Electric

mhardy6647

The whole world is demanding electric vehicles -- the US market is a small enough percentage of the total world market (at least, in pre COVID terms) that the so-called US automakers* (which are all more or less international conglomerates now, anyway) will follow, not lead, to remain viable.

_______
* Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, VW, and Honda (e.g.) are all EDIT at least as much "US automakers" as are Ford and Fiat-Chrysler... and probably EDIT as much so as GM, as well.

audioluvr

I don't think electric cars are the answer. At least immediately. I do see a future where we are rationed fuel which would eliminate frivolous events like drag racing, boat races, pretty much anything with the work racing in it, weekend camping trips, flights to Cabo (Now that REALLY sucks!) unless your part of the 1% club of course...
In the mean time I'm getting horses.

audioluvr

Kex wrote: »

I also found the idea of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles appealing...

They use fossil fuels to work. You can't create hydrogen out of thin air. It requires more energy(currently) to draw it from H2O and little net gain whatsoever drawing it from fossil fuels.

Clipdat

I'd like to eat your crumpet, if you know what I mean.

xschop

mhardy6647 wrote: »

The whole world is demanding electric vehicles -- the US market is a small enough percentage of the total world market (at least, in pre COVID terms) that the so-called US automakers* (which are all more or less international conglomerates now, anyway) will follow, not lead, to remain viable.

_______
* Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, VW, and Honda (e.g.) are all EDIT at least as much "US automakers" as are Ford and Fiat-Chrysler... and probably EDIT as much so as GM, as well.

Post-Chimera viability....Interesting market strategy.

BlueFox

xschop wrote: »

Post-Chimera viability....Interesting market strategy.

Excuse my ignorance, but what does that mean?

invalid

The production of electric vehicles causes way more carbon than the production of combustion engine vehicles. Then there is the charging that causes more carbon. It's not as good as it seems.

pitdogg2

invalid wrote: »

The production of electric vehicles causes way more carbon than the production of combustion engine vehicles. Then there is the charging that causes more carbon. It's not as good as it seems.

Lets not forget the environment destruction to mine the ingredients for the batteries, or the non-recyclable windmill blades that must be put in landfills.

invalid

The stuff that is also mined for the electric motors.

jdjohn

Key word with rare earth elements is 'rare' (i.e., it will run out, and become harder to mine as time goes on).

As a reminder, over 60% of US electricity comes from the burning of fossil fuels. So creating more electricity will actually accelerate the burning of fossil fuels - mainly coal and natural gas. We could build more nuclear power plants, but environmentalists wouldn't like that either.

I know some energy companies are experimenting with algae farms. And there's also bio-diesel fuel made from leftover deep-fryer oil. If you get behind a diesel vehicle burning that type of fuel, a sudden craving for french fries is known to occur.

mhardy6647

... and of course oil comes from pure springs bubblin' up, harvested by happy people with clean wooden buckets, then lovingly cracked and distilled using hot springs to heat the apparatus by skilled artisans before being gathered into pristine stainless steel tanks before being dispensed into folks' RAM pickups.

No real difference in the clean-ness or nasty-ness of gathering the raw materials.
Again, Benjamin: one word: fusion.

Maybe someday.

xschop

Jed Clampett don't know nuttin bout no fusion.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NwzaxUF0k18

pitdogg2

Key word with rare earth elements is 'rare' (i.e., it will run out, and become harder to mine as time goes on).

They are not as rare as we are led to believe. Plus mining for them can be very hazardous for the environment as well. There is not much difference between "not" green and green in reality. I'm all for reducing pollution in the environment but we are splitting hairs here.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-elements-actually-rare/

For decades China has refused to mine on their soil instead going to other places on earth to grab up any they see fit and profitable, China has over 80% of the worlds supply. I seen once China was looking to mine the seabed for RE elements, could this be the reason the have militarized the south China sea and surrounding area ?

mhardy6647

The "rare" in the "rare earths" is an historical reference.

jdjohn

mhardy6647 wrote: »

The "rare" in the "rare earths" is an historical reference.

They did put out some good music back-in-the-day

Jstas

Kex wrote: »

Jstas wrote: »

No, I didn't misunderstand you at all. You have no clue what you are talking about. I got it right the first time.

Yah... ya did, though. Perhaps it was beyond your intellectual capabilities to comprehend?

You are nothing more than a scoundrel and a cad. A pompous fool who owns a pond that he likes to call a lake (which, by the way is a large body of water, not a small one), because he engages in self aggrandizing pronouncements.

