US has an irrational dislike for overhead wires, for both trains and trolley buses (ubiquitous enough they have Unicode)
This isn't a problem of technology, and we can't "innovate our way out". Our dispersed suburban land use pattern is simply a mistake, and impossible to make efficient.
Efficiency comes from:
* Electrified freight rail for cargo transport into and between cities and buildings
* High speed intercity electrified passenger rail
* Frequent, automated subway and heavy rail in cities and their peripheries
* Frequent, ubiquitous trolleybuses to bring people to rail stations
* Dense apartment buildings with good noise cancellation which share heated walls, and use heat pumps for heating and cooling
* Renewable electricity
* Flights for trips >500km, taking passengers from several nearby cities who take high speed rail to the airport
ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES EXIST TODAY, we just need to be willing to adopt them. Because these technologies exist today, there is no sense in "waiting for technology to save us". We need to choose to adopt them, and abandon our inefficient policies now. These will always be the solutions, and we are just in denial that we need to adopt them.
but oddly, not for neighborhood electrical delivery.
Not compared to burial. The cost is up front (not amortized) and is a big enough multiplier that it won't overcome maintenance costs, especially when including buried repair/maintenance costs, which are significantly higher than overhead, even taking into account the lower frequency. (Tree roots, dug-up lines, cathodic decay and leaking conduits, necessary relocations, etc, all happen.)
There's nothing preventing the adoption of buried electrical today except the customer's willingness to pay for it.
New neighborhoods and houses that want it, pay for it. Simple as that. And nothing prevents replacing existing overhead except it becomes a 100% unnecessary cost, once overhead has already been installed.
>...and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground
>slight
4-10x upfront install cost. Higher in urban environments. Not slight.
If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?
> If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?
I don't think he made such a claim. There's an implication that it's 'worth it', but not that it's necessarily less expensive to implement.
Companies aren't making irrational decisions. They just haven't historically been paying for the externalities.
If you stopped subsidising the suburbs and suburbanites were forced to pay the 5x higher property tax rates it takes to maintain infrastructure, people's preferences would change.
Not to mention that they are subsidised within their own municipalities by commercial property and what little climate friendly housing is not NIMBY'd, typically by loud car sewers.
Not Just Bikes series on Strong Towns: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...
Everyone wants to live in a sprawling castle far away from pesky neighbors, they want to have an entire forest as a backyard and at the same time they want to have access to the same urban facilities as those in Manhattan.
There's no amount of innovation we could muster at least the next 2 decades to make that a financially feasible reality.
That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.
I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.
See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.
It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.
What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.
For example, how easy is it to make an image classifier with CLIP. https://openai.com/blog/clip/
Is everyone supposed to work in IT in AI-related fields?
Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?
> Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?
Is it more efficient to accommodate hundreds of millions of climate refugees rather than simply internalize the costs of climate change?
I’ve been thinking about it for a while and so far I understood that: people posting here live in a bubble, people doing their regular jobs at a shop, hospital, local doctor, builders, people who have children, bills, mortgages to pay, for them what counts is next paycheque. They won’t care about ev vs ice saving the planet because saving the planet isn’t solving any of their immediate problems. And those problems are basically being squeezed tax wise and having to earn enough to cover for inflation.
There are just so many people out there for whom sitting at a coffee shop for 20 minutes and waiting for the car to charge isn’t an option.
Many municipalities (I'll use my current location of St. Petersburg, FL as an example) are working to make the roads safer in all that ways that you (I assert, incorrectly) presume will never happen.
Are you sure you don't have that relationship backwards? Similarly,
> Especially since there is a strong link between weight/size and safety.
Solely for the given vehicle's occupants, and to the detriment of everyone else around them.
The sprinter is more susceptible to wind and driving surface variation.
Not to mention that the operating cost of the small vehicle is about 1/10 that of the large one.
Please don't foist green hydrogen fantasy propaganda in response, I've read it, it has no application in consumer transportation
Get off of your horse. BEVs aren't good for environment. Okay, there is no local pollution but the damage is done somewhere else.
The problem with electricity is the storage. Using electricity to produce hydrogen locally is a method to store said electricity. Hence: hydrogen.
Is that the old coal/nat gas trope that the fossil fuel a-holes trot out to FUD? Have you looked at LCOE for coal? And nat gas is about to be economically uncompetitive as well compared to alt energy, without subsidies. If there was a proper carbon tax, then it wouldn't be close.
Power companies lose money on coal, and are breaking even natural gas. They will be strongly incentivized by economics, not LIB-UR-AL REG-U-LATION, to get rid of that stuff as quickly as possible. Solar/wind is STILL dropping. Things have slowed in the LCOE graph, but I wonder how much of that price drop slowdown is inflation.
If you're talking about battery materials and car construction, that is, AT WORST, the same as building an ICE vehicle... except ICE vehicles have about a 100+ more components and parts than an EV. LFP chemistry (and hopefully sodium ion) batteries will be very cheap. Cobalt/Nickel chemistries are rapidly becoming the domain of vanity and luxury cars... the 300 mile LFP/Sodium car is probably about a year away, but it is coming.
EVs will drive research into Carbon Fiber as well: hopefully we get an breakthrough like the Bessemer process or Haber process that will deliver low-energy economical carbon fiber bodies. ICE/Big Oil never cared about that.
As for hydrogen as grid storage, well, you're just proving my point that it is inapplicable to consumer transport. Thermodynamic losses for hydrogen generation, even temporary, will make it noncompetitive once mass scale LFP/Sodium or other grid storage chemistries hit the big time.
Sure throw some research towards Hydrogen and fuel cells. They do have potential in aviation and long haul trucking/shipping. Just like we should throw some research at LFTR and next-gen nuclear.
You might as well have said "MONORAIL!"