Owning libs? In this economy?

Food is just solar power stored in organic compounds, made from the CO2 in the air.

You got it all wrong.

An American oil company is going to have absurd windfall profits this year, because the global price for oil has skyrocketed while American production hasn’t gone down at all. So that CEO is warning everyone that he’s gonna have an extraordinarily large bonus this year.

No worries. I just think pricing dynamics are neat and I wanted to talk about them.

what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said.

Not every reply to a comment is intended to do that.

Don’t forget the cross subsidies from co-products.

If ground beef (aka beef mince in the UK where this story is running) is the cheapest trimmings that remain after all of the expensive cuts have been processed, it’s entirely possible that the low price for this byproduct is partially subsidized by the high prices for the premium product (expensive steaks, moderate expense whole cuts). Plus things like hides for leather.

For now, the plant-based competition is aiming at the types of meat that are easier to mimic or replace with plant-based foods. And unfortunately, those happen to be the cheaper types of meat. If we get to the point where there is significant plant-based competition to filet mignon, that product will have a lot more room to work with in being price competitive.

Pricing inputs get complicated, and government subsidies are only a piece of the picture.

I’d prefer something that isn’t as dangerous as Lithium-Ion.

There are several different lithium ion chemistries, each with different safety profiles.

The spicy pillow bulge comes from delamination, which can be prevented with more rigid cell containers. Delamination itself is dangerous because it changes the electrical characteristics of the battery in a way that increases the risk of thermal runaway, where the increased heat speeds up the reaction that causes more heat, in a feedback loop.

Another related danger is the actual flammability of the electrolytes and cathode/anode materials. Several of these chemicals can react with oxygen, especially when hot, to cause intense fires or explosions. And these batteries tend to already contain their own oxygen, so that the fires can’t be quenched.

So the engineers needs to design cells that are more physically resistant to physical deformation, to implement safety features like current interrupt devices (that disconnect the internal cells when certain conditions are met), use chemistries that don’t have as high a risk of thermal runaway to begin with, and use chemistries that don’t rely on flammable components.

Many lithium ion chemistries already accomplish most of these. In recent years, lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP) have been taking over on car batteries, because they’re much safer on all these fronts: they can withstand much higher temperatures before hitting thermal runaway, and the characteristics of thermal runaway in an LFP battery are more subdued (the oxygen in an LFP battery is more tightly bound in a crystalline structure so that fewer oxygen molecules jump out to feed an ongoing fire).

And as it turns out, LFP is cheaper than the other common Lithium Ion battery chemistries. So the incentives to use this chemistry has caused it to jump ahead in market share in vehicles.

People are working on it. Safety is obviously important. But lithium itself isn’t necessarily any more dangerous than anything else.

but there’s no need for a sensationalist headline.

First time with this publication, Interesting Engineering?

Nuclear you are looking a decade before it starts being operational and then another couple decades to recoup the cost.

By the time a new nuclear plant breaks even on the capital expenditures to build it, a competing solar plant has already been built, operated for a few decades, and been torn down/decommissioned for even newer tech. That 80-year nuclear plant has to compete with like 3 successive generations of solar plants/batteries, advanced geothermal, and maybe even commercialized fusion. Building a new nuclear plant is a decision to saddle your grandchildren with a payment plan on locked in costs of construction today.

I don’t know how much to attribute to the war in Iran. The Chinese government ended a tax rebate program for exported solar panels effective April 1, so all the producers rushed their capacity to get as many as they could out the door.

Now that production costs are 10-15% higher for panels exported in April than the panels exported in March, we’d want to see how April’s numbers compare, once that data is published in about a month.

California is famous for having different emission regulations. They have an exemption from the national law that they’re allowed to make stricter emissions and gas mileage regulations. None of those should prove to be a burden for anyone who wants to sell a battery EV in California, because there’s no standard that applies only in California to EVs.

Kia pulled its EV6 GT, which basically did not sell well in the US. They only manufactured that particular top tier trim level in Korea, but the other EV6 trim levels continue to be manufactured and sold in the U.S. (Wind, GT-Line). Kinda stupid that they named their top of the line the GT and the one just below that the GT-Line, but brands can be stupid with naming schemes sometime.

now both Hyundai and Kia have stopped selling EV models last year solely in the US

They’re basically one company and they stopped importing EVs. They still build and sell plenty of new EVs in the U.S., made in their plants in the state of Georgia. They’re also currently expanding capacity at their plants, in the hopes of catching more of the growing electric SUV market.

So they no longer sell the top of the line trim level of the Kia EV6, or the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but they’re still building and selling very similar models on the same platform. The Kia EV6 still exists in the lower trim levels, and the Ioniq 6N and the Ioniq 5 and 5N, and their smaller EVs (Kia Niro, Hyundai Kona) are still available, too. Both brands launched their 3-row electric SUVs in the US, too (Hyundai Ioniq 9, Kia EV9).

A lot of companies are slowing down their EV rollouts, but I wouldn’t say that Hyundai/Kia is the best example of that.