What you need is more crumpet, if you get my meaning. Nobody could be constantly angry at everyone unless they just weren’t getting enough crumpet. 🤔

Ah, sex life jokes. Classy.

It wasn't beyond my intellectual capabilities. I was choosing not to respond because I really didn't want to waste the effort on you.

I'm not angry at all, either. I'm amazed at how much you can talk out your **** and still look at yourself in the mirror everyday thinking you're the bee's knees since we're using words like "cad" and "pompous" and "scoundrel" like it's 1720 instead of 2020.

So you want to play, we'll play.

I haven't researched this much,

Obviously. You can't seem to understand it even if you did. I'll illustrate.

since I have no immediate desire to replace our existing vehicles, but, the idea would be to use solar to generate most of the energy needed for the residence, which could easily be done,

Do you understand the concept of supply and demand? Do you understand that your electric car is going to need to 30K+ watts of power to charge from a DC power source like solar arrays? When you convert that power from DC to AC, you still have a big draw and since the conversion is no where near 100% efficient, it's more than you think it is. To support the current you need to charge your car battery (at least 45 amps so you need at least a 60 amp breaker) you need a 240V charging station, you need to have enough current and wattage coming from your DC power source to support the power conversion from DC to AC. That is if you have a charger in your household electrical system. Maybe you have a DC charger? Odd and rare for a residence to have a charger of the size needed. They would be unsafe in a house due to the wattage and amperage needed at the 10-17 volts most current solar technology runs at. It'd essentially be like having an arc welder like they use to build cargo ships. The kind that get towed behind a truck and are mounted on their own trailer? Yeah, that, buzzing away in your backyard or garage when ever it was under load from charging your car. One mistake on a DC charger like that, you cross poles or short it out, you're not just going to die, you'll be turned into overcooked hamburger meat and probably annihilate your house as well.

That's just for your car alone, btw, the rest of the house is not included in that.

Your house? All the garbage you have running from your TV to your fridge to your computer to all the electronically controlled stuff like a heaters and coffee pots and so on create a pretty massive draw. New houses aren't even getting built without 200 amp service anymore because of the draw that all the modern electronics create. Add the heavy hitters like electric or induction stoves and ovens, AC systems, heaters, especially if they are electric heaters, dishwashers, fridges, pool filters and so on. Add in your lights and electrical outlets and you have a house that requires another 35kW-40kW of power needs.

So now your total draw is up around 70kW for your house and your charger. That's 70,000 watts.

Do you understand how much power that actually is? If you had a 70 kW generator, you would essentially have a big block Chevy V8 powering a generator assembly the diameter of a manhole cover and about a foot thick to get enough coils to generate the EM fields you would need to cover the draw on 70 kW. That is a massive generator for a home.

This is a 70 kW emergency generator. It sits on rails that they use for securing shipping containers to trailers.

https://www.grainger.com/product/GENERAC-Liquid-Propane-Automatic-Standby-5EMA9

It's about 9 feet long, 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. It's the size of a subcompact car and weighs twice as much. We use these, typically in banks of 3-5, to power medium sized data centers in the event of an extended power failure. I've set them up and the battery bank for the UPS/power conditioner for them is the size of a city bus. It runs, comparatively, at a fairly whisper quiet 65 dBA too. For comparison, your average dish washing machine runs about 65-70 dB. Your average emergency generator of that size and bigger runs closer to 80-85 dB.

So no, generating most of the energy for the residence and powering a charging station for an electric car is not "easily done". Especially since you'd need about 3500 square feet of open space for all the solar panels you would need to cover 60-70 kW. And that's just for generating for your car. If you tap into the grid and you're getting just half the power you need from the grid, you're still pulling down 35 kWs for just your car. But kilowatts is not how power is measured for consumption from the grid. For that you need kilowatt hours expressed as kWh.

"The kilowatt-hour is a composite unit of energy equal to one kilowatt (kW) of power sustained for one hour."

and which is mostly needed during peak hours, when the grid would be most stressed. We could then use the grid to charge the car at reduced off peak rates at night, when it's least stressed (which for SoCal Edison in our area is after 9 p.m. to midnight, and at any time from midnight until 4 p.m.). During those times, each kWh costs about one third the peak rate.

