Sustainable Energy, USA and worldwide

No. I think robotic taxis will both happen and be huge. I am just also very confident they wont make anyone super duper piles of money. The barrier to entry does not exist, so the cost of a ride will freefall until it just barely pays for the wear and cleaning of the cars. In particular almost none of the profits from it will accrue to car makers.

Just found out about this thing: A 1990s age energy treaty in Europe that is (mis)used by energy companies to delay the clean energy transition.

Over time, supply and demand should reach a point of market saturation wherein you can't make a profit running robo-taxis, but that world is decades out and the advantage to the early mover is huge.

Anyway, individuals won't operate their own robo-taxi service; that would be complex and unworkable. Rather, Tesla will allow owners to second their cars into its network when they are idle. It returns a portion of the revenue to those owners. Tesla controls the whole process so it can set whatever rates it needs to profit from the deal, and it will also operate its own in-house fleet.

For competition to drive prices down to the point where it's no longer profitable implies a world in which robo-taxis are so ubiquitous that personal car ownership is unnecessary, and what a problem to have!

A world inching ever-closer to the point where only the wealthy can actually own anything and everyone else is renting at a premium dictated by megacorporations that have tried to absorb as many disparate industries as possible? Yeah, that sounds bad.

A world where I can summon a car at a moment's notice to go wherever I want, completely autonomously, for a lower cost than owning my own car while also freeing up my garage for useful purposes? Allow me to pay fealty to my new corporate overlords.

Edit: Seriously, this will be a quality of life increase for many people while also reducing the cost of transportation, freeing up more income for other purposes. If there are access issues, that is government's job to regulate, along with ensuring a minimum standard of service.

Oh, and don't forget the nearly total elimination of millions of annual deaths and hundreds of millions of injuries from car crashes.

I love how we brush off revolutionary improvements to human living conditions with "fuck corporations, yo". Sure, Karl, let's all live on collective farms and die at thirty from typhoid fever just to spite those horrible horrible businesses.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 25th 2021 at 8:11:02 AM

"There's an interesting article discussing how Tesla gives drivers a motivation to be engaged in monitoring Autopilot and thus there are fewer negligent crashes."

You have the link to that article? Because I would like to read it.

The article is here, by CleanTechnica. I didn't post it originally because it's a little "fuzzy": lots of theory, not so strong on rigorous analysis. It does make an interesting point that by giving Tesla drivers an emotional stake in driving safely, they perform much better at monitoring the vehicles while they are on Autopilot.

Specifically, they want Tesla to succeed, and thus they don't want to take any risks that might put the company in a bad light. They've been given the privilege of testing the latest software and they take it as an enormous responsibility.

More generally, by emphasizing that the software is not capable of driving in all situations and the driver remains responsible for monitoring it, drivers are much safer than if they are told that the company is responsible for it and they're just supervising. This may have been Uber's fundamental error.

I am not vouching for this analysis, just presenting it for consideration.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 25th 2021 at 5:26:22 AM

I see. That might not scale to other types of drivers, though.

Well, the idea is that by the time Tesla has enough market penetration to eliminate the "loyal customer" factor, FSD will be good enough that it won't require supervision.

As we’ve converted before, there’s going to be a time gap between “is technologically capable enough to not need supervision” and “is legally allowed to operate without supervision”.

Look at how long it’s taking for weed to be legalised even though the science says the dangers are minimal to non-existent.

Likewise there’s still the profitability question for robo-taxis, Concord solved the science of supersonic commercial flight, but it couldn’t win against the economics of it. The removal of the driver has to save enough costs that the price to use a robo-taxis is low enough to expand the market. Otherwise you’ll just have the market stay the same size but with no drivers, which isn’t much of a revolution.

How did we get to discussing energy storage in the electric vehicles thread and self-driving in the sustainable energy thread? My head is spinning.

Because Tesla came up in this one. And then the energy requirements for all-electric vehicles came up in the other.

Well, I've continued the conversation in the Self-Driving Cars thread.

And I'm bringing this conversation over from Electric Vehicles:

@Fighteer: "During the day you have a ton of output from solar."

