Reading some comments, it's clear beliefs are stickier than evidence.
There's a contingent of numbskulls who simply cannot (will not?) make the effort to envision a future in which this is scaled up. Trying to find a way to deal with that is one of the great challenges of our time.
@peregrine and Zack even made the effort to call it an above ground mining operation, but sadly it's not getting through.
@peregrine This is veering into dangerous territory, but honestly this is part of why I don't personally get too worried about capitalism getting in the way of solving climate change.
It is /obviously/ cheaper and less resource/labor intensive to move towards renewables. And there's soooo much money to be made doing it.
Oil companies will still oil company, sure. But they're either gonna adapt or die once the wisdom of alternatives is sufficiently obvious.
@peregrine people just don't like to imagine their lives changing, and honestly a lot of the eco-minded folks who focus a lot on living less comfortably or whatever are not helping the argument.
We're entering the tipping point right now, and I'm very excited
@TechConnectify in my particular case I feel is not scalable with current technology, and that you dirty americans should start coalescing cities and promoting public transportation đŸ˜†
@Nekoplanet careful, now.
This is a yes and situation. And there are people who worry about the recyclability of batteries /period/ and see that as a reason to not bother with renewable energy.
We need demonstrations that raw materials in battery packs are recoverable for far more applications than just cars
@TechConnectify There's a strong urge for a very focal group to always have one very specific reason why NEW TECHNOLOGY X won't work.
After wondering why (dark motives) I think the easiest explanation is that people need a reason to justify to themselves for clinging to the old (and known) system.
@IIVQ yes, I truly believe that's the biggest thing and am pretty jaded by arguments that evil people are pulling strings.
We humans seek stability and familiarity more than anything, and we bristle at the thought things might need to change. It's simply too comforting to believe that there's nothing wrong with things as they are.
@skotchygut surely the process in the video is an option in that case
@tebrown y'know, I really dislike this sentiment.
I get it, completely. But as shitty as they often are, they're feedback. As a YouTube creator, if you don't engage with them, you'll flounder.
@TechConnectify we absolutely should bother with renewable energy. But renewable energy can use batteries that have less-enegy-dense but easier to supply materials, like thermal accumulators (which usually uses sodium), or batteries made with non-"exotic" materials. Cars cannot afford that.
Fortunately, I think we will see many advances in energy storage in the coming years. We are already seeing papers about new electrolites and battery types so I think is a matter of time.
@TechConnectify but... what if: cars on power rails so we can skip the battery need, then we can put them on a fixed way so we don't need expensive AIs to drive them... and we can make them bigger and public so is cheaper to transition to this new technology! 
@Nekoplanet in the end it's all about $/kWh of storage.
I'm in full agreement that Li-ion batteries probably won't win that at grid-scale long-term, but expertise is its own form of efficiency. It might be the fastest path, and that's still important
@TechConnectify For your videos, absolutely. That makes sense. But for others’ videos, it's probably not worth the stress.
@tebrown consider that it still helps me craft arguments. I can learn from communication failures of others.
And right here is a good example, though I'm not saying Zack failed. It's just another lesson learned on how to connect dots for other folks.
@peregrine my videos on home electrification were done to demonstrate that "folks, you only have - at most - four things in your home that aren't already electric. This isn't that hard, and new solutions will make it easier and easier"
@TechConnectify this is super cool, but also let's be honest: most plastic recycling is bullshit.
@peregrine Well... that depends on what you find a compromise.
If all I want my car to be is a car, then sure. But man, vehicle-to-load is a killer feature that they need to implement before I'd consider one of their cars.
I nearly bought a Model 3 several years ago, and don't begrudge anyone for buying a Tesla. But they're not for me, and I still think they make too many decisions in service of being cool.
@TechConnectify Yeah. But I find it weird that people are so opposing new technologies with as argument that it can't do 100% of what old technology did, even if it can do a lot of other things objectively better.
You have noted this yourself in many of your heat pump video's. "What about the coldest days".
Another thing that happens is that people have a dated image of the state of the art. "This will never be big" even though it has already gone mainstream (in this case: bus electrification)
@IIVQ Heat pumps really grind my gears because so much of our housing... already has them!
They're just artificially limited for... reasons.
