Study finds California’s semi truck electrification comes with enormous costs that hit consumers

Just googled Calif population:

2021 == 39.24 million people

Cannot change bridges very easily,.

JUST USE a firing squad-—do NOT pick on the trees.

UP & BNSF can bring the container from the port to the state line.

Tailpipe standards. Department run by Buttigieg. The jokes write themselves...

Duh.

L

The idiots running Oregon and Washington will do the same nonsense. If I were president of Mexico, or ran the cartels (which really run the government) I would upgrade the Port of Ensenada, build a straight line road to the Arizona border and wipe out the ports of California.

Oleary calls California the Number One “Loser” State followed closely by New York and Illinois.

Those that stay in California are doing the rest of us in the remaining 49 states a huge favor as we don’t need the leftist/socialist/marxists creeps polluting our states.

Libtard Energy Hogs

Enormous costs that hit consumers

No shit California hasn’t the electrical grid system in place to handle it and won’t for the next 100 years.

You can’t even keep an A/C going in the summer without blackouts.
No charging EV’s until after 9:00PM

It’s California Jake

It took a ‘study’?

My half brain cell figgered it out LONG ago!

Washington State just stopped the biggest power and utility company in the State from providing NG for its customers, on the same day it erased the ability of FFL’s to stay in business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABRdCK2TKQE

Except for, where do you get the electricity? It takes more power generation than legacy fuel to run a car, van or truck.

It doesn’t pencil out unless you build nuclear power.

.., but the cost is incredible,”..

pfft!

We'll pass it on to consumers.

Yup.

Overall weight of truck can’t be increased, so whatever more pounds batteries add must be subtracted from the payload.

EV makes zero sense for class 8 long haul trucks. A ICE electric hybrid makes perfect sense. The hybrid part means instant torque at stand still at levels an ICE simply cannot make by physics.

The ability to regenerative brake to slow down and stop drastically reduces brake pads wear. Have known Prius that have 150,000 miles on the original brake pads due to almost all braking being done using the motors as generators. The effect on trucks would be even more pronounced. No need to make the truck a plug in hybrid not for long haul routes. Size the pack just big enough to use regen braking to bring a full load from 65mph to 0 that’s going to be under 5 kWh so a small pack. A full sized sedan at 4000 lbs yields 500 watt hours to go from 65 to 0. Added benefit is just like trains you could put electrical resistance elements in the cooling fan path and resistance brake at crazy high rates never needing friction brakes at all.

The ICE engine only drives a generator at its peak efficiency operating range that for compression ignition or turbo high pressure spark ignition is a plateau from 25% to 75% max operating output. That plateau is around 38% thermal efficiency twice what a regular engine even a diesel.averages chasing the peaks and valleys of load demand. Paired with a small battery pack just to smooth out the peaks and valleys of torque demands. The ICE simply follows the average load point.

This is exactly how a diesel electric train works minus the battery pack to smooth out the peaks and valleys. Ask Cummins to use their X engine line the one that is up too 15 liters and 600+ hp those engines can burn anything gaseous or liquid that is flammable by changing the heads and injectors the bottom part of the engine is identical from fuel to fuel. So far Cummins has run its X engine on methane,propane,butane,CNG,LNG,hydrogen,ammonia as gasses and gasoline, ethanol, methanol, diesel as liquids.

The important ones in that list are hydrogen,ammonia,methane,and ethanol. Any one of those can be synthesized directly from electricity for hydrogen,electricity and co2 for methane (CNG/LNG) & ethanol 96% or electricity and nitrogen for ammonia.

No need for on peak or even dispatchable power. Hydrogen electrolysis can be run on intermittent or off peak power even better is to use curtailment power that is power that would be curtailed at any given moment due to lack of demand on the grid. In Texas this happens at night quite often when 30,000+ megawatts of wind turbines in West Texas are spinning like crazy in the night time winds that howl through West Texas on the regular anyone who has ever lived in the panhandle or Midland can confirm the winds howl all the time. Hydrogen can be stored for use as a compressed gas indefinitely its boomer fud that hydrogen can’t be stored. Carbon fiber aluminum plus polymer lined tanks are impervious to H2 gas or a liquid in cryogenic ISO containers for 80 days venting free making it easy to move around great quantities via the already established ISO container distribution system. Millions of kg of h2 are used every day all over the world in petroleum refineries and power plants to cool the electrical generators.Hydrogen is the gas of choice to cool multimegawatt sized generators only helium would work and its hideously expensive to use helium. You cannot air cool electrical machines of that size. The H2 transportation,use and storage problem was solved decades ago period full.stop.

