Scrutable

When I bought a printer last year, all the manufacturers were pushing actual subscriptions - you pay say €3 a month, they let you print up to 50 pages, and send you a new cartridge when it runs out. If you miss a payment, or don't connect to wifi for a few weeks, they remotely deactivate your printer.

I can imagine a model where you pay for a battery warranty on top of the cost of the battery, with extra costs if you let the battery level drop below a certain level more than n times a month.

But yeah, rent seeking is the business model of everything now, from groceries with "autoship" and meal kit subscriptions to printers and cars.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:51 pm

When I bought a printer last year, all the manufacturers were pushing actual subscriptions - you pay say €3 a month, they let you print up to 50 pages, and send you a new cartridge when it runs out. If you miss a payment, or don't connect to wifi for a few weeks, they remotely deactivate your printer.

Fair enough I think our department printers might work on that sort of model.

shpalman wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:57 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:51 pm

When I bought a printer last year, all the manufacturers were pushing actual subscriptions - you pay say €3 a month, they let you print up to 50 pages, and send you a new cartridge when it runs out. If you miss a payment, or don't connect to wifi for a few weeks, they remotely deactivate your printer.

Fair enough I think our department printers might work on that sort of model.

Presumably those companies selling that service to businesses have done really well over the past year, while the home ones have been hit with everyone running up to the limits.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:13 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:10 pm

To be honest I'm half expecting batteries to be a subscription service, like they're doing with ink cartridges and stuff. More money = more range. Miss a monthly payment and you can't drive. Seems to be the direction capitalism is going: sell you something then make you rent it too.

Some started like that. The original Leaf you had a separate contract for the battery I think, but all that has stopped now it’s become apparent how well the batteries last.

I know it was the case with the Renault Zoe. Early ones you had a separate lease for the battery, then the model before mine you could choose whether to lease it separately (in which case the upfront cost of the car was reduced) or have it included. When I got mine it wasn't even an option. It appears that current usage is that people change cars before the battery is even remotely an issue so car companies gave up. However it may become an issue with older second-hand cars, but there the second-hand market is comparatively young so things haven't developed.

I think the Nissan Leaf's battery's lack of thermal management and consequent degradation problems put the wind up the rest of the industry so they did all sorts of gymnastics in an attempt to assuage potential buyers about battery concerns.

bjn wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 8:31 am

Millennie Al wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:16 am

bjn wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 01, 2021 3:07 pm

no practical degradation if the charge is kept between 25% and 75% after 10,000 cycles.

That's all very well, but it means halving your range, so a theoretical 250 mile range becomes 125 miles.

There is a reason I have you on ignore. Every time I make the mistake of looking at one of your posts it’s full of derp. In this particular case, if you look at the text in the image I posted,

“Lithium-ion batteries do better under conditions where they are not charged and discharged 100% every cycle - like an EV.”

That quote is ambiguous. It could mean either that "charged and discharged 100% every cycle" is like an EV or the exact opposite. Since you said "Jeff Dahn is a battery researcher who works closely with Tesla." I took this to mean advocating keeping EV battery charge within 25% to 75%. Maybe you meant something else.

It fits in with typical usage patterns of an EV, you have the range if you need it, but most of the time you don’t drive from 100% down to 0%.

No. It doesn't. When I refuel a petrol or diesel vehicle, I pretty much always fill the tank, and I would expect the same of an EV plugged in at home overnight. I'd also refuel based on range remaining - why make unnecessary stops? So if the range is 500 miles, I'd rarely refuel before 20%, and often wait to 10% (i.e. 50 miles remaining as I know it's easy to choose a filling station within that distance).

Ignoring your derp from now on Al. Sorry (not sorry) chum.

If you have an EV, assuming you have ready access to charging where you regularly park it, it doesn’t seem too hard to get used to plugging it in each time you park there rather than waiting until your battery is nearly empty - and we know that most people's daily distance driven is a small fraction of today’s EV ranges. Again I think this points to infrastructure being a bigger real barrier to EV uptake than range or battery durability. Perceived barriers, on the other hand…

Infrastructure is a real pain no doubt. Here’s a blogpost from the head of the EVA about driving a long way in her ev. Really hope this gets sorted soon. Ecotricity seem to come in for a fair amount of stick when these things are discussed on Twitter, and they have service stations sewn up.

https://fullycharged.show/blog/surveyin ... in-the-uk/

Meanwhile, here’s a thing about cold weather and wind turbines.

Cancel all coal projects, says UN Secretary General. https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-un-chief

I'm sure we all look forward to the UK regaining its world-leading stance on fighting climate change imminently.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 04, 2021 5:43 am

Cancel all coal projects, says UN Secretary General. https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-un-chief

I'm sure we all look forward to the UK regaining its world-leading stance on fighting climate change imminently.

Maggie was ahead of her time, trying to eliminate the UK coal industry.

(Well, she was a believer in climate change and proponent of the UK being a technology leader in reducing CO2 emissions.)

Martin_B wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:28 am

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 04, 2021 5:43 am

Cancel all coal projects, says UN Secretary General. https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-un-chief

I'm sure we all look forward to the UK regaining its world-leading stance on fighting climate change imminently.

Maggie was ahead of her time, trying to eliminate the UK coal industry.

