Tesla's dirty little secret on California's I-5 | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's dirty little secret on California's I-5

sfgate.com

30 pointsMilnerRoute27 comments

The secret is apparently that the site operates some local diesel generators at holiday rush periods to backstop the grid.

Isn't that exactly what we want though? You draw the clean power to the extent practical and then burn the junk fuels only in extremis. That allows for greater uptake of EVs on the whole while minimizing impact. What's the alternative being proposed? Sell fewer EVs or limit how much they can drive over holiday weekends? Who is that helping?

According to this crowd the alternative is probably to pretend bikes and trains can supply all transit needs and ignore the existence of rural and suburban areas.

Everyone just has to move into transit accessible cities. Of course that would require building massive amounts of urban housing that these same people would protest because it would “destroy the character of the neighborhood.”

There’s a certain mentality that thinks everything is wrong and horrible and any proposed solution is suspect unless it demands onerous sacrifice or doesn’t work. On the left it’s the degrowth people. On the right it’s the trads. God help us when those two groups figure out they’re actually on the same side.

(PS I think trains are great and we should build more of them. Same with urban housing. But trains can’t solve the entire problem. EVs are absolutely required to decarbonize as not everyone wants or is able to live in a dense city.)

"This crowd" usually suggests revisiting the US cultural default of living in car-dependent suburbs and relying on cars for everything.

That’s fine. We could cut probably 30-50% off our car use that way provided we could completely overrule NIMBYs and force massive urban development.

That would leave the other 50-70% of the country.

I feel like that was covered by the "Everyone just has to move into transit accessible cities" statement.

Before that, we had horses or donkeys to get around, as far as I can tell owning a household or personal beast of burden was about as common as personal or household car ownership is now.

People act like cars created a new paradigm, and they didn't - they extended and improved an old one.

In rural areas, yes, if you had the money. In cities walking, trains, and omnibuses were just as common. Suburbs didn't exist yet - they were specifically a coinvention of cars in the same way that you can't have smartphones without the cloud.

The earliest suburbs were along rail lines but they really exploded with cars.

Proto Suburbs did exist, sorta, but the nascent middle class was so small as to be meaningless

The specific case in point is holiday travel, though. You can't fix that with urban planning.

> these same people would protest because it would “destroy the character of the neighborhood.”

It's not the same people. The bikes-and-trains people understand and accept that America's suburbs are not fit for purpose and would require radical redevelopment to be even remotely green[0]. They want to vaporize the zoning code to allow this to happen. The NIMBYs who are shouting about neighborhood character specifically want to keep their cars and lawns, and think all the environmental problems America has are someone else's fault.

People are suspect of quick-fix solutions because we've had decades of being sold quick-fix solutions (plastic recycling, clean coal, electric vehicles) when climate change and environmental damage are complicated, multivariate problems.

TBH I have been skeptical of degrowth's left-wing credentials. I'm not entirely sure how we retain democracy without unbounded economic growth when...

a) Human society has an unlimited capacity for elite propagation[1]

b) Elites will absolutely cannibalize the rest of us if further growth is not possible

[0] No, having a green lawn does not make your house green.

[1] Gestures vaguely at The Tyranny of Structurelessness

> The NIMBYs who are shouting about neighborhood character specifically want to keep their cars and lawns, and think all the environmental problems America has are someone else's fault.

Oh The Urbanity! has a good (7m) video, 'The Problem of “Neighborhood Character”':

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bkC8YlBxoM

Rationally speaking the NIMBYs and pro-transit urbanists should not be the same people but people often hold absurdly contradictory views. I recall meeting people in California who were anti-development and wanted California to be a “sanctuary state” for immigrants and LGBTQ people who feel unwelcome elsewhere. So where will they live? Usually a complicated answer that boiled down to “not next to me.”

The suburbs probably can’t be as efficient as dense cities but they can be improved. The gap is also not as huge as you might think. A lot of a person’s footprint is in the food they eat and the stuff they buy not their house. People in cities still eat and buy things.

I agree that degrowth won’t work out well in any currently understood political system for numerous reasons. The “continued growth is impossible” argument is built on the fallacy that growth must equal increased resource use when in advanced economies these have been decoupling for a while.

The real limits to growth probably relate to the physical limits on the information density of mass-energy. How much value can exist per unit of “stuff?” Then there are things like space flight but I’m not even sure you have to go there.