Water plus co2 and into electrolytic cells gets you any of the C1 C4 gasses methane,ethane,propane,butane being the fully H2 saturated alkanes, you can also get to the alkenes with less Hydrogen per carbon ratios. With copper catalysts in the cells water+co2 yields ethane and ethanol with the primary product of ethanol at 93% faraday efficiency of electricity to final carbon in ethanol+a few percentages of ethane. C2 ethane which can itself be used as compressed gas with twice the btu per cubic foot as methane, or hydrated via catalysts into ethanol itself. Here again there is no need to run those Ecells continuously, intermittent electricity works just fine as does curtailment power. With large banks of Ecells and H2 electrolysis you can go from a demand based grid to a supply based grid where no matter what is being produced when there is a large load ready to take all it can throw at it or be shut down at will should other more important demand come online. This flips the grid supply and use dynamic.

The key is what is the capex per kg of H2 or liters of gas or liquid product at low enough capex it’s economic to run your ecells less than 8700 hours per year. 30% capacity factor is meaningless at low enough capex per output. 30% capacity factor means 2600 hours per year of production time. For H2 its $200 kg for 30% capacity factor large H2 PEM machines are approaching this today. Once H2 electrolysis hits that price it’s economic to only use intermittent or off peak power or curtailment power you get into the $2Kg H2 range and one Kg H2 is equal one gallon of gasoline btu to btu for comparison.

Clearflame can modify any existing diesel to run on 96% ethanol with zero particulate emissions,zero SOx and virtually zero NOx so ethanol is an ideal fuel for MCCI (mixture controlled compression ignition) engines that’s the scientific name of all diesel type engines, which can and do run on alcohols,and natural plant / animal oils as well.

Ammonia is also a logical choice for long haul MCCI engines run on it, farms all over the world use it in pure form for fertilizer so the handling and distribution system and knowledge is already in place. Ammonia holds 3 times the hydrogen by weight and volume as liquid H2 at room temp and a few hundred psi plastic tanks can hold it no need for carbon fiber tanks. The SCR catalysts needed on every MCCI engine to meet NOx limits has to have a reductant DEF is urea an ammonia compound that heat breaks to ammonia in the exhaust stream activating the SCT cat. Using ammonia for fuel means you have the DEF already in the fuel the exhaust cleans itself with any residual ammonia from combustion activating the SCR automatically. At high loads you would still need a supplemental injectors for pure upstream from the SCR. remember this is for commercial class 8 trucks and professional drivers who already transport ammonia in bulk so the safety certs are part of the industry. If we trust farmer John with pure ammonia we can trust truckers too.

Having bulk gigawatt sized loads of H2 cells and Efuel cells ready to take curtailment/off peak power at a few cents per kWh is the recipe for lots of synthetic fuels.

Anyone in the power industry knows the “duck curve” well. The back of the duck is begging for a load to fill that trough. Nuclear power wants to be run flat out all the time not follow the duck curve. CANDU reactors are the cheapest in the world for fuel costs, construction costs and operation and maintenance costs. Half the fuel cost vs PWR they can put out 2 cent power to the plant gate 24/7 at 90% capacity factor.

This begs for something to fill the duck’s back especially if your grid is nuclear heavy. Hydrogen electrolysis is 80% electricity to H2 it takes 55kWh to make one Kg of H2 gas, high pressure electrolysis outputs that at 3000psi natively. You pump the input water to 3000psi and the gasses come out at the same pressure reduces pumping losses to less than 1% of total energy input vs 10% to.compress gas, water being incompressable is the key factor.

Long term only synthetic fuels and electricity will be available 8 billion people will deplete the liquid hydrocarbon resources in under 50 years much less when not if the 6 billion people living in energy poverty demand access to resources at anything close to European middle class levels. Americans are twice the EU middle class levels so not even remotely possible for the world to use at per capita USA rates and 6 billion more consumers.

“Except for, where do you get the electricity? It takes more power generation than legacy fuel to run a car, van or truck.

It doesn’t pencil out unless you build nuclear power”

A model.3 tesla takes 180 watt hours to.cover a single mile with the a.c.roaring in Houston traffic. I have seen as low as 130 wh mile in grid lock. At 80mph also in Texas July heat its 280 wh mile. I rent on the regular teslas when I travel they are the cheapest sedan as t Corp LLC weekly rates. I own a virtually identical sized S60 Volvo these two cars are one inch in footprint size and my Volvo is 200lbs heavier than the model 3 RWD. That Volvo averges 22mpg in bumper to bumper traffic have seen as low as 15 and 28 at 80 mph on the interstate.

So now we know how much energy it takes to move nearly identical sized vehicles 200# is not enough to make a difference that like a fat driver vs a skinny one. Ok now the maths...

The LHV of gasoline is 112,114–116,090 Btu/gal per the DOE. There is 3412 btu per kWh so one gal of gasoline is at most 34kWh or 34000 watt hours.

22mpg converted to btu per mile is as follows

116900/22= 5276.8 btu per mile then we go to kwh 5276.8/3412= 1.55kWh mile then to watt hours so 1.55*1000= 1550 wh per mile.

Having seen as low as 15mpg
116090/15/3412*1000= 2,268 wh mile

So in grid lock the ICE is using between 2268 and 1550 watt hours per mile. Compare that to the model 3 that’s slightly lighter of 130 watt hours per mile and 180 wh/mi the math is clear at the end point of use.

