The F350 is a class 3 Medium Duty Truck, unaffected by the new regulations. He can keep burning diesel to his heart’s content.
I don’t know if the National Post is the best source for this sort of thing. But is anything factually wrong in this column?
I did NOT post an inaccuracy. Jesus. A Leaf can be charged enough becaause it is more efficient, and goess further per kWh. I thought this wouldn’t need to be said.
A leaf uses about 269 Watt-hours per mile. A Ford Lightning is 460. That’s in summer, on dry roads. But that can easily double if you are towing or carrying a load. In addition, a Lightning is much less efficient in the winter. The larger battery needs more energy to heat, the vehicle doesn’t have a heat pump, and those huge tires sap energy in snow.
As I said, if you are using a truck to commute in the city, maybe you can get away with it. But most trucks are not used exclusively for city commuting. Not around here, anyway.
I posted the figures for the charging rate of the F-150 Lightning. On a level 1 charger, it’s 2 mils per hour of charge. In winter, 1-2 depending on the temperature. Feel free to check it.
Now tell me what happens if you charge 8 hours per night, but you average 40 miles per day in your truck. I’ll tell you: Your truck will slowly deplete, and you will have to top up at commercial chargers from time to time. Charging on level 1 will just extend the time between charges at a commercial charger.
40 miles per day, 5 days per week is only 10,400 miles per year. Most trucks do more than that.
Do you have a cite for the number of trucks that are used purely as commuter vehicles? It’s a hard number to find, and I’m not sure we can even find it because it’s hard to define.
But every single person I know who has a truck bought it for some truck need like hauling plywood sheets, or hunting, or towing a boat, or something. Most have a truck becauxe their work demands it. But they’ll use the truck to go get groceries too, and I’m sure when certain people see them they think ‘poseur in a pickuip’. So maybe your point of view is a little skewed.
I did NOT say they were useless. I said they have less utility. My own quote you quoted back to me says “Count on your electric-only range being about half to 1/3 in winter of what it is in summer. If that works for you, get a PHEV.”
I also started off by saying I like PHEVs, and that they will have to be an important part of the mix if we want to hit the mandate.
In what universe does that translate into “you said PHEVs would be useless in cold weather.”
And I wasn’t moving goalposts, I was carrying on multiple conversations at the same time. I already said I understood the confusion.
I’m curious about this statement. It sounds like you’re saying “this is impossible, so we shouldn’t try.” What it sounds like to me is that the government is well aware that it’s currently impossible, but felt that a government mandate would prompt the innovations required to make it possible by the deadline, which (like every other deadline) will no doubt shift quite a bit.
I drive a pick-up. It doesn’t get great gas mileage. We considered an electric vehicle for our last purchase, but the costs were prohibitive (including not only the new car, but the electrical work on the house necessary to put a charger in the garage and the cost of maintenance, i.e. replacing batteries down the line).
The thing is, global warming is a thing, fossil fuel emissions contribute towards it, and we need to deal with that. Personally, I think the carbon tax is explicitly not dealing with it, while paying lip service to it, as is a lot of what individuals are expected to do. It’s difficult to find long-term, honest discussion of what would make a significant difference and what would merely score rhetorical / political points.
This whole thing reads to me like the international Climate Accords, where everybody agrees that we should do something in ten years, but we don’t. Trudeau will not be in power in 2035. The Liberals may or may not be in power in 2035. The chances of having a Conservative government in between which would reverse this is very high. So I would file this entire thing under “aspirational goals” and check back in 2030.
Well, he died last year so he won’t be doing any trucking. But that’s a good point - F350’s and similar trucks are exempt.
Any bets on what happens to F-350 sales if the mandate is held? It could easily backfire and push people into medium duty trucks if the electric trucks can’t do the job.
Yes tell us now about the folks who drive their one ton dually truck 500km to work every day over a snowy mountain pass loaded with 500kg of work tools, hauling a trailer full of hay and there are no chargers anywhere. (post #20 in this thread)
Head to Calgary and sit on Crowchild trail during the morning commute. Count the number of trucks with a single driver in a suit headed downtown to work in an office tower. Then come back and post some more edge cases.