Not during northern hemisphere winters you dont. The problem for renewables isn't daily fluctuations, it's seasonal.

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 26th 2021 at 10:13:06 AM

Actually, daily fluctuations are a problem too.

"In many energy markets the peak demand occurs after sunset, when solar power is no longer available. In locations where a substantial amount of solar electric capacity has been installed, the amount of power that must be generated from sources other than solar or wind displays a rapid increase around sunset and peaks in the mid-evening hours, producing a graph that resembles the silhouette of a duck."

Hm, EV's as a storage device wont help there, because people are just coming from home from work and their cars will be depleted. Actually, widespread adoption of EV's will worsen the problem.

A nuclear power plant would flatten all these curves right out.

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 26th 2021 at 10:22:27 AM

Actually that's not entirely the case. EVs returning from work should still have a healthy amount of charge, especially if they were able to plug in during the day. This implies that workplaces installing EV chargers is absolutely critical to effective grid management, but still.

If I leave home at 90% charge and drive 25 miles to and from work, I'll get home at what, 80% charge? That's hardly an emergency. Under automatic, distributed grid management, plugging my car in at home might actually drain its battery to sustain peak loads. Then it can charge back up in the later hours when there's not as much demand.

How will we get consumers to accept this? Pay them for the energy.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2021 at 10:30:46 AM

Me, I wonder how stable a grid would be where EVs are both a substantial power sink and a substantial power buffer - which is what would happen if e-cars can also double as a battery for the grid. Since they are independent from grid status (i.e the numbers of recharging e-cars and discharging e-cars is not in any way influenced by the current source-sink status of the grid) I could imagine that sudden, large fluctuations of demand and supply could occur.

First, you're right that we can't rely on them exclusively as a source of distributed storage, but that kind of misses the point that we're talking about statistical averages, not individual behavior.

If there are a million EVs in existence, trying to manage grid energy flow on the basis of when they are plugged in is futile. But if there are a billion of them, you absolutely can make such predictions in aggregate. You just have to build in enough slack to account for fluctuations.

You can even use social trends to predict grid usage — Super Bowl Sunday, for example, is a peak time because half of the U.S. is at home, cooking food, and watching their TVs, but at the same time their cars are all parked.

This is made easier because the cars will be smart enough to tell the grid when they are plugged in and, if self-driving and automatic trip planning are a thing, they can even tell the grid when they will be plugged in.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2021 at 11:00:59 AM

The natural disaster hardening will have to be double strong on such a grid. You could end up with grid output reducing due to weather, energy use increasing as people try and cope, combining with vehicle based storage going down as people flee the area and/or disconnect their cars incase they need to flee.

Edited by Silasw on Feb 26th 2021 at 7:42:03 PM

"If I leave home at 90% charge and drive 25 miles to and from work, I'll get home at what, 80% charge?"

Ok, but that means you have 20% less capacity in the EV emergency storage buffer. As we saw in Texas, a margin that large can make a huge difference. And the amount of buffer isn't predictable? I'm not saying that this is a bad idea, we clearly need all the electric storage we can get, I'm just saying that this won't be enough.

So where will the extra capacity come from?

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 26th 2021 at 1:11:42 PM

Trying to use vehicles as an energy buffer in extreme conditions also graduates to potentially endangering lives.

Fundamentally we're talking about a decentralized storage system, not a grid that depends on cars specifically. After all, the same could be said of a Powerwall: the main difference is that a car has utility as something other than a battery.

Like I pointed out before, during the power crisis in Texas last week you could tell who had solar/battery and who didn't because the former had their lights on.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2021 at 1:51:24 PM

Like I pointed out before, during the power crisis in Texas last week you could tell who had solar/battery and who didn't because the former had their lights on.

Sorry, but when I hear of that I get a vision of an underfunded two-class power grid with some people who have backups and others don't and where the former refuse to fork out money for maintaining the grid.

I think in Texas it’s actually the later group (the people who eschew renewables and thus wouldn't have solar/green backups) who voted against funding the grid properly.