­xkcd thread

I present a Cybertruck powering a gas station after a tornado, since otherwise the electric gas pumps were non-functional during the outage:

The fossil fuel supply chain is more vulnerable to grid outages, since it itself requires the grid, but then is also subject to other disruptions (refineries, supply from unstable states, etc.).

It should also be noted that a gallon of gas requires about 7 kWh to refine. Coincidentally, that amount of electrical energy will drive an EV 30 or so miles, which isn’t too far off from how far a gas car will go on a gallon of gas.

So claims about EV electrical use have to be balanced against the reduction in refinery consumption. I almost never see this mentioned in the anti-EV press, like the NYT article above.

Solar is growing by leaps and bounds

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-update

U.S. PV [photo-voltaic] Deployment

  • In 2023, PV represented approximately 54% of new U.S. electric generation capacity, compared to 6% in 2010.
  • Solar still represented only 11.2% of net summer capacity and 5.6% of annual generation in 2023.
  • However, 22 states generated more than 5% of their electricity from solar, with California leading the way at 28.2%.

On good days, solar is utterly dominant here in CA. There is still room for more solar+batteries, but we’re doing well already. Here is a graph of today’s generation:

(you might need to click to zoom in).

The green line represents renewables, which are utterly dominant during the day (since it’s mostly solar). But note the highlighted point–batteries are providing more power than any other source. Of course, earlier in the day, they’re a negative since they’re charging–but the solar is cheap and abundant then. It’s just timeshifting the energy use.

Peak renewable generation is 23.8 GW, while much of the time natural gas is <2 GW. And there’s zero coal at any time. There’s some nuclear+hydro in there.

Natural gas does ramp up in the evening, but only to ~8 GW. This could still be improved. But given that we built ~10 GW of batteries in just a few years, and the rate is accelerating, this is all doable. The only remaining question is for the winter months, but electrical use is down then anyway.

Any southern states can repeat this. And northern states can import renewable power from the southern ones.

I love the concept of electric vehicles, especially the setup of charging it overnight in your garage so that you start every day with essentially a full tank of gas.

I just really hate the whole unquenchable inferno aspect.

Yeah, remember how Kia and Hyundai just recalled 3.3 million EVs due to fire risk and told owners to park outside so that the cars wouldn’t set their houses on fire?

Oh wait, those were gas cars.

I should report Randall for trolling. He had to know that posting a comic about EVs vs ICE vehicles would stir shit up at the Dope and derail the thread.

I’m not talking about their propensity to catch fire. I’m specifically talking about our inability to put those fires out once they start.

You just dump lots of water on them. Eventually the battery will cool enough and go out. Or, now, just throw a blanket over them.

Yeah the blanket thing is promising. Water, not so much. I don’t think it’s as much that the water eventually puts it out as it is that it eventually goes out on its own whether you dump 50,000 gallons of water on it or not. But it is absolutely true that putting it out with water is a matter of hours instead of the minutes it takes to put out the fire from a gas powered vehicle.

Water is fine if you have nothing else available. The point is to keep the car cool. Yes, there have been occasional problems with cars reigniting, but that can be avoided with training. The car is not actively burning during most of that time.

Even if EVs are more difficult to put out on average, they catch fire so much less frequently that things are still very much in their favor. And the battery contains much less energy than the gas tank. Gas cars burn out faster in part because all of that energy contributes to the fire. That’s not a good thing. Anything nearby will be affected by the increased heat output.

Do you have a cite for any of that?

EV fires rage for hours. And then hours after that they can still reignite. It’s not like water puts them out in a half an hour but if you stop the water they reignite. They rage for hours while being deluged with tens of thousands of gallons of water, and then even after all of that they can still reignite.

Also EV fires burn much hotter than gasoline fires. Google is telling me 5000°F versus 1500°F.

It’s true that EV fires happen less frequently than gas vehicle fires, which is good. I never said anything about frequency, though. My comment was about “unquenchable inferno.”

But like I said, the blanket is promising.

EV fires do not rage for hours. That would be completely impossible since there just isn’t enough flammable material in them. They can reignite after some hours if not fully cooled and the battery still has energy in it, but that’s not “raging”. The flames are put out relatively quickly.

Googling for temperatures, I indeed see that they have an infobox saying that EV fires reach 5000 F compared to 1500 F, but that’s some unsourced nonsense they pulled from a local TV news station. If you scroll down just a bit further, you can see a dozen sites reporting data–each of which reports a different number. It’s hardly a sensible claim in the first place since peak temperatures depend very much on conditions. And again, much of what is burning is stuff that’s common to ICEs and EVs (Hope your ICE doesn’t have any magnesium components. That really does burn at >5000 F).

Yes, an EV fire may require lots of water to keep cool enough to not reignite. Or you can just let it burn, which it’ll do fairly quickly, just like an ICE. Probably the best solution if it’s outdoors and away from anything important. They will not burn for hours, and the resulting husk will not reignite since there’s nothing flammable left.

A couple of months ago, a car pulled off the freeway, and pulled into a driveway a couple of houses down. The driver said that she’d noticed a little smoke coming from the engine, and so she stopped and got out. Just in time, because all of a sudden, the whole car was an inferno, which didn’t stop until a fire truck got there and blasted it, full force, with water for multiple minutes. Nothing short of a fire truck would have been able to do anything to that fire. I think that by the time you get to that point, practically speaking, any car fire should be considered “unquenchable”, and you shouldn’t consider the scene safe until many hours later. And that was a gasoline car.

If a single fire truck can put it out in “multiple minutes,” that is very quenchable. That same fire truck would need supplemental water and it would take multiple hours (it seems the rule of thumb is 3-5 hours) to bring an EV fire under control.

[Moderating]

Y’know what, this is getting to be a hijack of this thread. I’m sure there are plenty of other EV threads already that discussion could go in.

ETA: Does it make any difference which version of Civ you’re running?

In my experience, this sums up Amtrak perfectly. :wink:

Amtrak is much more comfortable than Greyhound, and the price and convenience are a lot closer to Greyhound than to air travel.

Amtrak is often more expensive than an airplane on the northeast corridor. And it’s slower. And i take it anyway because it’s so much more comfortable and i don’t have to deal with the TSA. I don’t even need to arrive more than a couple minutes prior to departure.

And you can arrive and depart at a centrally located train station instead of an airport on the outskirts of town.