I didn’t see any errors in it. I think the only auto maker making a profit on electric cars is Tesla. Some, like Volkswagen, are saying that not only are they losing momey, they have no idea how to turn these things profitable.
The high value for losses on each car, though, are a bit misleading in that I believe they include the development cost to date. But Ford still managed to lose over $7,000 per EV not including sunk R&D. The article’s point was that we can’t expect EV prices to fall much in the short and medium term. And since the average EV sold in Canada costs $63,000 or so, that makes them unaffordable to the masses.
The power grid stuff is true as well. Remember when people said it’s not a problem because we’ll all charge at night when demand is low? Well, at night there’s also no solar power, ane in northern Alberta often no wind.
Have a look at our grid situation today. Pay close attention to ‘nameplate capacity’ vs what was actually generated:
What worries me the most about mandated changes is that we are talking about an incredibly complex energy system that has been evolving for a century. We have worked out a lot of bugs, added redundancy where experience showed we needed it, built out transmission networks based on anticipated demand that didn’t include electric cars, etc.
We have no idea what problems we will face if we tear out an evolved system and replace it with a planned, mandated system. But I guarantee we are going to miss a lot of critical things we’ll only discover later.
Here’s a small example: Most people assume that we can simply charge cars at night when there is slack demand. But transformers in the grid are designed for the duty cycles of the mix of energy we use now. Increading demand on those transformers can severely shorten their lives. And many neighborhoods just can’t support many cars charging at once.
How many electric cars can the grid take? Depends on your neighborhood | Ars Technica.
If we are going to charge at night when solar isn’t available, that also impacts Trudeau’s plans for a net-zero energy grid. He wants Alberta to build out more renewable and phase out natural gas. That cannot happen. But if we tried, it would make night charging even more problematic.
Also, there is a global shortage of power trasnsformers.
Putting out a hard mandate with a fixed date in an environment of supply chain issues is a recipe for driving up prices and probably failure.
As a point of comparison, Alberta has 49 million acres of farmland. So about 0.5%. And the solar plants are less damaging to the environment since they don’t create a monoculture or destroy pests or impede animal movement or otherwise.
If you double the solar acreage and use the extra electricity to support higher-productivity farming techniques (greenhouses, vertical farming, artificial lighting, etc.), you can use less total land area for the same net result.
Why no mention of nuclear? Carbon free, and northern Saskatchewan has some of the highest grade uranium deposits in the world. I’m sure Cameco would love to have more local customers.
Canada has enough nuclear fuel to provide 100% of its energy needs essentially for as long into the future as it’s worth projecting.
The problem is that you can’t just whomp together a nuclear reactor in a couple of years. Progress is being made on SMRs but precisely how soon those will be real economical solutions is unclear. Nuclear is relatively green, but your startup times and costs make 2035 a challenging target.
That number was based on current generation. At other times, the numbers for meeting net zero are much, much higher. But even 0.5% of land is a massive number. This has been an unusually good December for us. Temperatures above freezing, lots of sunny days.
And again, solar is offline all night, and mostly offline for two or three months in winter. What are we supposed to do then?
But the bigger issue is storage. We already have enough solar in Alberta to drive electricity prices down close to zero when the sun is shining. But when the sun goes down, energy prices skyrocket when our grid partners are also importing, which is often - especially between 4pm and 8pm. Then, our energy price can go from a daytime price of $10-30/MW to close to $1,000/MW.
If your daytime energy price is $30 and your nightime price is $900, what kind of energy would you invest in? More energy for daytime?
The only way Alberta can really use more solar power is if we build enough storage to utilize it at night. And then the cost of building the storage facilities will be added to our energy bills.
Last month we paid almost $900 for electricity and water. Three years ago it was more like $350. I wonder what it would be if we had to pay the amortized cost to turn .5% of our land into solar farms with storage?
This is a good article on solar power in Canada:
Canada and solar power - Global Energy Monitor.
However, they are too generous to rooftop solar. It really sucks here in Edmonton.
