The oil from the tar sands isn't really good for petrol that you put in a car, and we let our refining capacity wane over the years as it is.

Everything we're doing here in Canada (I'm also Canadian) is such a boondoggle. The pipeline that Trudeau bought will never be profitable, and any other pipeline we pay for will be a similar money-loser. (If pipelines were as good investments as Danielle Smith claimed, oil companies would pay for them.)

I'd be willing to see EV subsidies go away if the government would also get rid of oil and gas subsidies, AND get rid of the tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Like, everything the government does right now is a tilt towards some ultra-profitable oil and gas donor, and we could save a lot of tax dollars just doing a reset and not subsidizing anything. On that basis, EVs would almost certainly win on their merits.

(I bought a used EV. It was still the most expensive car I've ever bought, inflation adjusted. But it costs $2/100km to drive for the electricity. The only other thing I need to maintain are the tyres. The running costs are ridiculously low.)

I think the global numbers are low, honestly, and that's mostly down to this misadventure in Iran. Countries that had to ration oil and gas are seeing people flee to solar panels and Chinese EVs.

I actually kinda think that's what's going on already, tbh. My Ioniq 6 gets 100% of the claimed range at 90% charge, as near as I can tell. They've definitely fudged it a little.

Used EVs are such a good buy. My Ioniq 6 came with 40k km on it, and that's basically brand new. Certainly the interior and exterior look pristine, and without many wearing parts, the thing rolled off the lot with 100% of the claimed range (actually, a bit more) and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

It costs me about $2/100km of driving. I've seen petrol and diesel up to $2/L here on bad days, and even in a very efficient car, you need 5L/100km.

(One hiccup: someone literally stole my charging cable while the car was charging in my driveway. My fault, though. I didn't see the setting to keep the cable locked to the car unless the doors are unlocked. They just disconnected the power and it unlocked itself. But L2 chargers are so cheap, I'm only paying a 30c premium over home charging.)

Actually, yeah. Their reputation is on the line, and they won't survive as a company if they're wrong. It's not anonymous, it's not a think-tank generating faux reports to bolster some politician's opinion. Their name is now attached to this information, and if they're lying, that's it for them. They're not big enough to eat that kind of bad press and come out okay on the other side.

Valid concern, though the reality is that'll just leave the door open for 3rd party battery swaps. I bought my EV used knowing that the battery would probably outlast the body of the car, but in the off-chance that it doesn't, I'm actually a bit hyped for the potential to put a better battery in, with either longer range or less weight (though I assume a lighter battery would mess with the driving dynamics the car was designed for).

Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.

You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay to start is much bigger.

You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.

But that aside:

Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.

Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.

The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.

The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.

Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s...

no kidding. I just checked my June bill. We used 100 kwh less than last year...and the bill was 10% higher - a net 15% rate increase in a single friggin year!

Speaking of a DC micro grid, a company just got approval for a PoE on steroids setup. 1000 watts / 400 v DC over ethernet (18awg) called Fault Managed Power, and can be installed *without* an electrician.

https://www.panduit.com/en/pro...

this has some good diagrams

https://www.buildings.com/smar...

It's not aimed at existing edge PoE devices but higher power middle hardware that would feed those edge nodes.

regarding rates...we used 10% less power last month than a year ago. yet our bill was 10% higher. A 16% rate increase.

Data centers are here to make that grid stability go byebye.

They are huge loads that auto-trip offline if they sense even minute fluctuations to protect all the computer equipment. The grid isn't designed to handle that. NERC just issued it's highest warning over potential instability b/c these huge loads at multiple data centers will all follow similar patterns and all of a sudden multiple GW loads vanish.

US power rates outside CA are generally quite cheap and makes ROI longer, no argument about that.

Solar + batteries is basically locking in your power rates for 30 years, vs the 10-15% annual increases we're seeing. That makes the ROI shorten fast.

I had a 2003 Civic Hybrid with a battery that lasted 10 years/140k miles - 20 year old tech. Modern stuff is *much* better.

My current 2012 Insight hybrid is going on 14 years/110k miles and *just* starting to show some loss of capability.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/c...

30 YEAR warranty.

The way I look at it is this.

If you pay $2000 annually for your power. In 10 years that $20,000....probably more like $25,000 with rate increases.

In 30 years, that's $60,000 without rate increases.

$25,000 in solar to reduce your power bill for 30 years vs a guaranteed $60,000 spend is pretty no-brainer to me.

Outside of CA, US power rates are, at least for the moment, pretty cheap on average so that does extend the ROI period probably into 10-15 year territory.

DIY'ing a home sized battery is a great way to have your insurance deny a claim when you have one.

Building codes are still slow to catch up to newer types, but if it's not 'approved'/UL certified etc, something that big and even a small fire risk is gonna punt you out of coverage.

A YT'er put in a system and if it was 25 kwh in size, code said it needed a dedicated sprinkler system...even if the LFP batteries don't have the fire risk of Lithium Ion. So he sized it just under that.

Yet the same code lets you park a 100kwh LIthium Ion car battery in the garage without a sprinkler.