You also need to look at where the electricity came from. If it came from solar panels on my garage and home roof then the btu per mile of chemical fuels is zero. Panels made of regular polysilicon not thin film have an EROI of 4 years every watt hour after that is positive energy vs what it took to make the panel including the mining of the silicon ,refining it and turning it into cells then panels. My panels have a 25 year warranty at 5% capacity loss at the end of 25 years. Teslas measure gross power from the plug into the pack and make the calculation if watt hours per mile based on that value which includes charging losses. So for solar power on location only the losses in the inverter would increase the total whr per mile. Since its fuel (aka the great thermonuclear fireball in the sky) is free that is irrelevant.

How about for grid power Texas gets 60% of it’s power from natural gas, 18% from wind and solar, 11% from coal and 11% from nuclear. We have virtually no hydro. So most assuredly not coal powered.

Most of this gas power is combined cycle plants with some simple cycle peaked plants at peak times.

“According to the EIA, natural gas combined-cycle power generators installed since 2015 have an average heat rate of 6,654 Btu/kWh.”

That’s to the plant gate, now transmission losses...

“Losses are lower in HVDC than in HVAC over long distances: for a ±800 kV line voltage, losses are about 3% per 1,000 km for an HVDC while they are about 7% per 1,000 km for an HVAC line- IEA”

Nowhere in Texas is a power plant farther than 200km from a major city so 7% per 1000km is 0.014 or 1.4% over 200km. Then transformer losses.

“It’s also worth noting that transformers themselves are designed to be highly efficient, with energy losses typically less than 1%. These losses occur mainly due to resistance in the windings and hysteresis and eddy currents in the core.”

So 1.4%+1 ish percent let’s go with 3% total.

6654btu/kwh*1.03= 6,853.62 btu per kWh to the wall. One kWh is 3412 btu. So the dimensional analysis 1000wh/180wh= 5.55 miles to kwh or 6853btu/5.55= 1,233.65 btu per mile compare this with 5276.8 btu per mile for 22mpg ICE.

180wh/mi= 1233.65 btu in natural gas burnt at the power plant including all the transmission losses and charging losses.

Vs 22mpg of E10 burnt at the engine of the ICE gives 5276 btu per mile most of that as heat out the tailpipe and radiator.

This just demonstrated the difference in second law vs first law of thermodynamics. Contrary to boomer fud it is much more efficient to burn natural gas in 60+% efficient combined cycle plants and transmit the electricity for the EV than to burn anything directly in a 25% or less efficient ICE motor in the vehicle.

Average efficiency is easy to calculate since we know it takes 180wh gross to move a S60 sized vehicles down the road for a mile and we know that at 22mpg the LHV of.the fuel used is 5276.8 btu per mile converted to watt hours = 1546wh gross so 180wh/1546when= 11% actual average efficiency tank to wheels the math checks out going both ways btu to wh or wh to lhv btu.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/03/solar-power-can-pay-easily/

You are right about nuclear power being the answer no matter what the question.

For EVs nukes have crazy high miles per gram of uranium. CANDU reactors have a burn up of 7500 MWd/Mg(U) that’s 7500 megawatt DAYS per Mg or metric tonne = 1000Kg so 7.5 megawatt days per kg or 7.5*24hr= 180 megawatt hours now to kilowatts is 180,000 and to watt hours is 180,000,000 since we know we lose 3% getting the power to the wall plug net that’s 174,600,000 to use for moving EVs per Kg of natural uranium. We know it takes 180wh to move a Model 3 down the road that Kg moves a single EV of that size 970,000 miles or 970 miles per gram of natural uranium. A sugar cube sized piece of uranium is 20 grams or 19400 miles worth of travel. Since the average American drives 14500 miles per year we can now find the grams needed for that distance in a five passenger EV its 14.9 grams and smaller than a sugar cubes worth. The spot price for uranium today was $225Kg or 22.5 cents per gram only CANDU reactors can burn natural uranium. 14.9 grams is $3.35 worth of raw uranium let that sink in. The average yearly driving distance can be covered in a five passenger EV with 3.35 dollars worth of uranium nothing anywhere will beat that only roof top solar would be cheaper over a 25 year panel life. Let’s look at life time driving distance and waste volume.

Average lifespan of 78 years can drive from 16 yo till deaths at the avg annual distance. It works out to 926 grams of uranium for 62 YEARS of driving. Uranium oxide fuel pellets are 11-15g/cm3 we will use the lower number. 926 grams at 11g/cm is 84 cubic cm volume. In freedom units that’s 84ml=2.84 ounces or a large shot glass worth of volume. Read that again the lifetime driving distance waste if a candu reactor is used to power an EV of midsized sedan fits inside a shot glass and costs $208 dollars in uranium wholesale spot prices. This is the future regardless of what the luddites say it’s a matter of when from the species level.

If the state figures that out, they will mandate electric locomotives.

I think Siemens is creating such a beast for Amtrak.