Average new car price has gone up a lot because the average new car has been purchased by rich people who demand high performance and luxury features. And rich people have been doing great the last 50 years, so the top of the market has totally run away with high prices.

If you actually dig into specific models and what they go for, you see that the most basic cars have only gone up slightly in price, but are also much higher performing (0-60 times, quarter mile times, braking distance), more efficient (better highway/city gas mileage), more reliable (more miles/years to failure), and have a lot more standard features that used to be expensive add-ons (automatic transmissions, power windows/locks, power steering), and are generally better constructed (smaller panel gaps, better sound proofing/vibrations), and much, much safer by pretty much every measure.

Today’s cars, even the cheapest ones, are much better than the cars from the 90’s, much less the cars from the 70’s (5-digit odometers because getting past 100,000 miles wasn’t necessarily expected, bodies that rusted within a decade of normal use).

So if a first generation Honda Civic in 1974 cost $3000 in 1974 dollars (inflation adjusted to $21,000 today), we should compare what that car was, compared to what a Honda Civic is today (starting at around $25,000 for the barebones model, $30,000 for a few nicer features). Compare torque/horsepower specs, actual performance at 0-60/quarter mile, gas mileage, all of that. I’m not entirely convinced that the people of 1974 were getting a better bargain on their cars than today’s new economy car buyer.

I hate that cars have gotten so big, and that the SUV is basically the American default at this point. But I don’t think that car prices have actually gone up that high in the 30 years I’ve been driving. And cars from before I was driving just…sucked.

being an insignificant player in the broader Geo space.

The broader geo space is insignificant right now. We have about 4.0 GW of capacity nationwide.

But people are excited about the future. USGS and the Department of Energy estimate that about 90GW of capacity is achievable by 2050.

Fervo’s IPO filing claims that it will have 100 MW online next year, with up to 400 MW from the Cape Station site targeted for 2028.

The pace of development (with techniques learned from oil and gas fracking and horizontal drilling) means that we’ll know soon just how feasible this will be. I think it’s almost certainly going to be more cost effective than nuclear, and has the best prospects of providing dispatchable carbon-free energy around the clock in the near future.

If you don’t like oilprice (and I don’t love their reporting generally), you can read more from Canary Media.

If you were already going to use the heat later in the day when fossil fuels are burning again, then whatever you can do to reduce that future consumption, through storing some thermal heat produced now, can still reduce that fossil fuel consumption overall. Water heaters, warming any living spaces that might need to be heated at night, etc.

It doesn’t even have to be efficient when prices are literally negative. All it has to do is be somewhat effective at reducing later consumption.

Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.

It can still be a useful sink at small scales. You could make ice at those times of day if you’re eventually going to need that ice later. It takes a lot more energy to chill something (especially water with its high specific heat and latent heat of fusion) that it takes to hold something at temperature in an insulated space. And then go on and use the ice later so that the need to chill something doesn’t have to be synchronized with the exact moment in time you’re drawing energy from the grid to run a refrigeration compressor.

Same with heating. Some smart water heaters can store thermal energy for later, too, and top off their energy usage for some times of day.

I’m not sure if the scale you’re imagining makes these ideas too small to be worth pursuing.

It would still depend on a non-renewable resource that needs to be mined

One thing to point out is the energy density in nuclear fuel, even before reprocessing, is higher than all the energy that will pass through the same amount of lithium processed into rechargeable batteries, over the entire life cycle of that battery. A typical 1GW plant consumes an average of 70 kg of fuel per day, at a 90% capacity rate. So that’s 24 hours x 90% x 1000000 kW, divided by 70 kg, for about 300,000 kWh per kg of fuel.

Meanwhile, LFP batteries are about 10% lithium and have 150 Wh per kg of battery weight. Let’s say the battery can get through 10,000 charging cycles before recycling. That’s 15,000 kWh per kg of lithium.

Obviously lithium can be recycled and uranium fuel can be reprocessed. We can also compare the very inefficient extraction of either element (uranium or lithium) from the actual natural ore pulled out of the ground. And the very involved manufacturing processes of turning that ore into useful fuel or batteries.

But either way, the overhead of mining physical stuff to support the supply chains of things that get used up, even reusable/recyclable durable goods, will always be there. Uranium genuinely is special in its energy density and requires closer examination of the calculations.

Yeah, one of the issues I’ve read about happening for concrete failures was that some construction crews are under enormous pressure to salvage concrete that had been mixed too early, or delayed in pouring, or whatever, and where the concrete pouring characteristics cause issues (or crews add unauthorized water or things to slow down curing and then alter the characteristics of the poured concrete without the engineers’ awareness).

It’s wildly counterintuitive to those of us who don’t work in the space.

Yeah, the most prominent examples:

Motorola spun off its cell phone division (despite being the company that invented the cell phone and the clamshell cell phone) and sold it to Google, who sold it to Lenovo. So Motorola phones, under the Motorola Mobility name, don’t have anything to do with the radio and electronic equipment company that is currently known as Motorola Solutions.

Volvo spun off its car division and sold it to Ford, who sold it to Geely, and kept the truck business. So Volvo trucks are made by a different company under different ownership from Volvo cars.