That will happen about the time Miami is underwater.
Nah, you are just making sure that Greenpeace is the one that will dictate what to do, nice work.
Solving many other problems? 
I prefer to make sure private enterprise, governments and the people to work together as they do in West Texas. Eventually even more people will stop relying on people like you.
I’m not certain how EVs can replace diesel-powered cargo trucks or even cargo ships. Also, if demand for EVs go up worldwide, then more oil and resources will definitely be required.
In addition, some assessments reveal that carbon emissions throughout the whole life of EVs are almost as high as those of petrol-powered vehicles.
Given that, I would look at electric rail for carrying necessary cargo and the use of EVs and diesel-powered vehicles for emergencies (with the latter for rough roads, etc.), with communities focusing on localization.
The catch is that this will require significant levels of coordination and cooperation between countries and business, plus a lag time:
It Will Take 131 Years To Replace Oil, And We’ve Only Got 10 (shared earlier)
Some argue that major transition initiatives should have started more than a decade ago. Also, such cooperation will be difficult given competition, the need to profit, countries engaged in incessant conflict during the past few decades, increased militarization and armaments production, destabilizing effects of oil price increases, extreme weather conditions, and pollution, etc.
Unfortunately, petrochemicals from oil are also needed. Also, some transport (such as cargo ships) require fossil fuels. There are also possible resource issues for uranium, water, etc. (See previous post.)
In addition, energy returns for other sources are low.
Given that, a significant decrease in resource and energy consumption globally has to take place. That’s bad news for a global economy that requires increasing and much higher consumption to guarantee profits and returns on investment.
Those are very serious issues and connected to global warming.
I was interested to see that some big trucks (like the tractors in 18-wheeler tractor-trailer rigs) are already being produced as hybrids. While it doesn’t immediately follow from this that such trucks could realistically be powered entirely by batteries as they exist today, it’s a step in the right direction. In the longer term, hydrogen fuel cells may be the right answer to big trucks and smaller ships, and possibly nuclear for really big ships.
Some of those assessments seem a bit overblown, but regardless, there is nothing intrinsic that says EVs must have a high life-cycle carbon footprint – in fact there’s no theoretical reason they even need to have any carbon footprint greater than zero; it’s just a matter of technology. Whereas burning fossil fuels for energy produces a predictable amount of CO2 through straightforward chemistry.
I would be inclined to take the petrochemical argument off the table entirely. No one is really arguing that there’s anything wrong with extracting oil for petrochemical use, any more than there is in mining iron or copper. It’s the burning of it that constitutes a massively large-scale unintentional exercise in geoengineering.
Some roads are very rough and have steeper angles, which means diesel trucks will still be needed. This and more have to take place immediately as oil surplus will not last. One documentary reveals that the transition should have started at least one decade ago. Add increasing demand for such transport worldwide due to a growing global middle class.
Some details are shared here:
“Life Cycle Assessment of EVs Reveals Startling Results”
I think the issue isn’t the need for a zero footprint but that the decrease in carbon emissions isn’t that much. Add to that the increasing demand for such vehicles by a growing global middle class (which will certainly be needed by manufacturers who need to sell more units each time for more profits).
The reference to petrochemicals is crucial because these are used for thousands of components and goods, as well as in the manufacturing process and delivery systems, and for all sorts of parts and finished goods that are part of renewable energy systems.
I am also totally for us all working together, although I’m not sure what West Texas is all about.
Unfortunately, so far all of us working together on our economic systems has left a substantial disparity of wealth and an enormous debt for future generations to bear. I guess I have trouble believing we’ll band together to solve AGW, except by addressing catastrophes as they arise–similar to the way we “address” our debt by hoping to solve for any future consequence of it as it arises. And, in parallel to AGW, it’s possible to predict in general that horrible economic consequences will arise. It’s just very difficult to predict exactly what they will be, with predictions ranging from world economic collapse to a brief period of higher taxes or inflation.
I’m clear that your preference is to make sure we all work together, but I’m a little less clear on why you think people will stop relying on people like the Pedant (by which, I assume you mean the masses will stop listening to the negative nabobers and get their act together around AGW) and actually solve AGW.
Too many of us are Al “Strawman” Gores.
Is there a success story in West Texas that gives you hope for the world?
The rest of your reply, and virtually all the other ones, show that this is not your intention.
Bad enough that your advice recommends to do nothing, but worse when it ignores that you accuse proponents of the solutions as the ones making a crusade of it when the reality is that the crusade is afoot for powerful interests to give you information that confirms your biases and give us leaders that recommend doing nothing.