And US manufacturers, despite one of them literally inventing air conditioning, are so behind the times and haven't innovated in years.
@Nekoplanet Check out Rondo. Their heat battery tech is pretty amazing.https://www.volts.wtf/p/why-electrifying-industrial-heat.
Unfortunately, the energy density people (feel they) need with cars, generally, is just insane. Most people just cannot understand the idea that the car in the garage only needs to go maybe 25 miles a day to handle 360+ days a year of their needs, and a rental/public transit can handle those other edge cases. People, Americans in particular, want that feeling of security they get from not having to be flexible at all. Not to mention that there are always going to be trade and logistical needs for cars that CAN handle hundreds of miles a day of movement that demands huge energy density.
@admiralteal @Nekoplanet This might seem contrarian, but there actually is a solid reason to have a large battery even when you don't truly need it: wear.
Pack lifetime is, at least currently, a function of the number of cycles. If your battery can only sustain your daily needs, then it's cycled daily and will wear out faster.
From that perspective, I don't actually find it all that wasteful.
@peregrine It certainly is the easy route, yes.
If I haven't expressed this, it's honestly part of why I get annoyed with people who think their way of doing things is "necessary" - their route planning is excellent, hands down, but I don't see that as something you're really gonna need in ~10 years. At least I hope not.
In this transitional period, I see today's "necessities" as band-aids. Definitely needed to heal a wound - but ultimately, we need the wound gone.
@TechConnectify we are in *violent* agreement!
I have so many discussions with people who just are uninformed and angry. Ideally yes we move towards trains and bikes and ebikes instead of cars but like this is a America, and we have to make progress in the next 6.5 years, EV's are it.
@TechConnectify and so many good things come downstream of EVs. batteries get exponentially cheaper and better and more ubiquitous.
That induction range that runs on 120v and uses LiFE-batteries when you wanna boil is one recent example.
@peregrine @TechConnectify But before getting recycled batteries need to be manufactured in the first place. how are supposed to get all the lithium & co for hundreds of millions or billions of cars? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/forget-lithium-its-rare-earth-minerals-that-are-in-short-supply-for-evs/
@sumek @peregrine I imagine people thought the same about oil around the turn of the century, yet here we are.
Even better than oil, lithium hangs around once it's used up.
@TechConnectify How efficient is this process? The EU has set somewhat aggressive collection ratios in the past and have sometimes not managed to reach them. They are targeting 70% recovery of lithium by 2030 (this includes batteries that are not returned). According to a review paper efficiencies tend to top out at around 90%.
If it's any less than 100% we'll need massive amounts of lithium as cars get bigger. This seems to often come at the expense of indigenous peoples, e.g. Canada is already planning on destroying more Cree land to mine lithium.
My position, and the position of most people I talk to about this, is that battery recycling and more electric cars are necessary, but not sufficient. A lot of this reasoning is described in a whitepaper from UC Davis and various other researchers around the US.
In addition to recycling it's important to improve public transportation, reduce the use of cars in cities, promote e-bikes, and increase density in cities. This would have other positive effects, such as more social mobility (easier to get to jobs and poor people do not have to spend thousands of dollars on a car), more safety, less noise, and lower PM2.5 from tires.
@artemist The answer you're looking for is in the video, and a word of advice:
I know about all the things you've mentioned here, and agree. Don't take my excitement for this process as an endorsement that electric cars are some sort of panacea.
@peregrine Oh, in that one specific area I'll agree hands-down that Tesla's way of doing things is better.
I really can't stand car dealers, and it would have been great to side-step that experience when I bought my Ioniq. And still, they're annoying with service appointments.
On the other hand, though, I'm not entirely sold on Tesla's service scheme. In some respects I still want a dealer, I just want them to suck less.
@TechConnectify How are they making money if the company that is to receive their product hasn't even been built yet?
@number6 My understanding is that they currently have a functioning facility in Rochester and that what they're building now is expressly to scale that.
@TechConnectify Sorry, I've just been kind of annoyed at other people thinking that and assumed you were
@artemist No, and to be quite honest, I'm similarly annoyed that every time I mention something to do with electric cars, I am flooded by "car bad!" comments.
Some folks will still needs cars. We need to electrify them.