Remember Trudeau pushing up,the net zero requirement to 2035? Here’s what it would take to get to net zero by 2050:
After years of buildout, Canada has about 4400 MW of solar. To hit net zero by 2050, we have to add 5,000 MW of solar every year for the next 30 years. To hit Trudeau’s deadline of 2035, you can almost triple that. We would need to build out three times as much solar per year than Canada has built to date, and do that every year until 2035. In our best year for solar installation we did about 1,000MW. It’s a fantasy goal, and Alberta was right to tell him so.
And that still doesn’t add a joule of energy at night, and you’ll get about 1-5% of that capacity on average in December and January.
Capacity factor tells you how much of ypur nameplate capacity you can expect to generate in a given year. Anyone talking about nameplate capacity in Canada or the U.S. in terms of cost/MW (which is how solar is advertised around here) is being misleading, because capacity factor in the U.S. ranges from 10% to a little over 30% with an average of 24%. Last December in the U.S. solar returned 12.6% of its capacity. In Canada it was 1.1%.
Here’s a good table of capacity factors for various renewable energy sources in the U.S. Canada is worse for wind and solar…
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_08_b.html
I’ve been preaching nuclear since forever. It was always the obvious way to reduce greenhouse gases the fastest with the least changes needed to the grid infrastructure.
If we had started a crash program to build nuclear plants back in 2000, we would be well on our way to net zero. But the second beat time to start is right now.
BTW, while capacity factor for solar is only 24% and wind is about 39%, nuclear is 92-93%. So you need almost four times the size of a solar plant to match the output of a si ilarly rated nuclear plant. And you still get zero power at night with solar.
Since we’ve been debating what to do about global warming ifrom 2000, China has built 35 nuclear reactors and has 19 more under construction.
There are 57 nuclear reactors being built around the world. In the US that number is one, and in Canada zero. We are being idiots about this.
What I meant was, you presented an tweet implying it’s impossible to get to net zero because wind/solar can’t get us there while ignoring the most obvious way to get us to net zero. I don’t think we really disagree here, because we both know that although nuclear is the obvious path forward it’s infeasible at this point to get enough of it online fast enough to meet the current targets (which obviously aren’t going to be met anyways, between Trudeau’s ineffectiveness, provincial conservatives stonewalling, and potentially Poilievre reversing course). I just thought the tweet was kind of disingenuous due to the omission. “We must burn fossil fuels because wind/solar are too hard! Please ignore the existence of the Cigar Lake and McArthur River mines!”
Off topic, but shouldn’t you be asking your UCP Premier some tough questions about this when other provinces haven’t had these dramatic increases?
Our electricity has gone up considerably in BC as well. I can’t measure the water because it’s a flat rate for us, and bundled with waste collection (weirdly, we don’t even have a water meter).
This is certainly not the case recently. BC Hydro rates went up 1.8% in 2019, and then actually went down in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Hydro has planned for modest 2% hikes for the next 2 years.
The prices we pay right now are the result of decisions made before the UCP came to power. Smith is trying to correct some of that now.
Alberta’s electricity prices have gone up 128% while other provinces have seen increases in the low 2 digit range. The primary reason is because Alberta has almost no hydro and no nuclear, and our previous government paid penalties to shut much of our coal down. So when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, we have to import grid power from our partners. Except they’re then also importing power. That,# when it gets really expensive, and that cost gets distributed to the rate payers.
Quebec gets 80% of its energy from Hydro. Ontario gets a huge percentage of its energy from hydro and nuclear. BC has hydro and geothermal. Hitting net zero targets there is a lot easier than in a province that has nothing but a few percentage points of hydro and fossil fuels. If you want to eliminate the fossil fuels, it is a monumental task.
We are also supposed to do this while having 30% of our oil and gas export revenue cut, and energy prices skyrocket.
It’s more to do with taxes than rates. Technically, we don’t have BC Hydro. I just noticed the increase was significant, though it wasn’t insane or anything.
As an expert in power generation, you know that capacity does not come on line quickly between environmental assessments, design, build, and commissioning.
The PC/UCP has had control in Alberta for 48 out of 52 years and couldn’t plan for this?