That is beginning to change regardless of the misguided efforts to demonize the proponents and the science.
And here again is the shell game that makes it so maddening to have this debate. AGW catastrophists throw out extreme scenarios or demand specific policy interventions, and if anyone questions it, the response is that there’s a wide consensus among scientists that AGW is real, and therefore if you refuse to accept whatever the current flavor of argument is, you’re a ‘denier’.
Let’s go over the chain of knowledge surrounding climate change, and where the consensus really is:
- Is Earth Warming? (overwhelming consensus - yes)
- Are human CO2 emissions part of that warming? (overwhelming consensus - yes)
- Is that warming a potential risk of future harm? (consensus - yes)
- How big is the risk (no consensus at all)
- What should be done about it? (No consensus at all)
Items 4 and 5 are where the debate should be focused. Most of us, including many famous ‘deniers’ like Lindzen, Christy, Pielkie, McIntyre, and others, would agree with the first three statements, as would I. But let’s be clear: When it comes to ‘what should we do?’, the catastrophic AGW side is trying to trade on the consensus on the first three items to shout down debate on policy. Or, they try to sneak in outlier studies that show great harm and claim they are part of the consensus, or use low-probability scenarios as if they are the median.
So what do we need to know to solve items 4 and 5 and come to an agreement as to what should be done? Well, if you want to be scientific about it, you’d need to do the following:
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Establish a reasonable model of likely climate outcomes, and quantify them into an overall risk assessment, including a risk assessment on the process used to come up with those likely outcomes.
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To do that, you need to have a reasonable model of CO2 emissions over the next 100 years, which requires an economic model that can predict our fossil fuel consumption over that time period.
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Develop a reasonable model quantifying the sources of economic and environmental damage, and assign risks to them (extreme weather, sea level rise, droughts, etc). We need to know where the damages might be so we can decide if mitigation is a better path than prevention.
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Understand what the costs will be for mitigation vs harm.
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Using the risk profiles, costs of each risk, costs of mitigation, establish a reasonable number for the net present value of those future costs.
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Develop strategies for preventing the outcomes or adapting to them, assign costs to those strategies, and all the various risks in implementing them. The burden of proof is on those proposing the strategies to show exactly how they will reduce global CO2, what the cost will be, and based on that CO2 reduction how much future damage was prevented.
NONE of these questions have satisfactory answers today. Our climate models have shown zero ability to predict climate more than a decade or so into the future. Our economic models can’t even predict GDP six months in advance with any accuracy. Our sociological models are pretty much useless for prediction.
There have been numerous studies that have tested expert ability to predict the future of complex systems. In almost every case, the experts do no better than amateurs - or chance. The current GCM climate models actually do worse than simple models that extend the trendline into the future and incorporate known cycles like el nino and la nina. All financial models utterly failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, and subsequent macroeconomic models were less accurate than simple ‘regress to the mean’ models at predicting GDP even a year into the future.
Determining future costs depends on what technologies we will have in the future, which is unknowable. It depends on the wealth and development of Africa and other poor equatorial nations, which are political problems that have nothing to do with science. It depends on human migration patterns over the next 100 years, which are unknowable.
Knowing the cost of restricting CO2 today depends on the cost of developing alternatives that will scale - which is still unknowable. It’s unknowable in part because it depends on unpredictable breakthroughs, and in part because it depends on regulatory and political issues outside the scope of science. For example, we could assign a cost to solving the problem by transitioning to nuclear power - except no one knows if governments will actually allow that to happen, or if they do how much the cost of the regulatory burden will be.
The future is damned near a random walk when it comes to complex adaptive systems. That’s why experts have failed at predicting them. Consider just two big changes that have happened in a very short period of time which drastically affected predictions of CO2 output since the 2007 IPCC summary: The financial crisis, and the discovery of new natural gas reserves through fracking. Both of those resulted in a major reduction in CO2 output relative to predictions - and both happened within a couple of years after the last ‘100 year’ forecast.
We don’t know what big changes are going to happen in the future, but we know there will be big changes, and that they will dominate in determining our future direction. Since the models can’t predict them, they can’t predict the future with much accuracy.
And of course, the big elephant in the room is the fact that no regime of carbon reduction can possibly work so long as China, India, and Russia refuse to go along. And so far, every indication we have is that they’re not going to.
