Are Liberals trying to destroy the resource industry?

[Grand Mal]

20 hours ago, Bonam said:

Electric cars are a sure thing at this point. "Cheap and viable" are vague enough terms that one can always argue about whether they've been met but in many other countries electric models are already very popular. Within 10 years, electric cars that cost cheaper and have comparable range to similar gasoline models will be a given, and charging infrastructure will be prevalent. However, charge times will likely remain an issue (it won't be as fast to fully recharge your battery as it is to refill your gas tank). But more electric cars only strengthens the case for nuclear power - we'll need a lot more energy to charge all those cars. 100% conversion of cars and trucks to electric would increase electricity demand by ~50% over current levels. But nuclear faces essentially insurmountable opposition from all levels of the public and government.

Fortunately, electric cars work fairly well with a grid powered by a larger fraction of solar energy, since they function as distributed energy storage. Drive your car to work in the morning, plug it in to charge during the day while its sunny, drive it home, plug it in there and its your battery for the night. Right now it'd be hard to load balance the power grid with more than 10-15% of the power coming from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. If 100% of cars were electrics and we had a "smart grid" that knew to charge those cars when power is abundant and to use their batteries to supplement generation when power is low, we could probably up that fraction from 10-15% to 30-50%. That means most/all new generation needed to accommodate the power needs of electric cars could potentially be solar/wind. 

Overall, converting all land transporation from gas/diesel to electric and using renewables for that extra generation would lower worldwide GHG emissions by ~25%. Converting freighter ships to use nuclear reactors similar to navy ships would cut another ~5%. After that, you have to go after base load power generation (coal and natural gas).

Charge times aren't an issue for my screwgun. I just swap the dead battery for a recharged one. I don't know why you one day couldn't drive into a station and have your dead battery swapped for a recharged one. Or even have one of your own on the charger, ready to change out. Might be a difficult thing today but I'm willing to bet that it's an easily solvable problem, and if experience has taught us anything, it's that the market finds a way.

[OftenWrong]

8 minutes ago, Grand Mal said:

There's a better option, though it's not available to everyone. Out here in BC our electricity is hydro, which basically is solar. The sun lifts all those water droplets out of the ocean and drops them on the mountains. As they run downhill back to the ocean we make them turn turbines and generate electricity. Works so well we sell electricity to Americans. True, there's issues around disrupting the river flow and providing access for migrating fish and whatnot but they're relatively easily dealt with. Relative to nuclear waste and hydrocarbon combustion byproducts, I mean.

But, as I said, it's not an option that's available to everyone yet. And, actually, I suspect that some of the schemes for using tidal flow will be more interesting for large-scale electricity generating, with no waste or byproducts.

Unfortunately generators based on this principle cannot be built in every city, it has to take advantage of natural geography wherever that occurs. Not a limitation for nuclear. This is only on topic in the sense that Canada has a fairly advanced nuclear industry, and the CANDU design is highly respected around the world.

Edited September 14, 2017 by OftenWrong

[Queenmandy85]

49 minutes ago, Grand Mal said:

Charge times aren't an issue for my screwgun. I just swap the dead battery for a recharged one. I don't know why you one day couldn't drive into a station and have your dead battery swapped for a recharged one. Or even have one of your own on the charger, ready to change out. Might be a difficult thing today but I'm willing to bet that it's an easily solvable problem, and if experience has taught us anything, it's that the market finds a way.

It's so simple. Who woulda thought.

Edited September 14, 2017 by Queenmandy85

[Grand Mal]

49 minutes ago, Queenmandy85 said:

It's so simple. Who woulda thought.

Who woulda thought? The guy who'll swap out your dead battery for a recharged one, he woulda thought. Or, diesel engines will never replace steam because diesel fuel will always be expensive and unavailable.

[Bonam]

5 hours ago, Grand Mal said:

Charge times aren't an issue for my screwgun. I just swap the dead battery for a recharged one. I don't know why you one day couldn't drive into a station and have your dead battery swapped for a recharged one. Or even have one of your own on the charger, ready to change out. Might be a difficult thing today but I'm willing to bet that it's an easily solvable problem, and if experience has taught us anything, it's that the market finds a way.

Possible, but there are difficulties here. As you probably know, Tesla was looking into it but gave up on the idea.

One issue is that the battery needed for a car is very heavy, making up a pretty big fraction of the total mass and volume of the car. That means it gets built into the frame and distributed in a way to fit the car's design. If electric car batteries had to be a standard size/shape, this would reduce how much you could optimize the performance of an electric car. With every car having a different shape battery, a battery-swap station would need to have many different models on-hand, which is not feasible. 

Secondly, if every car has to have a battery in it, but also there needs to be an abundant supply of additional batteries lying around at battery swap stations that are as ubiquitous as gas stations, then even ignoring the issue above, you would need several times as many batteries as cars. However, world battery production and availability of the necessary materials are key limitations for how many electric cars can be produced.

My suspicion is that the charging time issue will be an easier one to address than developing a viable battery swap architecture. Battery chemistry will continue to improve to allow faster charging, and companies will eventually agree on and deploy a ~1 MW charging standard of some sort. Even at 1 MW, you're still talking a few minutes longer to recharge than to refill a gas tank, but I'm guessing that in the 5-10 minutes range per full charge people would get used to and accept the extra few minutes delay given the other obvious advantages of electrics. 

[Argus]

15 hours ago, Grand Mal said:

Charge times aren't an issue for my screwgun. I just swap the dead battery for a recharged one. I don't know why you one day couldn't drive into a station and have your dead battery swapped for a recharged one. 

Your screwgun battery weighs a few ounces and fits in your pocket. An electric car's batter pack weight 650 pounds and is several feet wide.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Argus said:

Your screwgun battery weighs a few ounces and fits in your pocket. An electric car's batter pack weight 650 pounds and is several feet wide.

We're gonna need a bigger pocket...

[PIK]

In the city sure, but in the rest of canada. But then liberals don't realize that there is a ''rest of canada''.

 

rest

[Michael Hardner]

24 minutes ago, PIK said:

In the city sure, but in the rest of canada. But then liberals don't realize that there is a ''rest of canada''.

Once in awhile, when the wind changes, you can hear the whining ie. "subsidize us".   Trudeau has to keep the resource industry going even if they hate him irrationally for being French, basically.  

Look, farm equipment and such has had exemptions in the past and there's no reason to think that wouldn't happen with such a change.  

As for 'the rest of Canada'.... Toronto subsidizes you 11%, so it's basically  a giant welfare state.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/SharetheWealth.pdf

Quote

Greater Toronto Area (GTA) taxpayers pay out almost $24 billion more in taxes than they receive in government spending—a net tax burden equal to 11 percent of the GTA economy

And we have to beg for a few billion for a decent transit system because 'the rest of Canada' hates us... but not our money.

[cannuck]

On 9/10/2017 at 9:24 PM, Queenmandy85 said:

I am getting too old to be able to have influence on the course of national and international policy.

That's a cop-out.  Don't sell age short - with it comes some wisdom (with any luck).  Think about how we killed off the CWB - all old guys and gals, pretty well, and the Wheat Board is GONZO!

BTW:  your earlier comments about nukes are right on.  Problem is: the nuclear industry in North America took a horrible beating at the hands of communist governments in USSR and their sympathizers - such as one PET - who made it a bad word within our culture of technical ignorance.  Sub-critical mass reactors and thorium fuels are definitely what SHOULD put the nukes back in the groove.