We should also make not needing one easier.
Conversations don't need to be broadened at every opportunity. It's pretty close to sealioning, honestly.
@peregrine Agree, but again - it will be adapt or die.
An increasing number are seeing the light.
Average vehicle lifespan is 12 years -- ~4380 days. That's below average for a well-maintained lifepo battery cycle lifetime, isn't it? But it will be interesting to see how much longer EVs may last than ICE cars, given their comparative mechanical simplicity. I recharge my e-bike daily even though I could probably do it just every 2-3 days because this math on its battery told me it wasn't worth the stress. Admittedly, that battery is vastly smaller and cheaper (since the vehicle is vastly more energy efficient). And also intensely easy to replace -- something I hope may one day be true of car/truck batteries.
I am also optimistic for the future use of "second life" batteries, too. Current EV batteries are huge. Even an old one degraded to 50-60% capacity is still big enough to be a maybe 1 day whole house backup battery, assuming the economy of salvaging them can make sense.
@admiralteal @Nekoplanet I don't think so. 2000 cycles is still pretty average from what I gather. So if your battery were only sufficient for your commute, assuming 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, that's about 8 years if cycled daily.
Maybe that's acceptable, and battery technology will certainly improve, but I'm still not bothered by more battery on-hand. It allows for emergency energy storage, and people will still have oddball needs they can't foresee.
@peregrine @number6 Also, hot take, we need to make transit free-to-use.
You don't change people's habits by making one thing harder, you make the other thing easier.
The need to pay for transit, as well as the need to figure out how to use it or get a ticket/pass/whatever are significant barriers to trying it. It is viewed too often as a last-resort in the US, and we need to change that.
@peregrine @number6 Our current paradigm is "deal with this system and also pay for it" or "buy a car and you have an easy out"
I'm 100% in agreement that we need alternatives to cars, and if you ask me, making the transit we have as easy and accessible as possible is the first step to accepting more public investment.
The idea that transit is "for them" needs to go away.
@TechConnectify @number6 this is a spicy and hotly contested take even amongst liberals lol so I'm staying out of it.
@peregrine @number6 Oh I 100% know.
Some people view taking fares away as a slippery slope to worse service. I, on the other hand, think tying its financial well-being to its ridership is putting the cart before the horse.
Ain't nothing more attractive than "free," we just need to keep it well-funded.
@peregrine @TechConnectify Electric cars are just replacing one bad idea with a slightly less bad idea.
We allow cars to drive free on highways and yet expect people to pay for public transit. Why is that?
We will never have good public transit if we simply switch from ICE to EV.
It takes energy to push around a 2000 pound vehicle. It takes even more energy to push around a 3000 pound vehicle. The ticket to saving energy is to reduce that weight or make it carry more people.
@number6 @TechConnectify Quiz Whats harder to change in *less than* 6.5 years:
- millions of miles of road and highway, ~300million americans daily routines/expectations and our *waves hands* built environment,
- A *most* a few thousand factories and supply chains?
Noting we'd have to do both in your example.
@peregrine @TechConnectify People could start car-pooling today if free-ways became toll-ways. With modern tech, there is no toll-booth. You drive onto a freeway and your plates are scanned and you're dunned with a bill. This could happen in 3 years, not 6.5. (and what's magic about 6.5?)
@number6 @peregrine That's making the current situation more painful before offering popular alternatives.
I, for one, think that's backwards.
@number6 @TechConnectify Right now there is a 5 block long section of raised highway cutting the city of Milwaukee Downtown in half by 3 blocks wide, on our most valuable realestate, that serves *at peak* ~20k people a day.
There were at least a hundred people against at a public hearing to discuss the POSSIBILITY of tearing it down in 10ish years and increasing drive times for the *most* impacted by 6!! minutes.
I'm not a cynical person but I just don't see it.
@TechConnectify @peregrine Freeways are "free". Only a third of the cost of freeway maintenance comes from gas taxes and fees. The rest comes out of the general fund. This is actually socialism, but for the wrong thing.
@number6 @peregrine Absolutely, and this is a reason I think we should just make transit free.
It's lower-cost infrastructure, we already know that, and we accept it for roads as a matter of course.