The key takeaway is that there is still a LOT of work to be done before we can get to the point where we should start interfering in people’s lives and forcing them to reduce their standard of living in order to ‘solve’ the problem. It’s this hard work that the catastrophic global warming folks want to short-circuit by shouting down the opposition.
Of course, if we take this out of the realm of science and into philosophy and political worldview, it all changes. And that’s why the two camps are so separated.
If you believe that:
A) sustainable living is a good all by itself,
B) giving more power to governments and NGO’s is a good thing,
C) Taxing CO2 emitters is a public good because the money can be used to redistribute wealth,
D) we should be engaged in large wealth transfers between the rich countries and the poor, and that such transfers should be directed by governments and NGO’s
E) The primacy of the environment over man, and that any risk of ecological damage is too great (the precautionary principle)
Then the whole calculus of climate change ‘action’ is different. To people with this worldview, it’s a no-brainer. The things they want to do would be valuable even if it turns out that AGW doesn’t happen at all. If what some of us see as risks and costs are perceived as benefits and improvements, of course it makes sense to take action now. But don’t confuse your political preferences for science. They are value judgments.
From my perspective, I’m very focused on risks like carbon taxes becoming riddled with so many loopholes and exceptions that they will fail at reducing carbon, but instead will become just another way for big government to control the economy and extract wealth from the citizenry. I’m worried that any UN-based global regime will be quickly co-opted by bad actors and kleptocrats. I’m worried that government-imposed alt-energy schemes will be inefficient and inferior to what we might achieve if we let the market sort it out. I see a whole bunch of additional risks from the ‘action’ side of the debate that I’m sure people like GigoBuster either discount or perhaps even see as features.
In any event, this debate is never going to be resolved until the CAGW side is willing to engage in the higher level debate and acknowledge the concerns that the other side has. And the ‘other side’ is not going to get anywhere with the higher-level debate until they stop arguing over the basic science.
And after all the past warnings and notices that you were getting information that was falsely minimizing the risks you resort in the end to “CAGW”, that is a boiler plate denier say so.
One could again report that your tirade is just that, but then again…
Based also on a previous encounter it is clear that you continue to be way off base on #4, as the IPCC and others report, it depends on the scenarios, as currently the scenario that is happening ( in big part thanks to the Republicans in congress and other powerful interests) is the worse case scenario.
Then, as for #5 was it was reported by me and others is that the solutions will be different, so it is no wonder that there is no consensus there, but what you ignore is that the end result is to prevent the massive quantities of CO2 and other global warming gases into the atmosphere. (that BTW was the conclusion of the scientists for one study that was used by contrarians (and pointed by you once) to claim that we should expect the low end of the warming predicted, what the scientist reported was that sure, we should get the low end if we do the right thing and control the emissions).
As I observed before, you also rely on real bullshit in the middle of good arguments:
“Our climate models have shown zero ability to predict climate more than a decade or so into the future.”
Not so, what was found was that the models from Lindzen, Christy, Pielkie, McIntyre, and others failed miserably, there was a reason why others got recognition for doing better than others. You are indeed just swallowing the sorry points of deniers here, very worrisome when you showed before that you could identify them.
The best you can say about current climate models is that they can predict with some accuracy the value of sequestered past data. But since climate is a complex adaptive system, tuning a model to the past climate and then predicting other values generated by that climate is not the same as predicting the future state of the climate system.
I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong - the errors in their predictions are still within the range of natural variability in the climate. A sudden turn to abnormal temperature increases due to variance could put them smack in the middle again. But that hasn’t happened, so the predictive power of these models is still uncertain.
In every other field I’m familiar with, the value of ‘tuned’ models in predicting future states of complex systems is treated with a high degree of skepticism. Even in economics, most economists will freely admit that the predictive power of their models is highly dubious, but they use them anyway because that’s the best they’ve got. The real value of these models is generally found to be in helping to understand such systems - not to predict their specific state in the far future.
If anything climate modeling is even more difficult than economic modeling, or computer models of immune response or brain activity. Climate operates on geologic time scales, the interactions between elements are very hard to determine, and measurement problems are very difficult. Yet we claim much more certainty in our understanding of climate change than we do of immune responses or how a specific ecosystem will respond to a shock, despite these systems being much easier to measure and change happening on much shorter time scales so we can learn from our model failures.