The other reason this is better than the status quo is where the fuel is being burned. An ICE vehicle is burning fuel 5 feet from pedestrians and 15 feet from people's homes, and since it's portable it's harder to have reliable emissions controls. Even if there were no sources of renewable energy whatsoever, an EV is at the very least using power that was produced in a power plant that can be miles away from the city center.

Idiotic hit piece. They did this because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. Otherwise it would make zero sense as diesel is many times more expensive than grid power. As soon as grid power is available the diesel would be shut down.

Sometimes you have to do weird and seemingly silly things when you are doing something new. For some reason this reminds me of early server farms for web services in the late 1990s that had PS/2 mice hanging off the back of every server to allow them to boot properly. Silly example but shows the principle.

Lots of dumb anti-EV hit pieces lately. Oil and ICE industries must be worried.

Of course now lefties are piling on since Elon started huffing the same brand of glue as Tucker Carlson.

> Hidden in plain sight across the way from the Harris Ranch Supercharger’s main stations, behind a Shell station, is a small diesel plant that has helped power Tesla’s footprint.

Could have fit that in the title...

The dirty little secret of my F-150 is that although it does not require massive lithium mining and subsequent environmental pollution, it in fact requires the combustion of hydrocarbons thousands of times a second every time I start the engine. Needless to say I'm shocked and I am looking into alternatives.

This is a completely predictable outcome of an energy policy that pretends that intermittent power generation is substitutable for dispatchable power generation. Also related to a distributed energy system (diesel/gasoline) vs a centralized system (electrical grid).

Tesla claims they've solved both the intermittancy of renewable energy and bursty demand patterns with grid-scale solutions like Megapack. There's no excuse for running diesel generators.

Yeah no. I don't think Tesla makes that claim and if they do they are wrong. Megapack does not provide long term grid-scale energy storage that is required to remove dispachable generation from the grid.

If you can't remove dispachable generation because you need it to back up the intermittent generation then you've successfully increased your cost of energy considerably because you have to build and maintain two systems. Take a look at Germany for example or I think maybe trends in Australia.

You get legislate away dispachable generation as much as you want but until someone solves the energy storage problem you are just creating more problems tha you solve (unreliable and very expensive energy grid).

TL;DR: a stop on I-5 has superchargers powered by a Diesel generator if there isn't enough power to power them all

Or had, because apparently driving a couple hours isn't expected of journalists anymore.

> he doesn’t have current information about the specifics of the Harris Ranch Supercharger

Not a ton of substance but I do see this being expressed often:

> Time and again, every Tesla owner at the Harris Ranch Supercharger had a similar story. Their car wasn’t perfect — neither is the company — but it’s the best option for now to do long-range driving, to get them from one end of the state to another, especially at the front end of a busy weekend.

We have two Teslas and I really enjoy them even with their downsides. But I am _really_ excited for more brands to get a good charging experience on the road (convert to NACS in NA) and can't wait for the competition to keep on ramping. There are some awesome EVs out there hampered a lot by a lack of solid charging networks.

I really want to kick Tesla's butt into gear with more competitors.

This is an odd article. Just a massive Elon hit piece with little of substance.

I'm certainly no fan of Elon but this is not journalism, it's just an I-hate-Elon blog.

It makes the typical lazy assumption that all EV charging happens at fast chargers, which is not even close to being the case. Most people charge the majority of the time at home, and in California, approximately 60% of electricity delivered to your home comes from carbon-free sources.

The site linked to from the article, "Elon Musk Today", is kind of interesting. It claims to track things that Elon said he would do, but hasn't, and sure enough there are plenty of these, but it includes things like making X "The Everything App" and starting a program to research how to convert CO2 into rocket fuel.

Are they really complaining that these things haven't happened overnight? That's just petty.

Reminder that hedge funds that are short Tesla stock (and other stocks) spend many millions to PAY/sponsor people like the author to write hit pieces.

Not just blogs, also enitre media companies (CNBC for example) often considered "mainstream". This is not "just" a click-bait blog post (as in: the author doesn't necesarily primarily make money off of ads: the post itself is the ad).

Basically a bunch of hit pieces in exhange for cash under the pretention of journalism.

I've been trading stocks for a long time, and I've noticed this type of "journalism" is knee-capping a lot of companies at a higher rate than ever.

Here's a video of Jim Cramer (now CNBC) likely high on coke (source: my own judgement, take it with a grain of salt) basically openly admitting/bragging that this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyaPf6qXLa8

The video is from 2006

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