I think carrots are better than sticks, though.
@peregrine @number6 That's a fair consideration, but increasing vehicle registration fees or adding tolls is similarly risky.
Which is probably why I'm mostly with you on "we need EVs now" - it's the easiest pill to swallow.
And, ironically, if that breaks the way fuel taxes work (which it is), road infrastructure will stop being so free.
@TechConnectify @peregrine I guess I would say that you need to pay a small stipend or have policing ... just so that it doesn't get used as a form of housing.
Notice that the freeways are always kept free of non-travellers, no matter what the surrounding areas are like.
@number6 @peregrine As much as I agree, we could also do a better job of providing housing to solve that problem. In fact I think that's a better course of action than holding onto a barrier to using transit.
I agree, though, that this is all very tricky. I will say from experience, though, that the difficulty of using my local transit system is a big reason I just drive everywhere. I cannot try it on a whim, so I won't.
@peregrine @number6 (oh, so do I, but I doubt that's enough and it's also not that fair. A mileage tax will probably appear, and that won't go over well)
@TechConnectify @peregrine What you're really saying, is that no one is willing yet to take GW seriously yet.
I wonder if we'll have to get to the point of famine or war before we finally "get" it.
@number6 @peregrine Nah, I just don't think you're going to get anywhere by using a club.
Make the better solutions easier.
BUT. I'm receptive to contactless payments. I think CTA turnstiles already accept them.
If it were that easy, and I didn't need a card or a ticket or whatever, I'd probably be more inclined.
Then again, we have a lot of unbanked people here, and there are still plenty of costs to collecting fares (like payment processors taking their cut).
@TechConnectify I have a neighbor who insists that all electric cars will be thrown, whole, in the junkyard when the battery dies. That’s why they prefer gasoline powered vehicles.
So yeah, now we mostly just talk about yard and garden maintenance.
@peregrine @TechConnectify I can't agree with this, FWIW. I know you're all in a happy agreement, and I wouldn't stick my nose in if it weren't important. Here goes.
1) Recycling is, itself, resource and energy intensive, so the priority needs to be scaling back production (eg, building cell phones to last decades, not years) as well as recycling. "Reduce" comes before "recycle" in the triangle.
@OrionKidder @peregrine sure, but this is a yes and.
A battery is a fancy thing we have designed which allows us to perform a reversible chemical reaction on a whim. They will wear out as a matter of course.
We absolutely should do our best to enhance their useful life - and we are. But when they expire (which they will), we need technologies to take their raw materials and create new batteries.
2) You appear to be assuming that "capital" (and the powerful people who control it) are logical actors. They're not. Recent studies have shown that the wealthiest among us make some of the poorest decisions bc we overestimate our own, get this, ability to make rational decisions.
Rich people are absolute shit decision makers. They'll cling to dead revenue streams for decades. But that's not even the worst part because...
@OrionKidder @peregrine a larger discussion which, as far as I was aware, we were not having.
But if you really want to go there - I already drive much more inexpensively now that I have an electric car. And electric cars keep getting cheaper. Before long (and arguably now if you're willing to give up some creature comforts) it will not make economic sense to purchase a gas powered vehicle, no matter how hard the capital class works to convince you otherwise.
@OrionKidder @peregrine personally, though, I view this sort of injection of other issues as adjacent to sealioning.
There's an awful lot of people who genuinely believe we are not recycling lithium-ion batteries. Or that it's not possible to.
Here we see evidence that this is incorrect, and I am celebrating a creator documenting that evidence (as well as expressing frustration that people don't see it).
That's all I was hoping to do
Truly, though, I would not stick my nose into someone else's thread if it weren't literally the destruction of the habitable Earth we're talking about (not that this thread is making any difference one way or the other).
@OrionKidder @peregrine I didn't say it literally was sealioning, but adjacent to it.
I know all about the ills of recycling and how a lot of it is bullshit. But this, clearly, is not that. And nowhere am I saying that I think recycling is some solution - I honestly think it's hella weird you could assume this case represents a distraction from larger issues.
We need shitloads of batteries quickly - and they're gonna wear out. We better know how to recycle them.
@OrionKidder @peregrine And yes, we also need more walkable cities, land-use reform, better transit. All those things!