So, define "peak hours"? That definition you've given is for billing purposes. When talking about usage, again, define peak hours 'cause, right now, if you don't work from home, your "peak hours" are while you are at work. You use 10 times as much power at work than you do at home. So your house and your charger are both dormant and drawing little power while your place of work is sucking down power like a fat kid eating cupcakes. So, because of the amount of power draw at the office and so many other people are at the office drawing similar amounts too, that's considered a "peak time" because of the amount of energy needed to run that office vs all those people running their homes. It's typically, again, about 10-12 times as much, at minimum, as a single household needs.

OK, so how much power does an actual commercial property use on average?

Well, according to the Department of Energy, the average number of kilowatt hours per square foot for a commercial building is approximately 22.5 kWh annually. The average yearly power consumption of an average office building of around 20,000 square feet is around 165,000 kWh per year. Your average home is about 13,000 kWh per year.

So yeah, there's a peak time because it takes about 13 homes to equal the power consumption of one averaged sized office building. When you look at larger buildings, though, you get into the millions of kWh a year easily and your ratio gets pretty big.

Now here's the problem. If you are charging your car with a Tesla home charger, you're running a circuit that runs anything from a 60 amp to 100 amp circuit on 240VAC for a 4-8 hour period every night depending on your commuting distance/daily power consumption from your car batteries.

So at 60 amps on 240V, you're running typically 75-80% capacity of your breaker so you're eating up a total of probably 45-48 amps at 240VAC. That's about 11,500 watts of power per hour, 11.5 kWh. OK, not that big, right? Well, the thing is, when you look at power consumption for a house, you're rarely running your meter at a full tilt and sucking down all of your household capacity at once for extended times. If you ran a 200 amp service at your house at peak, 200 amp capacity on 120V for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you'd burn 210.2 kWh a year. We obviously don't do that but that is how capacity planning works. That's why the 13kWh a year is an average and why we have meters. But, your 48 amp Tesla charger is going to be running at all 48 amps for the entire time it's charging your car. Even if you run it at a trickle charge, you're just going to spread out a lower usage number over a longer period of time. You will end up seeing similar consumption rates due to the extended time frame instead of higher amperage. So if your charging for 8 hours a night, that's 92.2 kWh a day. In a year, your Tesla has guzzled down 169,000 kWh (4 hours a night) to 337,000 kWh (8 hours a night). Your Tesla charger is eating in one hour of charging, 90% of the power the entire rest of your house uses in 1 year.

So, that's just for YOU. If you and all of your neighbors have Teslas and are all running the 60A/240VAC chargers when you get home for the day, remember how we'd need 13 homes to equal the power consumption of one 20K sq. ft. office building in a year?

Jstas

One Tesla home charger running at 48 amps on a 240VAC circuit for 4 hours a night for one year uses more power than your 20K sq ft office does in a year. All by itself. Add to that the ~13,000 kWh the rest of your house uses and you are burning about 182,000 kWh a year on 4 hour charging sessions each night for a battery that is only partially drained. You drain that battery to less than 20% charge every day and you're 275,000-350,000 kWh a year.

So, with that in mind for JUST YOU, what are peak hours? 'Cause if you are going to charge your car at work, that might skew this some. But, that's still just you. Your house is going to use, probably at the minimum, 75% of the same power consumption your office building uses in what would be considered traditionally "off peak hours".

When you start scaling that to just the 12 neighbors you had that would be needed to equal the power consumption of your office building, you and your neighbors are now burning at least 10 times the amount of energy in "off peak times" that your office building uses in "peak times".

This. Does. Not. Scale. The. Way. You. Think. It. Does.

That's even if you're only burning the equivalent of 40-50% of your total range from driving, listening to the radio, in the dark, with your car heater on, at 5 PM in the middle of December sitting in rush hour traffic for hours at a time while people scramble to get to shopping malls for Christmas gifts.

Additionally, this is if your household has just ONE car. If you have two cars and need two chargers...yeah with two chargers running at night, your house would be burning about 350,000 kWh a year at the minimum given the numbers above. Additionally, you'd need about 400 amp service from the pole to support that level of draw without blowing the transformer every other week.

Why's that important? Because Tesla even says that if you are running a 60 amp home charger, you need, at the minimum, 200 amp service to your house. For residential service, that's about as big as it gets. Above 200 amp service and you are now running commercial power infrastructure and it's exponentially more expensive than the 200 amp residential stuff. You would essentially need a second 200 amp service panel to run two Tesla home chargers at the same time. Then you're either upgrading to single service with bridges or you're running two meters with two different electric bills for a second feed to the house.

And that brings me to this.

