That's a weird understanding. Are you on a lot of heavy drugs? While burning biomass is one form of renewable energy, it's hardly exclusively what is meant when people say "renewable energy". You also missed the part where you don't clear cut forests. Whatever you're growing, you grow it in a sustainable way. If it's trees, you use sustainable forestry techniques like they're supposed to use in the lumber industry (certainly you should not be cutting down old growth forests). Of course, if you're growing just to burn biomass, large trees are not the way to go. Willow, poplar, eucalyptus are some trees that have good yields for burning but bamboo or giant king grass might be better in many locations. Also, when you say that burning trees is far more polluting, you have to define what you mean. In terms of CO2, it's certainly not because it's a closed cycle. The CO2 that goes into the atmosphere came from the atmosphere in the first place and in the recent past, so you maintain equilibrium. As for other pollutants, it's not actually very polluting at all if you do it properly. You're probably thinking of an open fireplace. Consider, however, a three stage catalytic wood burner. First stage is typical burning like in a fireplace. However, the heat from that heats up a sinusoidal pipe that's bringing in more air, heating it up and that air is mingled with the hot smoke, burning the unburned material in the smoke. Then, what's left goes through a catalytic burner that's pretty much the same thing as a catalytic converter in a car. That does a final burn of just about everything remaining including polluting nitrogen compounds. The final result is that basically everything that can be burned is burned and the exhaust is very clean. Do basically that on an industrial scale and add a scrubber and you've got a relatively non-polluting system. Of course, it's not absolutely perfect That though, is why you're better off with solar panels, wind turbines, etc. You know, the renewables you ignored in order to have a nice strawman to attack.

But none of them normally need 100% battery coverage. It's all about figuring out the risk of a period of downtime over a wide geographical area and what amount of risk is acceptable. Just like with other power sources.

Ah. Of course. Missed that one. Doesn't help that I inverted the direction since I didn't think it mattered. Thanks for pointing that out. Of course that means that the distance was not carefully chosen to be right in between typical ranges for BEVs and ICE vehicles, it was just a coincidence. Not sure what to think about that. I assumed that the poster was being manipulative with the choice, but at least clever. Now it looks like I have to drop the clever bit, but give them more credit for not being manipulative... I think it ends up being mostly a wash.

OK, you're leaving out one major thing, but also a bunch of other things. I'll deal with the other things first, then get to the major thing at the end.

Assuming your numbers are right, and I think you need to provide your sources, that would be about $3,342.87 per person in the US. Of course, those would last a good 15 years or so. That means $222.86 per person per year, or $18.57 per person per month on their power bill. So, not too bad if your numbers are accurate.
There is the question, of course, of if your numbers are accurate. So, you have $1,170,000,000,000 worth of battery storage and let's assume a cost of something like $300K per MWh of storage. That means 3,900,000 MWh, or 3.9 TWh. That seems in line with average residential electricity usage for the US of about 4.2 TWh per day. Of course, that's the whole day. If we look for the place in the US with the longest night on the shortest day... well, we get places in Alaska that have 24 hour nights because they're in the Arctic circle. If we ignore the state that has about 740K people, the longest night is in NorthWest Angle, Minnesota and the daytime is still 8 hours and 14 minutes. On the same day, the place with the shortest night is Key West, Florida, which gets 10 hours and 36 minutes of daylight. Sure, it's not the best daylight for solar power in either of those places, but you're still being misleading about how much power needs to be stored.

The reality is that, if built so that the mean power generation is exactly the mean power requirement, then the mean power generation in winter is roughly 40% of the overall mean. So, you don't have to actually store 100% of the needed power, reducing your number. Plus the fact that you don't actually have to build to provide exactly the mean power needed, you can overbuild so that you have more surplus power year round, and a higher percentage of daily required power in the Winter (you're sure to point out that it needs to be stored, but more on that later) Then there are other factors, like typically reduced power needs after daylight hours. Then there are households that have their own battery storage which can reduce the need for grid storage (and remember, with EVs everywhere and systems that let houses draw from their cars at night, and a smart grid, grid storage requirements could be even lower). Then there are the types of storage that most households have even without battery storage. For example, about 16% of residential electrical usage is for heating hot water, which is then stored in a tank that can keep it hot for days. So if you have a smart system that heats the water only when non-stored power is available, a percentage of that surplus capacity from overbuilding can be stored without needing battery storage on the grid. Not to mention that, for home heating, you can heat hot water during the day (with a heat pump system) and release it into the house at night to heat the house as well, reducing the need for electricity at night for heating.

Aside from that, remember that the US is four time zones wide. So with a reasonable power grid, and some overbuilt storage for solar power in the different time zones and in the regions further South with longer days, you can get a lot of extra power so that the overnight storage requirement is even less.

OK. Now I will address the major thing you left out that I mentioned at the start. That is that powering the entire US with just solar and batteries, while possibly a fun mental exercise, is contrived if being used to calculate the battery needs for the grid. Even ignoring other sources and storage systems like hydro and hydro storage, geothermal, etc. there's the obvious other power source: wind power. Wind is strongest in the US in Spring, but second strongest in Winter. Whatever the mean capacity factor for wind power, it will be above that capacity factor in Winter, reducing the needed storage for overnight by a lot.