Nonsense, you are recycling denier talking points. If that was the whole truth, then people like Lindsen would had the same rate of success than other climate modelers.
http://www.epw.senate.gov/105th/schn0710.htm
The thing here is that until recently I had not paid much attention to the models as on the whole they are not used exclusively by the experts to report that warming is coming thanks to the dumping of global warming gases into the atmosphere. But then as I found on searches while discussing this issue recently, I have concluded is that most of the items pointed by contrarians are really silly or not at the levels of the distrust they want to make of.
As it turns out it was thanks to Carl Sagan and Cosmos that I found in his last update to his original show that he pointed that computer models also work very well with the climate of other planets.
And then with that insight I found this:
So, since it is not junk science, one has to then conclude a few things:
- You are still drinking a lot from the wellspring of the denier information.
- The blind can not lead the blind. You have to be aware that the same makers of the “computer climate models are junk” say so are also recommending the “solutions” that are just the same as the think thanks that told us how to deal with the tobacco companies.
- You still forget about the ants.
No, really, you are like an owner of a barn that has found an infestation of carpenter ants and he is being told that a few skeptics out there to do nothing as some models predict the ants will move away and he is accepting that over what the pest control experts recommend. Problem is that most models do predict the undermining of the walls of the wall if nothing is done. But imagine here if this is no problem for the barn construction companies that funded those skeptics.
Yes, that last bit is not what what the barn companies are doing, but it applies to the forces that are funding politicians and think thanks that are telling us to do nothing.
For now I think batteries can contribute to fuel use reduction in diesel-powered cargo trucks. Semis. Tractors. Pulling those big trailers, about 15 meters long by 3 meters wide, no?
Consider the design of the Tesla Model S. There is a layer of batteries all along the bottom of it, about 260 kwh worth. A tractor trailer could easily haul 4 of these battery packs within its volume- both because it is so large and because a tractor trailer can be equipped with a monster chassis. Point is, that’s a 1000 kwh battery in your trailer.
If tractors are converted to electric motors, they could still carry diesel tanks to run a generator to recharge the battery, basically like a big Chevy Volt or a small diesel-electric train.
If you’re really trying, you could pave the top of the trailer with almost 45 square meters of solar panels to recharge the battery/drive the motor. It may not fuel your whole journey, but a truck that gleans free (and carbon-free) fuel from the air looks rather efficient on the face of it.
Cargo ships are so large that they allow for other options. A flow battery doesn’t really have a capacity limit, so long as you have enough space. A cargo ship (especially the stinkers that run on coal) have plenty of cargo room for huge volumes of liquid electrolytes. Fueling an electric cargo ship with charged liquid electrolyte at port will feel familiar, even if the draining and recycling of the discharged electrolyte will feel a little weird.
A cargo ship is also so large that it presents the opportunity for solar paneling on the scale of square kilometers. When all you really need to do is coast across the water, this much energy can really add up. (And, can you believe it, ships can be equipped with sails too?)
So there ya go, cargo trucks and ships can be run as evs, at least to the hybrid degree. What else do you think can’t run on electric motors?
They are 2.4 meters wide. 3 meters wide would be significantly oversized.
The reason that trucks aren’t going to hybrid or EVs is multifold:
First, the only kind of trailers that might be useful for things like solar panels would be box trailers. In any other style of trailer, the panels would get in the way of loading/unloading.
Then, heavy trucks have infiltrated transports’ way of life over 100 years. When you start buying EV/Hybridss you must have a transport plan in place that works within the limits. Will an EV, for instance, idle all night providing heat for a long haul driver sleeping on the roadside without having to charge in the morning?
Heavy trucks have also been adapted into just about every situation you can imagine. Not all of these situations are easily replicated. Long haul, heavy haul, and long heavy haul are the areas that are huge diesel consumers and the places that are least served by the proposed EVs. Some of the current hybrid designs can probably do the trick, but it’s not a sure thing yet.
And then we get into the logistics aspects. Let’s say you are an over the road trucking company. Your operating margins are 2-4%. How are you going to deal with having to buy a lot of trailers (that would be quite a bit more expensive than the standard box trailers currently used) with solar panels on them? If you are a national company how would you distribute those to all of your depots. After all, a tractor will come in, pick up a trailer and then take it someplace. So you’d need all of your depots to have them on hand and then to only have them given to the EV/Hybrids.
Additionally, most box trailers are at the regulation height of 4.11m. You would have to buy trailers with a loss of height by 10-20cm for the solar panels (assuming flat on the top) with additional frame support for those panels. You lose cargo capacity.
