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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

That seems like just a different way of saying to stop using fossil fuels, which is true but hard to achieve when the vast majority of our transport is done using them. Electrified public transport taking precedence over cars would accelerate the process but so many people are opposed to public transit.

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which is true but hard to achieve when the vast majority of our transport is done using them

Many countries have passed laws to make selling new fossil fuel powered cars illegal within the next couple of decades. You might argue that's too slow, or even not possible, but the intent to reduce reliance on ICE transport and move to electric vehicles is definitely there.

We'll have to see how that pans out - I don't weigh intent very strongly when it comes to averting climate disaster.

Most fossil fuel use is outside of transportation, and within transportation cars and trains are a fairly easy transition. Electrified highways solve the issue for Trucks.

Boats and aircraft are more difficult, but there are a range of viable options for each. For example the US uses a little over 18 billion gallons of aviation fuel a year and produces 17 billion gallons of ethanol per year. It’s not a drop in replacement, but it is much easier than hydrogen or batteries.

> Electrified highways solve the issue for Trucks.

In principle sure[0], but the devil is in the details with anything like this. You could also solve the intermittency of PV with a planet scale HVDC grid, much cheaper than batteries, but doing so would need a long time just to mine the metal ores out of the ground (someone asked me to do the math, and I did, it’s hiding somewhere in my comment history).

[0] of course Tom Scott did a video about this, in some ways he is the vlogger equivalent of xkcd: https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg

The general solution to intermediacy is excess production. If you assume EV’s win, the batteries needed for that dwarf what you need for a Wind/PV/hydro grid.

Sure, albeit with the exception of a few polar settlements. (IIRC, small thought those are, the required reduction in emissions is such that we do still need to care about them in aggregate).

Indeed, I expect the battery market to grow as fast as the factories can keep up, and for some fossil mining workers to switch to other minerals important for renewable power (not all of them, because we don’t burn the stuff when we’re done so demand ought to be lower when the energy transition is complete).

But the point remains that the details do matter. This stuff may, like code, even remain experimental until it’s obsolete.

Electrifying boats should be easier than cars. It's probably just not that much of a priority because fuel costs are much less relevant.

On a second though, transportation modes tend to fall on a curve where the more relevant are the fuel costs, the harder they are to electrify. Cars and buses are just on a sweet spot of the curve.

You can buy solar powered electrified boats, even with solar they have short ranges and low speeds. Fine for a pleasure trip but not even close to enough for say a tugboat.

The extreme end is icebreakers which actually sometimes use nuclear power because even fossil fuels have energy density issues. Not that we need to replace nuclear icebreakers, but many countries use the non nuclear version, and when you start talking ~100MW * weeks the batteries needed get crazy.

It'll play out in the opposite manner. The shift to EVs is going to happen first, followed by public transit. This is because EVs don't have a consensus / coordination problem. Electrifying a line or building a new line takes a minimum of a decade of planning, consultation, design and study, construction. But cars need replacement all the time and you can just go to a website and get an EV. Prices for batteries fall about 30% for every doubling of production. The spread of EVs is exponential, not linear. Sales roughly double every three years and many OEMs have stopped ICE development altogether. Once new car sales are close to 100% EV, existing stock will naturally die off.

Cars will electrify far faster than busses and trains in North America.

All 2300 or so busses in the LA metro fleet will be electrified by 2030 fwiw

Yeah, that's basically the point of the book. Acknowledging that our dependence on fossil fuels is hard to break, but outlining an actually realistic plan for doing so.

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