Ultimately, when you consider all of the factors, you clearly would not need 100% of the days energy stored for Winter. Realistically, with a well designed system, you would need a third or less. So that portion of the average utility bill would be around $6 per month per person or less. So, not actually bad at all, really.

Now, it is worth noting that we are only talking about Residential usage. Other uses like industrial and commercial are about twice residential usage. Still, most of the same factors apply. Plus, for most commercial usage, the drop in usage at night is a pretty big drop. Industrial varies. There are a lot of industrial customers who also stop at night, but there are plenty of big power draws that can run all night. Overall though, given most of the same arguments that apply to residential, commercial and industrial would also only need about a third of a days power usage or less stored for overnight usage.

There is also the drop in price that goes along with scale. I cited $300k per MWh, but it's already down to around $180K in some places. With battery prices dropping and other battery chemistries and perfection of the methods for building out this kind of storage, it should get even cheaper. So, the quoted price drops by potentially another 40% or more.

In the end, it seems like you think you're presenting a showstopping giant number, but it seems like you're actually presenting a great deal. The current US administration just asked for $1.5 trillion for the military. Not for decades like the grid storage, mind you. For a year. Also, while all sorts of arguments can be made about defense of the country, etc. the basic reality is that the money is for oil related wars. Big numbers don't really look so big when you look at the other big numbers we're already spending.

Warsaw to Berlin is about a 5.5 hour drive. It also seems to be cherry picked as a distance that is just slightly beyond the range of an average EV, but just in range of an average ICE. The average EV can make the trip with one charging stop from 20% to 80%. The average time for that charge is about half an hour (though some EVs can do it about a quarter of an hour). So, that makes the 5.5 hour drive a 6 hour one. That's about a 9% increase in travel time or less. Not showstopping for most people.
Basically it looks like new battery architectures that are on the horizon that will hold more charge and also be able to charge faster are going to force you to move the goalposts when you ask that question.

You haven't established that it would. If you just consider the basics, using cars as an example, gasoline has 33.6 kWh per gallon. Average fuel economy is 26 MPG. That means about 1.3 kWh per mile. Meanwhile average miles per kWh for EVs is 3 to 4.2. We'll just use 3. So, an EV getting 3 miles to the kWh is using about 25.64% of the energy of an EV. Going back to TFA, gasoline prices have gone up by about $1.05 per gallon, and could go up more and for diesel it's 1.69. People in the US buy about 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline per week and about 1 billion gallons of diesel. So that's about $4.2 billion per week just in price increases due to this disruption. In terms of overall weekly cost, it's $15.3 billion. Meanwhile, the war itself, which is yet another oil-driven war, is costing (if you include known figures for support to Israel and other gulf states for the war) is about $10 to $13 billion per week. I would say that we don't have wars for oil every week, but if you look at the last few decades, it would be entirely fair to say every other week.

So, using electricity, especially locally sourced, is massively cheaper so far, but then we do have to consider infrastructure. Of course, it doesn't look like that will be any more expensive than the infrastructure needed for ICE vehicles. You certainly haven't shown that it would be. As it stands, it is looking like we will mostly pay for it through our purchases of electricity. Going by the current national average per kWh of electricity for 17.45 cents, a gasoline gallon equivalent is about $5.86. However, if you adjust that for the mileage difference, it's $1.50. Of course, the cost of electricity has gone up 28% in just the last five years, which is 7.4% above nominal inflation and a good portion of that increase is the rise in cost of natural gas, tying back in again to the problems of unstable fossil fuel prices.

So the cost of infrastructure is just one of the involved costs. A pretty strong rule of thumb is that the infrastructure used to distribute a resource is less valuable/costly than the resource itself. Ultimately, the infrastructure requirements for oil distribution are less costly than the infrastructure requirements for electrical distribution. Now, there is the fact that liquid fuels are very energy dense. If you build a big pipeline, the Wattage in the fuel traveling through the pipeline can certainly exceed the Wattage in a similarly priced set of electrical lines. There is the approximate factor of four advantage the electricity has for applications like transportation or heat pumps, but even then a big pipeline wins. That changes though when you get to "last mile" distribution. There's simply so much more involved in the distribution of fossil fuels than in the distribution of electricity. Especially when more of the electricity is locally generated rather than needing to be shipped around the world. In the end, the infrastructure for electricity distribution is likely to be less expensive overall than what is required for the distribution of liquid and gaseous fossil fuels.

As for the costs for AI data centers, that's a bubble. It's frustrating that we all end up paying more for electricity to support them. Of course, when the bubble bursts, hopefully the extra capacity and infrastructure will be useful for increased electrification of sectors like transportation.

It seems to me like you're creating a false dichotomy. Not to mention buying into the false dichotomy that building new infrastructure means increased costs in general. That argument fails to recognize that infrastructure is really a consumable with a limited lifespan and ongoing maintenance costs. You don't necessarily increases costs by replacing one form of infrastructure with another as the old infrastructure becomes obsolete and ages out, especially when the new infrastructure allows you huge savings on resource usage.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. Kind of baffled, actually. What technology that's less efficient than fossil fuels is being forced in?