(Well, she was a believer in climate change and proponent of the UK being a technology leader in reducing CO2 emissions.)

Credit where it’s due, Maggie was very pro-science.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 03, 2021 12:10 pm

Infrastructure is a real pain no doubt. Here’s a blogpost from the head of the EVA about driving a long way in her ev. Really hope this gets sorted soon. Ecotricity seem to come in for a fair amount of stick when these things are discussed on Twitter, and they have service stations sewn up.

https://fullycharged.show/blog/surveyin ... in-the-uk/

Transition innit, it will be painful now and then. It would be nice of the UK had something like Biden's push for a unified wide scale charging infrastructure.

It's not as if you don't get similar problems with fossil fuels, I once had to push a motorcycle several miles because a service station I expected to be open wasn't.

It'll be a nice project for the Green Investment Bank the UK's getting.

I just noticed that Google Maps has a little petrol pump icon which offers to show gas stations along your route. I picked my yearly trip from home to Snowdonia and it pinned well over a dozen places along the 200 mile route. Nice. But they all literally sell gas. Not petrol. Not gasoline. Gas. Like bottled propane gas. Thanks Google.

(This was in the context of looking to see if it would show EV charging points, but it seems it hasn't quite caught up with petrol yet so give it time, I guess.)

https://www.zap-map.com/live/ is a good interactive map and route planner showing UK charging options.

jimbob wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 30, 2021 10:26 pm

shpalman wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 30, 2021 12:03 pm

MartinDurkin wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 30, 2021 11:45 am

Couple more links.

https://www.zeroavia.com/
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/0 ... ebear.html

So does the hive mind think zero emission aviation is a realistic goal in the short/medium term (let's say before we have working fusion power).

If I say that we'll have zero emission aviation before we have working fusion power, it's not because I think we'll have zero emission aviation soon, but because I think we'll never have working fusion power.

Likewise.

It's not a good model to follow. Unless we are talking about science fiction scenarios

A slightly less pessimistic view in this IET talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pd8kQRfydU
Main speaker begins about 7 minutes in.

We're getting a new semi-commercial fusion experimental reactor near here soon.

https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2021/03 ... ion-devens

Interesting paper on the mispricing of legacy generation assets.

Valuing a generation asset relies heavily on the LCOE, while the LCOE is heavily influenced by the capacity factor, in their definition, this is the proportion of generation capacity you can produce and actually sell. The problem they point out is that the capacity factors built into standard valuations are rubbish. For example, standard LCOE calculations for coal burners assume a capacity factor of 85%, while real world capacity factors for coal in the US is 47%, in the U.K. it’s 8%. This grossly overprices a whole range of assets.

Capacity factors for a range of technologies are in decline because of increased competition from Solar, Wind and Batteries. Market prices for power are typically dictated by the marginal cost of available generation. Marginal cost of generation for SWB is pretty close to zero. The inevitable consequence of that is the wide scale deployment of ever cheaper SWB will squeeze out other forms of generation, decreasing their capacity factors, and so raising their LCOE, and so dropping the price of the generation assets in a question.

In short, coal is already f.cked, based on real world cap factors it’s 2020 LCOE should be 4x the one given by the EIA. Capacity factors will be dynamic as more SWB come on stream, gas will be squeeze in the next decade, same with Nukes. Hydro has low marginal costs of production, so existing hydro will do fine, but no one will be building swathes of new ones because the LCOE at the reduced capacity factors don’t make sense.

Their supposition is that this has caused a huge financial bubble based around mispricing of legacy generation technologies and their supply chains, and that is a source of economic instability as bad as subprime lending was.

An interesting alternative use of food waste - rather than using a bio-digester to make methane gas, using food waste to make a liquid fuel for use in aircraft.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56408603
The claimed percentage reduction in CO2 is probably spurious, and I would say, doesn't really strengthen the case for it.

Gfamily wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 15, 2021 11:09 pm

An interesting alternative use of food waste - rather than using a bio-digester to make methane gas, using food waste to make a liquid fuel for use in aircraft.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56408603
The claimed percentage reduction in CO2 is probably spurious, and I would say, doesn't really strengthen the case for it.

Yes, that reduction would be interesting to prove!

Gfamily wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 15, 2021 11:09 pm

An interesting alternative use of food waste - rather than using a bio-digester to make methane gas, using food waste to make a liquid fuel for use in aircraft.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56408603
The claimed percentage reduction in CO2 is probably spurious, and I would say, doesn't really strengthen the case for it.

The paper's here: clicky, but you have to go to the supplementary stuff to see some detail on how they got to 165% which is here: clicky

Only scanned it, but it seems they get the big reduction in emissions because they are using CO2 equivalents (1 methane = 25 carbons, IRC). By avoiding the methane emission by letting food rot in a landfill, and burning to get CO2 instead, they claim to cause a reduction in emissions larger than flying causes.

But they subtracted the landfill emissions from the new fuel emissions, which makes it seem like you are actually taking CHGs out of the system, which seems wrong. You are still burning stuff when you fly.

If I was doing it I would have added the emissions from landfill to the flying emissions as the reference and compared the emissions from producing and burning this new fuel. This gives you 45% of the total emissions you had before.

Including while lifecycle costs would be interesting. The food waste had to be made into food in the first place.

Yes it’s going to landfill/compost at the moment, but ideally it should be being eaten.