This isn't just about cars.
But the batteries in EVs are constantly treated as some boogeyman. A false equivalency is routinely drawn between metals mining and oil extraction, when metals are infinitely recoverable and oil just isn't.
No worries. Internet communication is hard!
I only echoed the sentiment that there is a strong economic incentive to recycle these batteries. The raw materials in them are far too valuable to just landfill them, but so far we haven't really reached a critical mass of batteries to make a closed-loop pipeline economically feasible compared to acquiring virgin materials.
We appear to be there, now.
@OrionKidder @peregrine And I do genuinely bristle at the idea that our current economic system is an immovable barrier.
From my perspective, entrenched power is. And that entrenched power has indeed been spending lots of resources to convince folks the truth is murkier, and we shouldn't look for greener pastures.
But those tactics stop working just as soon as the alternatives are obvious and cheaper - and even a capitalist will follow that lead.
@TechConnectify If you're open to requests, please do battery electric buses versus trolleybuses, since I think we made the same mistake with trolleybuses that we did with streetcars.
@BalooUriza I'll leave that to the transit folks.
But, honestly... I'm not so certain it would truly be worth rebuilding overhead power infrastructure. There's a lot of headaches there (permitting, NIMBYs, engineering cost) which are sidestepped by $50k in batteries per vehicle - an added cost that's fairly marginal when that vehicle is a bus.
@TechConnectify Fair! Both technologies benefit from having *far* fewer moving parts. But, one eliminates almost all energy charging loss by only needing enough battery to negotiate a short detour, can run with the heat on without effecting range and can effectively run 24/7 for weeks on end stopping only for cleaning and inspection. All of those upsides is why the cities that have trolleybuses are not keen on getting rid of them any time soon.
@BalooUriza Oh absolutely, if it's already there, there's no reason to ditch it! I do think that in a situation where it doesn't exist, though, it's a lot of work for (mostly) diminishing returns.
If we can get light rail going, though... then by all means!
@TechConnectify Sure, light rail is great and hella efficient but really, if you got BRT already, what are you even doing not electrifying a static, high volume route, other than making it harder to transition that line to light rail later? Or if you have neither and a budget of about $3.50 and a roll of tape... BRT with the stretch goal of light rail's a good starting place.
@BalooUriza How prevalent is BRT at this point? I don't think we even have any around here.
@OrionKidder I agree to an extent, but find viewing everything through the lens of capital as reductive.
More broadly, I have this sense that nobody agrees on the terms when discussing economic systems. For instance, I see entrenched power as very much a thing that would occur under socialism. A worker-owned power plant probably wouldn't stop running just because scientists say they need to. It's in their best interest to keep going as-is.
But now we're veering dangerously off-track.
@OrionKidder While I agree it's disheartening to see governments continue on with efforts to secure fossil fuels, we can't simply cease using fossil fuels immediately or literally millions of people will die. What we're dealing with is inertia of critical systems.
We cannot just stop those systems we rely on for healthcare, refrigeration, food production, etc. without incalculable havoc to society. We must transition, and yeah I agree we need to do it faster. But we also are kinda stuck.
@OrionKidder However, I'm pretty confident that the money to be made selling what are effectively free-energy devices (with, admittedly, a few bugs to work out) is a pretty big incentive on its own to accelerate the transition, and we are seeing it happen. I, for one, take solace in that.
There's still lots to do, though.
To be absolutely clear, I don't think markets/capitalism/whatever will save us. I just don't think it's as in-the-way as many believe it to be.
Society is.
@OrionKidder But, I'll shut up now. Honestly not looking for a back-and-forth, here, as I suspect we'll continue disagreeing on that point. I'm just skeptical of simple narratives.
@TechConnectify @BalooUriza Hear hear! I often read/hear about the old Chicago Aurora and Elgin light rail line, and hate that it was long gone by the time I was born.
@gregly @BalooUriza Now it's the Prairie Path, which I rode all the time when I was a kid. Sad what happened to it (though the path it is today is very nice!).
But, we thankfully still have plenty of rail service in Chicago and, honestly, the CA&E was kind of redundant in many places so it's not a terrible loss... but it sure is annoying to realize what we used to build and have before the car changed our priorities.
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