Furthermore, any electric vehicle with a range of 200 miles or more would rarely be driven those 200 miles in a single day, so the battery would almost never be fully discharged. For normal usage of about 30 miles a day (or whatever), it would require less than 10 kWh to charge the vehicle at night. That's about one quarter of summertime average daily usage for us, so it should work out economically, and we'd never have to visit a filthy gas station ever again.

Horse hockey.

That's not how battery charging works. It's not like a water faucet where you have a half empty jug and you just run the water until it fills up and your usage is the same as the volume of water you put in the jug. You need to run a higher current and voltage to charge your battery and it needs to be sustained. Additionally, your battery is going to be DC, not AC so you need to convert the power and that is no where near a 100% efficient process. It's the reason why your car's electrical system runs at 12.0 VDC but your charging system actually operates at 13.7-14.4 VDC. So not only do you have to charge at a higher voltage and amperage than the battery discharged but you have to convert that 240 VAC to whatever the Teslas battery is charging at, say 12.7 VDC for gits and shiggles. So even if you only used "10 kWh" of battery charge, you're going to likely consume 50% more than that to return that missing charge to the battery and "fill it up".

It's not just power used to move the car either. Since you don't have a fueled engine that provides movement AND electrical power to power all your stuff as well as several pumps for cooling, HVAC and fuel delivery, you need electric motors to run your blower fan and HVAC compressors, door locks and windows in your Tesla so you can be comfortable on your commute. You also draw down battery power for lights (55W to 85W per headlight, BTW), your stereo (200-1000 watts depending on what you splurged for on the option sheet), the dashboard information systems (probably 30-100 watts) and anything charging on the 12V accessory ports like iPhone, dashcam and GPS unit.

It's not just moving the car down the road that impacts battery usage. All the stuff above adds up, too. That's about 1500 watts of total consumption for just the lights, radio and dash info. They all run at different amperage levels but they equate out to watt hours and they add up.

Your oversimplification of all of this is very inaccurate. The math to prove it is simple. But you're ignoring it and me because you think I'm an under-sexed angry little man despite me throwing the actual science at you. You'd rather dismiss me and what I am telling you as the rantings of a crazed lunatic instead of shutting your mouth, learning something and realizing how off base you are. But hey, you live in SoCal, so I get it. Reality is not your forte. I mean, y'all can't even keep the lights on that you currently have for 25M people. What's the big deal if we make 25M people buy 25M electric cars and charge them all at home? Pfft!

BTW, 25M times 182K? That's 4.55 tWh for just the region known as "SoCal". You know how much the U.S. currently uses in a year as a whole for ALL households? 4.384 tWh. A Tesla in every driveway with a Tesla charger in every house in just SoCal alone would more than double the entire power consumption of the U.S. as a whole in a year.

These are the levels of impact we are talking about here. We would need to build twice as many power plants as we have now to cover JUST SoCal charging their electric cars at home.

Do you see the problem with your ideas, here?

I also found the idea of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles appealing, and there's even a fueling station near our local store, but that doesn't seem to have gotten any traction with the manufacturers.

Hydrogen fuel cells in what everyone calls a "hybrid" system are the best path to the future. It's the same idea as diesel-electric trains. Using a hydrogen fuel cell to power an engine that generates electricity for electric motors is a very efficient use of the tech. The biggest hurdles have been a lack of infrastructure, not in distribution but in hydrogen refinement and fueling of fuel cells. The others are the efficiency of the motors being used so that a fuel cell doesn't have to be massive to provide the amount of energy needed to run huge, heavy, inefficient motors and the cost of fuel cell construction. With cheap energy costs from natural gas and petroleum products, we won't see it for a while.

But, the manufacturers did have traction on it. Honda, Ford and Toyota all had prototypes. Ford and Honda both ran pilot programs and leased vehicles. All of them have dropped the plans because of the sheeple clamoring for all electric cars and not wanting to buy a hydrogen powered vehicle. Basically, because, like you, the average person has no clue how this works or the problems of scale when a single metered unit quadruples it's power consumption by "easily" adding an electric car charger in their house. Then some moron politician makes a law that says all 99,999,999 other metered units out there have to have the exact same thing in the next 5 years but we're only using solar and wind power to get there. The country's gonna look like one giant mirror with a bunch of buzzsaws on posts sticking up above them. It's not scalable or sustainable. There's lots of really smart people out there telling them this too. But, like you, they think all these people speaking against this are just angry little fascists who are looking to suppress anything that isn't like them and call them crazy and they should BELIEVE THE SCIENCE!

