a gas car.

I know it's a cop-out to blame your choice of vehicle for your experience, but please understand that the 2023 Bolt EUV has a max DCFC power of 55kw. That's about a third what the majority of vehicles are capable of (150kw peak) and about 30% less than what my 2020 Kona EV can pull (75kw) - another vehicle that was comparatively under powered when it was new.

Your 2023 Bolt EUV is literally the second worst charge-performing EV you can find in the US, with the #1 spot being the 2024 Fiat 500e.

I hope you're not too disillusioned with EVs because of it; the EUV is a perfectly fine vehicle for daily use especially for the price. Just know that your experience is not typical.
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> I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance.

And I'm saying you cannot effectively do load shifting without storage. Renewables tend to peak mid-day, especially solar, and the ability to soak up that surplus energy is dependent on actually having loads that can be dispatched at that time. We're talking about domestic energy use which is not very flexible; Okay great you can do your laundry with cheap solar electricity at 10AM but that's not helpful if you're not home at 10AM. There's very little a typical homeowner can do here unless they've invested in additional equipment. Storage batteries and water heaters are the most obvious choices and are easily scheduled to take advantage of electricity rates. Taking a half day off work to do all your household chores is a bit less practical.

> If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm.

That's exactly not how coal power works, and that's actually the core problem. You can't turn a coal plant on and off on a whim; it can take north of a full day to get one of those things started. This means you can't afford to turn off a coal plant from 10AM to 3PM when renewables are peaking because you won't be able to turn it back on in time for the 4PM peak demand. The coal plant stays on, and now you have to soak up the surplus energy to avoid blowing up the grid. In case you missed it, this is *exactly* the reasoning discussed in the article.

This is not about saving you, the consumer, money. If electricity is expensive to buy then that cost gets passed on to you. The only economic factor at play is the cost of curtailing renewables - curtailment also costs money and those costs CANNOT be passed on to the consumer. Utilities want to avoid curtailment and would rather give electricity away for free than absorb those costs. This point is, again, in the article.
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Not exactly. Electricity must be consumed at the same time it's generated, and the stability of the grid hinges on supply and demand being balanced. Load shifting requires storage, which there isn't enough of, so using electricity now usually does not help much to avoid using electricity later unless you have some form of storage (e.g batteries, thermal storage tanks)

That's happening is you have inflexible electricity sources - your so-called "base load generators" - that cannot be throttled down, and renewable power that is very "use it or lose it" since they cannot be dispatched on demand, resulting in a surplus of generation. Wholesale electricity prices go down because supply exceeds demand, and continues into negative wholesale prices because you cannot tolerate a surplus of generation without destabilizing the grid.

So yes it's about "using power when it's there" but it has nothing to do with "not using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on." It has to do with the fact that you can't turn some plants off and they need to encourage extra usage during times of glut to avoid crashing the whole system. Operators have no problem with people using "expensive" electricity 'cause they're gonna pass those costs on to you anyway.
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