Not sure what problems you mean, or what problems you're talking about that are not already being worked on. As far as EVs being a loss of freedom, you realize that no-one is actually going to stop you from using ICE vehicles if you need to. Although, if a pure BEV doesn't meet your range needs, there's always a PHEV. Now, a lot of PHEVs on the market are kind of green-washed garbage where they can't even actually operate normally on just battery power, but there are legit ones. With a sufficiently large battery, the average driver can probably get something like a 90/10 ratio on electric vs. gasoline usage and still have no range issues and basically all the advantages of an EV.

No, you just add a possible range for the result, or rather, that's what you would do if you had standard samples to manipulate with stearate coated gloves and run test after test against to see maximal and minimal levels of contamination when using said tools. Done correctly, this would let you know that anything above the maximum range is almost certain to be from actual plastics.

It's a growing niche, with every indication of eventually turning what it is displacing into a niche. If we want to go by your last post about cars, 1 in 5 new cars sold last year worldwide was electric and it's a growing market. For the electric shipping question, you first talked about electric shipping like it couldn't be done. When I pointed it that it can, you acted like ships stopping at ports to fuel wasn't a thing and that, anyway, that would mean spending money on infrastructure and having to spend money on infrastructure somehow precludes a thing from happening, the entirety of our modern civilization somehow notwithstanding. From my perspective, it seems like you're on the losing side of a lost cause. You just seem to really, really want electrification to fail in the face of the fact that internal combustion engines appear to be at their peak, but EV systems are still developing and improving (I mean, the motors are at maximum efficiency, but the battery technology is definitely still improving). For the life of me, I can't really understand why you're so insistent on fossil fuel tech over more modern and sustainable technology.

Ah. I know this one. XKCD reference here. So that you don't have to follow the link if you don't want to, it shows one of the stock characters showing a bride a graph indicating that, since she had 0 husbands yesterday, and 1 today, she'll have over four dozen husbands by late next month. In other words, it's cute that you can only make linear extrapolations.

As for ships and trucks not having worked yet. They, in fact, have, but they're still a niche. Sensible extrapolation of the technology shows them becoming more and more mainstream.

So now we're talking about consumer BEVs? Quite aside from the fact that you're intentionally downplaying the capabilities of BEVs, you're also exaggerating the sales situation. Despite the dip in sales when the Trump administration eliminated the tax credit, 2025 was still the second best year for US EV sales on record. Then, of course, we come full circle to the actual point of the article after all your goalpost shifting. The large rise in gas prices due to Trump's war is renewing interest in EVs. While it is too soon to have sales numbers, other indicators like web searches, etc. indicate increased interest. Of course, if we want to reverse the goalpost shifting altogether, we can go back to your first post and point out, as throughout this discussion, that electric ships and trucks are indeed making their way into shipping from producers.

The status quo has clearly changed since 100 years ago and it is continuing to change, so your argument makes little sense. Not to mention that you're pretending that EVs are useless now, which simply isn't the case.

Well, we're talking about around 50 MWh here. MCS systems go up to 3.75 MW for charging. So that would be about thirteen and a half hours. Except that there's no reason the battery system can't have parallel chargers. Use four of them and you can fill up in under three and a half hours. If the port can't handle 15 MegaWatts, you can just have containerized batteries onshore that charge the batteries in the ship. Of course, battery swapping is even faster, but you could charge by cable instead.

I'm getting this weird feeling like maybe your posts on this are parody. The rechargeable batteries available back in 1926 were unsealed lead acid batteries. The kind you had to fiddle around with a hygrometer and top up with water to maintain. They had a specific energy of maybe 30 Watt hours per kg. Basically around a tenth of modern EV batteries. Of course things have changed since then.

That is a well known economic theory. It's a version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It's actually a very old idea. It's probably been around since prehistory when people were mocking the idea of using round things to roll along the ground to carry heavy loads because, if it was worthwhile, people would already be doing it. It should be noted that progress usually happens despite people who think like that, not because of them.

I mean, your whole premise only works in an "all other things being equal" scenario, where the state of technology is static. That simply is not the case. Technology has advanced and is continuing to advance. The practical range and the charging/battery swap technology for such transportation choices is better now than in the past shows clear signs that it will be better in the future.

You're a bit out of date. They're already a thing. What is being experimented with at this point is the longer range ones. You're coming off as the guy who desperately wants to be right about heavier than air travel being impossible when companies like Wright, Fokker, and Sopwith were already competing on commercial sales.

I would say that you're like Lord Kelvin, except that, despite his massive hubris, he had some pretty impressive laurels to rest on and you do not appear to. He is a good example of someone who prominently insisted that heavier than air flight was impossible, and still refused to change his mind with extant flying aircraft right in his face figuratively speaking. I imagine also that, much like Kelvin, you'll move the goalposts as you go. Kelvin went gradually from completely impossible to claiming eternal impracticality without actually admitting that his position had changed.