Outside of the solar panel on trailer idea, EV’s longevity and hauling capacities are a real question mark for most in the transport business and no one is coming out and saying “Hey, this will do what you need in an EV!” Hybrids have their own cost concern: As the consumer popularity has shown, having a hybrid means you have to maintain two power plants. Fortunately for consumers, the electric side of the vehicle is usually covered under a generous warranty. That same mitigation would not be available for fleets. They have to pay their own way.
And there are a lot more issues up for discussion. Fleets will come, but don’t expect them to be jumping at the chance to disrupt their business by adopting new, unproven-in-their-field technology. They will, as always, let the few pioneers go first, solve the problems, and then buy the less-bug-riddled 2.5-3.0 version.
I’m not claiming there aren’t difficulties or that it can happen overnight, but it certainly can be done.
Consider a route from Chicago to Denver. That’s about 1000 miles. A semi rig gets between 4-7 mpg, let’s call it 5 for the sake of easy numbers. That is 200 gallons of diesel required, $800 in fuel per trip at $4 a gallon.
Today’s lithium ion batteries can withstand 1500 full charge/discharge cycles and retain 90% capacity. If this ev rig makes 1500 trips entirely on electric power, that is $1,200,000 saved in diesel fuel, in exchange for peanuts to recharge from the grid. For round numbers, lets say you come out ahead $1 million.
Clearly, the answer to the company with the thin margins is 1. financing and 2. scale. Installing charging infrastructure at both ends of the route is going to have an up-front cost in addition to the purchase of these expensive ev semis, but if each one saves $1 million per 1500 trips (~5 years), clearly you come out ahead in the end.
If it is a pure ev, longevity should not be a problem- electric motors are far more durable than their ICE counterparts. Will the batteries and the panels last? The best solar panels today produce 75% of their original output after 30 years of service, so I think those will be okay. Even if you replace the batteries every 5 years (which seems too often) the battery system I described would cost $150k-$200k, which eats into your $1 million but still leaves you far, far ahead.
I assume they will have to be hybrids because, logistically, maybe it won’t always be practical to charge the thing up overnight each time- you may need to use it now. With some power supplied by the solar panels you still save something on fuel, and anyway, solar panels on semis seems like the most efficient application. We can wait for grid parity before the solar industry completely goes bananas, but diesel-parity was passed long, long ago. No need to build out the grid, the panels are right at the source of your carbon pollution.
I think the logistics could be a problem, yes, though probably less so for big enough organizations. Losing cargo space is a concern too, but when Liberal Hitler emerges and forces everyone to change everything about their lives in the service of mitigating AGW, that will be the least of your worries. 
Have you figured out how many lithium ion batteries you need to pull a loaded semi truck 1000 miles? How much do they weigh? How much volume do they take up? How long do they take to charge? How much current capacity does the charger require for a battery pile that large?
Once you subtract the weight from the load capacity of the semi, how much freight do you lose per trip? Once you factor in the volume of the batteries, how much cargo space do you lose?
Let’s do a quick sanity check: A Nissan leaf has an electric range on the highway of about 70 miles. A non-electric version of a similar car will get perhaps 40 mpg. So that means the battery is supplying an equivalent energy of perhaps 1.7 gallons of gasoline. The leaf battery weighs 648 pounds. That means a battery that can replace 1 gallon of gas is about 381 pounds. But a gallon of diesel contains about 11% more energy than a gallon of gas, so that’s about 423 pounds of battery required to replace one gallon of diesel.
So, if your truck requires 200 gallons of diesel to get where it was going, to go all-electric it would require about 85,000 lbs of batteries.
That’s more than the entire allowable weight of a 53 foot trailer. Will not happen. Ever.
I don’t know of any battery technologies even in the research stage that would make this feasible. Most of the big ‘breakthrough’ battery technologies are not going to provide more than a 3-5 times increase in storage density per pound. Needless to say, even 10,000 lbs of batteries would be a deal breaker.
How about those solar cells? A gallon of Diesel contains about 37 kw/h of energy. The most efficient solar panels available today will provide about 175 W/m2 in bright sunlight.
A typical semi trailer is 53’ long by 102" wide. That’s about 41m2 on top. if we could cover every inch with solar material, that gets us about 7.3 kW of solar panels. If our trip takes 10 hours, we’ll generate about 73 kw/h of energy - not quite enough to replace two gallons of diesel fuel, or 1% of our energy needs. Now factor in the weight of the panels, conversion losses, the times when the vehicle is running during cloudy days or driving at night, and you’ll see that adding solar panels to our truck does almost nothing.
