rgmerk

Also, parasitic losses in engines tend to be proportionally lower as the engines get bigger.

Compare the thermal efficiency of marine diesel engines to their automotive equivalents, for instance.

You might not care, but plenty of people clearly do. The current speaker of the US House of Representatives apparently cares a great deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/06/speaker-mike...

You might know that. I might know that. I can assure you that there are lots of people out there who don't realise it.

(sarcasm on)

Woohoo, we're almost all of the way there! Now all you need to do is ensure that the formal specification you are proving that the software implements is a complete and accurate description of the requirements (which are likely incomplete and contradictory) as they exist in the minds of the set of stakeholders affected by your software.

(sarcasm off).

It’s not just drilling deep enough, it’s whether they can keep the wells open and flowing long enough to make the whole thing economic.

Some deep geothermal projects have failed because the wells wouldn’t stay open. Maybe this generation of companies have solved this problem; let’s wait and see.

From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).

The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.

Curious - any references for those “rocket turbine” motors, particularly for this application? I’ve not seen that idea before.

In cold places district heating solutions with seasonal storage, like this one, make a lot of sense:

https://www.vantaanenergia.fi/en/about-us/projects/varanto-t...

The economics are pretty strikingly in favour of renewables and batteries, and one thing China does not have is cheap natural gas.

We can and do, and there are detailed plans based on those weather scenarios (eg for the Australian east coast grid; there is AEMO’s Integrated System Plan).

Things in the US are a bit more of a mixed bag, for better or worse, but there have been studies done that suggest that you can get very high renewables levels cost effectively, but not to 100% without new technology (eg “clean firm” power like geothermal, new nuclear being something other than a clusterfumble, long-term storage like iron-air batteries, etc etc etc).

To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.

You missed the iron law of the universe, which is never get between a capitalist and the possibility of a bucket of money.

That’s not how the maths works unfortunately.

Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.

It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.

It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.

Reactor fuel remains radioactive even when the reactor isn't operating.

And the proposal was a containerised nuclear reactor, so you're going to irradiate the surrounding containers in the process.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are completely different beasts. The reactor core is very heavily shielded, is built into the ship/boat, and is tended by a team of expert operators, and (at least in the case of US/UK subs) uses bomb-grade uranium as fuel.

Seriously? This couldn't be more "jumping on the AI hype train" if it tried.

I don’t understand why Hawaii doesn’t have more solar. Gotta be a lot cheaper than imported oil, even with the the US solar premium.

You’re not going to build a nuclear reactor (other than military ones) anywhere near a major port.

You power this the same way you power aluminum smelters - you have a big honking grid connection and build the generation capacity in places with more room.

In any case, the near-term use case isn’t across the Pacific, it’s to other Asian ports, of which there are numerous very large ones in reasonably close proximity. Think Singapore, Japan, Korea, and so on, all of which are well within 5000km of Chinese ports.

The Port of Los Angeles is one of the largest ports in the USA, and has about 1,800 ship arrivals annually.

If they were all electric, all of this size, and required a full charge on arrival, you’re talking about (very roughly) 1 GW continuous power requirement for charging the ships. That’s a lot; no bones about it, but it’s not unprecedented - aluminium smelters and data centers are similarly hungry for power.

Not quite. The difference in energy density is way more than that.

However, most large ships apparently have multiple times more fuel capacity than is required for 5,000km of range, which is what makes the electric version realistic.

Battery energy density is way behind that of bunker fuel, it’s just that cargo ships (at least as far as some googling suggests), have fuel capacity far in excess of what is required for a 5000km range.

A quick googling suggests that unloading such a vessel takes at least a couple of days, more likely 3-4.

Assuming two days available to charge the vessel, you'd need about 100MW continuous. Not trivial, but doable.

As far as battery fires go, sure, but a) there are already a lot of electric ferries in service so designing safe maritime battery packs isn't a new challenge and b) the alternative isn't exactly risk free either; we've seen plenty of oil spills from ships.

OK, I did some calculations based on:

* a 5,000 km electric range. * 40MW continuous power requirement for a 21.5 knot cruise speed[1] for a 14000 teu container vessel: * the size and weight capacity for the batteries being the same as the fuel capacity for a 14000 teu container vessel (taking the upper figure from [2]) * the battery pack having similar gravimetric (weight) and volumetric(size) energy density as this a modern Chinese NMC EV pack[3]

The short version is that the battery vessel would require about 25,000 tonnes of batteries for a 5,000km range under those assumptions, which compares to the current fuel capacity of approximately 13,000 tonnes. Volumetrically, it's even closer - about 17,000 cubic metres, compared to about 13,000 for the bunker fuel.

Furthermore, it's worth considering just how much cargo the ship carries. One teu corresponds to about 33 cubic metres of cargo space (not counting the space taken up by the walls of the container), so the ship can carry about 462,000 cubic metres of cargo. So the additional space required to carry an additional 3,500-odd cubic metres of batteries corresponds to only about 0.8% of the ship's total cargo-carrying capacity.

I was surprised at just how doable this is, to be honest. What threw me is just how much bunker fuel ships can carry; if I'm doing the sums right, a ship like this can carry enough fuel to circumnavigate the globe a couple of times over. It may well make economic sense but it's not really necessary to have that kind of range to operate the ship safely.

[1]https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/prop... [2]https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d... [3]https://www.batterydesign.net/zeekr-140kwh-catl-qilin/

No.

I’m too lazy to do it myself but 5 minutes of searching and calculating will show you that the area of solar panels required to move a ship is far, far, larger than the area of that ship.

Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers.

Also, lithium isn’t scarce.

The old Group A touring cars of the 1980s and early 90s are perhaps closer to what you’re thinking of.

Nissan built the R32 Skyline GT-R and killed the category (and birthed a legend in the process, admittedly).

Yes, this year's Bathurst finale was quite the spectacle if you haven't seen it!

But while Supercars can be entertaining, they are in some ways a faster version of the categories I'm describing - they don't have much downforce and not that much mechanical grip either, so they're pretty slow in corners even if they are respectably fast in a straight line.

The 15-25% of demand number is pretty similar to the number I've seen in multiple places. Furthermore, cars have an economic lifespan of approximately 20 years, so that increase in demand will take place over a couple of decades.

Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.

Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).

Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.

For what it's worth, the most entertaining circuit racing in the world happens at grassroots level featuring slow, cheap cars that permit a lot of drafting.

The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.

It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.

The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.

The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.

As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.

In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.