Posted on 03/25/2024 3:32:31 AM PDT by Sam77
You’re right. That doesn’t include the vast number of extra trucks needed to make up for untold hours of downtime during charging. It’s not just charging your rig for a few hours, it’s waiting for the four rigs in front of you. DOT hours of service are racking up and after waiting eight hours to charge, you can no drive for a whopping three hours before your time expires. This requires another driver to come and hook your trailer so he can repeat the stupidity.
Oh, and the average semi can travel 2000 miles per fillup. An OTR driver may fill up every 4 days or so, taking 30-45 minutes. the Freightliner eCascadia can go a whopping 115-230 miles on a charge.
The average semi tractor in America is 11.5 years old. EV batteries might last 5-8 years. Tesla’s cute little $200,000 number goes away real quick when you get to buy a new rig 5-10 year before your business plan called for.
EV everything is a stupid idea. EV trucks are beyond stupid.
Losing a day or two each way on a long haul to charge the massive batteries would affect profits of truckers and customers alike.
It won’t work. But the Democrats are good at screwing things up, blaming Republicans, and then trying to fix things with more ‘fixes’ that don’t work.
“To collect enough solar power, on average, for just one truck’s worth of 700 kWh would mean 350 solar panels of 400W each. “
Interesting information. Thanks!
On the highway yesterday we passed a multi-acre solar farm. Don’t know its output. I don’t really think solar only will get the job done.
If you can, make an estimate of how many acres of solar panels it would take to keep the current number of big rigs running, say, along some route on an interstate.
I do like the idea of replaceable batteries on the big rigs.
in optimum conditions, with no consideration how much that electricity costs to generate, and the additional expense of infrastructure, etc. It JUST WON”T WORK. Let’s do some honest science and compare ALL the cost features, not just plugging in to a home socket.
Sounds great, but you can’t actually buy a Tesla semi.
Nowhere do they tell you what the load capacity is, or the price.
Put your name on the list and they will get back to you...someday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3dCDNIRM34
There is no mention of how many batteries a semi truck will require or how much more weight they will carry in order to haul a maximum load of 80,000 pounds.
They’ll need 2 EV trucks to carry the load of 1 of the Diesel ones
Assuming my numbers are correct from the trucking (the part I'm the least comfortable assuming is right), I'll use the specs from a newer version of a solar panel similar to mine: 430W Mission Solar panel from Texas.
The length and width are 82" X 42", which is 24 square feet. I'll assume a 30% reduction in sq ft of land taken up, due to tilting the panels to face the south. We'll call it 17 sq ft per panel. And since these are 430W panels instead of 400W panels, we'll assume we need "only" 325 of them instead of 350 of them.
So that's 325 panels X 17 sq ft/panel = 5,525 sq ft, or about 1/8th of an acre of land. Let's add a little room to walk between rows of panels for maintenance and hold the batteries waiting to be loaded onto the semi, call it 1/6th of an acre of land for solar panels to keep one truck rolling on most days (again, not counting for driving during rainy days).
If there are 2 million trucks on the road, that's 2 million X 1/6th acres = 333K acres needed for solar farms and battery storage to produce 80% of the miles with solar. Of course, that assumes no reduction in throughput for northern EV's driving in the cold and northern solar panels getting less sun exposure. My numbers above are based on what I'm used to in Alabama where we get plenty of sun and our EV rarely has to perform in below freezing temps.
IMHO, with northern weather included we'd need probably half a million acres of solar/battery land to produce 80% of the power needed to electrify today's semis. To make it 100% solar based would need probably twice as much (law of diminishing returns, trying to have a system that works good enough even in the harshest conditions).
How often do they have to charge it and what does the battery weigh?
Do we close our power plants before or after we change to EV?
Let’s say 666000 acres required for the 2 million trucks.
That’s 1040.625 square miles at 640 acres per square mile.
Taking the square root of that, it would be a square 32.26 miles.
I don’t know the amortized cost for the panels and their maintenance.
Who knows? ....
Tesla promised that all Superchargers would be powered with 100% renewable energy by the end of 2021 and they never lie, right?
So yes, we can start shutting down power plants right now.
Musk stated publicly in 2017 that the Semi would be guaranteed not to break down for one million miles. He didn't say whether that included the battery or not, and there is nothing on their website to clarify this. The battery warranty on their passenger autos is 8 years or 100-150K miles, whichever comes first.
The largest lithium find in the world was discovered in Oregon and Nevada which Biden promptly closed down.
Wouldn’t a diesel-hybrid (PHEV) make the most sense?
The problem with that theory is that the fuel for the current fleet of trucks is transported to the retail distribution points by trucks using the same fuel. Fuel for battery-only EVs only can be transported to the retail distribution point by means of the common electrical grid, which in many places already is either over-taxed or under-powered or both.
Switching to battery-only for OTR trucks will drastically compound the problems with the existing grid.
Not to mention there has never been any large-scale, real-world testing to confirm the efficacy of the plan. Which is as silly as building a rocket you propose to send to the moon without first testing it with a suitable number of shorter missions.
LOL. How money do they make when the are charging for hours and hours????
When they build 100 new nuclear power plants then we will talk.
Not the Bee.
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