No offense, T2BC, but a lot of people advocating for battery and solar power don’t seem to have a reasonable grasp for just how much energy is in a gallon of gasoline compared to batteries and solar panels.
You have to understand that the only thing that makes electric cars remotely feasible is that they’re starting with a very light chassis and an extremely fuel efficient design to begin with. EV power just doesn’t scale to large heavy vehicles, and it never will unless there’s a breakthrough in batteries that lowers their weight and cost by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Now, I can imagine a hybrid truck being possible in the future, with the battery acting as a torque enhancer for starting off, providing power for the sleeper at night, acting as a buffer to store energy through regenerative braking and providing it again to add low-end torque at start, drive lighting and instruments, etc. There may be some clever efficiencies to be had in large truck operations with a hybrid drivetrain. But all-electric is completely out of the question for the knowable future.
I guess you could assume that you are going to stop every 100 miles and recharge. In which case you’d ‘only’ need 8500 lbs of batteries - still a major whack to the cargo capacity of the tractor trailer. And how long does it take to charge a battery pack of that size? And what kind of facility do you need to pump that much energy quickly enough to make sense?
If it takes a truck 2 hours to go 100 miles, even if you could charge the thing in an hour you’d be adding 33% to the travel time. Again, not feasible. Time is money. And more realistically, charging a battery pack of that size would be a many-hour affair, or your charging station would need to be be able to charge at extremely high currents.
And you discount the cost of electricity as being essentially free. That’s not a reasonable claim either. We’re going to need about 7500 kw/h of electricity for our trip. If electricity at our stop is generated by coal, the over-the-counter price might be as low as 4 cents per kw/h. That’s $300 worth of electricity for the trip. Certainly less than the cost of diesel, but not free. And if you want to go ‘green’ and only use renewable energy sources for the electricity, the cost will likely be higher than the cost of the diesel it replaced.
The “future” was half a decade ago. Your cynicism is showing.
I think your numbers are off, Sam Stone. My sketch involved 4 Tesla Model S batteries. I think those are 260 kwh, weighing ~550kg. So, a 1040 kwh battery weighing 4840 lbs. That’s a lot, but nothing like your numbers.
Your estimates from the Leaf’s range seem about right- I go by roughly 8 kwh = 1 gallon of gas. So our battery amounts to ~130 gallons of gas.
The best solar panels today are ~24% efficient. If on a good day you get 1100 w/m^2, 40m^2 of solar panels would be a bit better than a 10kwh system. Another 13 gallons, big deal perhaps, but you get some % of that every day that it is outside. 365*13= 4745 gallons of fuel a year, top end. ~$19,000 a year in free fuel- my numbers are ‘best case’, so call it 13-15k. It’ll pay for itself in a few years.
Regenerative braking might bring us up to 150 gallons a day of electric power. If you stop once for an hour (let the poor driver stop for an hour every 1000 miles), you could re-charge the rest. A Tesla Supercharger gives half a charge in 20 minutes. I envision re-charging the 4 battery packs separately and at the same time, so there’s the rest of your e-juice. But it burns natural gas too, just in case.
Let’s look at the the Leaf’s capabilities a different way: The Leaf itself weights 3,300 pounds and the average carry would be, what, another 400 for passengers and cargo (two people and a grocery trip-ish)? So that’s a 24kWh battery going an EPA estimate of 75 miles at 3,700 pounds. Assuming that the battery is completely exhausted during the trip, that means each kWh is driving 154.12 pounds 75 miles, which further means that each kWh of battery is transporting 6.42 pounds 75 miles, which ultimately yields roughly 0.0852 pounds per kWh of battery per mile. (Note that the Leaf’s motor is 98% efficient and 80 kW. The battery need will change most based upon the efficiency and secondarily on the input of the motor.)
Full weight tractor-trailer combination load is 80,000 pounds. And most of the combination loads you see roaring down the highway are close to this weight for transit. For that weight, you will need 6,816 kWh of battery to go each mile. 10 kWh of solar panels across the trailer is sorta dwarfed. So is the Tesla 4-fold battery pack you proposed at 1040 kWh.
EVs are going to have a shaky start in the long haul, large load, long large loads department.
The hybrids I’ve seen are much more effective. But those are still brand new and, as I said above, the pioneers are going first. Even so, there is very little to change when you buy a hybrid tractor. There is a huge fundamental shift for full EVs.