Well, there's the science, laid out for you. I feel like I just wasted a ton of time, though, because you're just going to poo all over it. Maybe somebody else will get something out of it, though, since you're not going to.

And I'm not the one who calls it a lake. Both the USGS and the NJDEP have it listed as Edgewood Lake, a sluice lake and part of the Cooper River Watershed.

Viking64

Cocaine is a horrible drug.

invalid

I just seen tesla charging stations at a gas station a few miles from my house, I wonder how long it takes to charge, and what they charge. Seems counterintuitive to me.

[Deleted User]

If this thread is to continue it will have to be free of political innuendos and attacks on other members. Period.

lightman1

DaveHo

This is the electric thread. Start your own if you wanna talk about your gas!

pitdogg2

Wait do we have a Sasquatch selfie????

audioluvr

lightman1 wrote: »

Thanks Russ! If I put my thumb over your face I can kinda make out the pretty fall colors. Looks like a place I went to in Missouri.

lightman1

Madison Indiana.

nooshinjohn

lightman1 wrote: »

There is a giant booger in your nose...

Kex

Just as a follow up to the earlier discussion, I had the chance to chat with a neighbor who installed solar power two years ago, so I asked him what he thought of it.

• Previous 2 month bill in summertime for water and power: $1,800.
• His house is large, with no double glazing (he installed decorative single pane, stained glass windows, so he doesn't want to get double glazing).
• Current two month bill, in summertime, for water and power: $300.
• He is able to monitor power generation vs. power usage, and he showed me his online records. Usage is almost always lower than generation, with only a couple of exceptions in a year, and those are during the low usage months (no a/c). So the $150 per month are essentially all water usage (normal for a property of that size, with the associated watering needs).
• There are a lot of trees on his property, so it's not an obstruction free south facing location.

He clearly has no issues generating plenty of power for his residence, and would also have no issues with generating additional power to run an electric vehicle.

So, I maintain what I wrote earlier that it is perfectly plausible to entertain running an EV and using solar. Do your own research, and make your own, informed decisions, using information from reliable sources.

Maybe @cmy330go could chime in more with personal experience specific to the EV aspect, but he hasn't been on much lately. I've yet to meet an EV owner who regrets his decision or would ever go back.

invalid

Bet you can't drive across the country as fast in an EV as a combustion engine vehicle.

mhardy6647

Kex wrote: »

Just as a follow up to the earlier discussion, I had the chance to chat with a neighbor who installed solar power two years ago, so I asked him what he thought of it.

• Previous 2 month bill in summertime for water and power: $1,800.
• His house is large, with no double glazing (he installed decorative single pane, stained glass windows, so he doesn't want to get double glazing).
• Current two month bill, in summertime, for water and power: $300.
• He is able to monitor power generation vs. power usage, and he showed me his online records. Usage is almost always lower than generation, with only a couple of exceptions in a year, and those are during the low usage months (no a/c). So the $150 per month are essentially all water usage (normal for a property of that size, with the associated watering needs).
• There are a lot of trees on his property, so it's not an obstruction free south facing location.

He clearly has no issues generating plenty of power for his residence, and would also have no issues with generating additional power to run an electric vehicle.

So, I maintain what I wrote earlier that it is perfectly plausible to entertain running an EV and using solar. Do your own research, and make your own, informed decisions, using information from reliable sources.

Maybe @cmy330go could chime in more with personal experience specific to the EV aspect, but he hasn't been on much lately. I've yet to meet an EV owner who regrets his decision or would ever go back.

It's not a problem for folks with the space, the exposure, the wherewithal, and the inclination to go with PVs and/or a windmill to manage an EV. Indeed, the EV is a cost-effective way to bank excess power from PVs (vs. basically swapping it back to the public utility). With ca. 5000 watts' worth of PVs on the roof, we paid no electric bills last year -- other than the "alternative minimum tax" analog that the utilities levy for the privilege of being hooked to the grid (which, for us, is roughly $16 a month).


from our installer's FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/SolAirNH/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1778280349065650&ref=page_internal

Jstas

Kex wrote: »

blah blah blah

none of this is relevant to the statements I made but I'm standing by it anyway

Your neighbor does not have an electric car. So this entire post is moot since it does not correlate at all to what your statement is regarding the ability to generate enough energy from solar arrays on your average plot of land to cover a 48 amp battery charger for an electric car as well as your average 200 amp service load.

Also, $1800 for two months in the summer for power and water? You're joking, right? You think that's reasonable? I have a 2500 square foot house with a full basement that is climate controlled. My summer time bill for water and power is about $400 a month. Maybe $500 if it's extra hot out.

Besides that, the fact that your "neighbor" has single pane stained glass windows is indicative of the fact that your neighbor is in the top 5% of earners in the country and really isn't comparable to your average American who probably rakes in 1/5th of what a guy who can stick stained glass windows in his house like it's blasé earns.

Your neighbor is what folks would call...wealthy. Completely not comparable to your average joe.

See, the thing is here, despite your pettiness over my casual and very often tongue-in-cheek mentioning that I own a lake, here's what I actually have:

- I have 400 amp service to my house. I have two 200 amp service panels, one in my house, one in my garage.
- I have three 100 amp service panels, one in my other garage and two on the 2nd floor of my house, two of these I installed myself
- I have three 60 amp service panels, one for my pool, one for my pool house and one for the arc welder receptacle in my garage, two of these I installed myself and I have to replace the 3rd one because it's a Captain Halfass job and is sketchy as f@#$
- Believe me, I'm not just Googling and regurgitating what I'm talking about, I have actual, personal, first-hand experience
- I have about 4700 square feet of roof space over 3 buildings that I could use for my own solar farm. Or I could just use the barren 5200 square feet of land at the far end of the property to build a solar farm that gets sun for 3/4ths of the day instead of trying to grow grass to curb erosion
- Hell, I have a sluice dam and I could easily put a micro-hydroelectric system in to generate even more power for my house. Probably all the power I need, honestly. Actually, now that I think about it, that's not a bad idea. Maybe it's time to build myself a water wheel? Yes, micro-hydroelectric systems are real and you don't need water rights to have one: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/buying-and-making-electricity/microhydropower-systems
- If I still had a septic system, I have enough resources in my 4 acres of land to be completely off-grid if I so chose.
- I planned this this way.

Maybe that makes me a braggart, I dunno. All I know for sure is that these are facts and I worked very hard to get to this place in my life to have it. Petty people like you trying to bust me down because you think you have to compete with my hard earned experience can just go suck an egg. There's plenty of people here that have vast levels of knowledge about stuff that I'm dumb as a stump on. That doesn't mean I think they are petty braggarts looking make me feel small. If anything, they are a resource to tap 'cause there's certainly things I know about that they don't and I can offer a free exchange of information to benefit us both. I have a level of knowledge well above your average person when it comes to stuff like this because, for a significant portion of my career in IT, I built data centers. I understand what it takes to do what you think is so easy. Additionally, for a not-insignificant portion of my existence on this earth, I worked in a diesel repair shop where I worked on heavy equipment daily. So not only do I know the ins and outs of on-site and emergency power generation, I know how to fix it when it breaks, too. Furthermore, I basically grew up at Boy Scout Camps where I learned low-impact, natural conservation techniques from not only the BSA but fairly often, the Army Corp of Engineers who often came to help with large projects like lake dredging, dam repair and erosion control on hill sides where a bunch of teenagers with shovels were meaning well but lacked the experience and knowledge to be effective. I'm not that ineffective teenager anymore and it's because people who were older and/or more experienced than me took time to show me the error of my ways/thinking. I know this is going to be a novel ideal for you but, instead of thinking those people were just bragging and trying to make me feel stupid, I just shut up, listened to them and learned a few things. Now I'm the experienced one and I have all those people who took a few minutes to straighten stupid me out to thank for it. So not only do I have the education for stuff like this, I have applied experience in the matters as well. Means I've actually done the stuff I'm speaking of.

If I have seen further than other men, it's because I have stood on the shoulders of giants...and not squandered the opportunity.

You can have the fanciest neighbor you want. But unless they they are actually doing what you propose on the average U.S. salary of $54,099.99 then I don't want to hear it. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't stack up against the actual science. You still have no clue what you are talking about.

The biggest benefit to this thread so far, though, is that I've had two people who I don't know from spit reach out to me in PM and thank me for the effort I put in to illustrating why the electric car idea is not feasible in the manner with which you propose and how horribly it will impact our nation's power grid. They're afraid to post because they don't want to get in the middle of the drama and I can completely understand that. Many people say it won't work with little more explanation beyond an "I said so" level of detail. I actually did math and capacity planning with scalability concerns while probably very over-simplifying it to a fault and you're still telling me that you reject this reality and substitute your own.

So, again, you go ahead, you keep thinking that electric cars are a super great idea and we're not just thinking about it right. I'm gonna go back to doing something else. Like figuring out that micro-hydroelectric idea.