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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones

That's sort of the point of gov't intervention in the market to address market failures resulting from externalities. It is no different from requiring cars to have catalytic converters or smokestacks to have scrubbers; in both cases most of the benefits flow to people other than the buyer, so the market will sell "too few" (i.e., the maket fails to maximize utility). This particular intervention might be poor policy or it might be sound policy, but simply saying that consumers are not buying enough of the product is not much of a point, since it is implied.

They should just tax emissions, but it's very important to Democrats that a) they be seen by their base as sticking it to corporations, and b) the increase in the cost of owning and operating a vehicle be seen by the base as caused by corporations raising prices, rather than by Democrats raising taxes.

Do you have a gas tax in the US? If so, what’s the difference?

There are gas taxes, but they're mostly to fund roads, so they may cover the cost of roads (though I'm not 100% sure of even that), but they don't also cover the social cost of carbon emissions. There also aren't generally taxes on other uses of fossil fuels.

I’m not sure I understand the difference. What matter does it make if the tax is used for one purpose or another?

It's not about what the revenues are used for. It's about internalizing the externalities. When you use roads, that imposes a certain cost on society, because it costs money to build and maintain the roads, and only so many people can use them at the same time. When you burn fuel, you impose a certain cost on society by contributing to global warming, and also emitting other pollutants.

US gas taxes might be high enough to cover one of these, but are probably not high enough to cover both of them. So maybe burning a gallon of gas has a total social cost (including the cost of extracting the gas, road upkeep, and pollution) of $3.50, but you only have to pay $2.75. Or whatever. This means that if you get $3 of value out of burning a gallon of gas, you'll do it, even though it does $3.50 worth of damage. That's a bad outcome. We want an incentive structure in which you only do $3.50 of damage if you get at least $3.50 in value from it.

True, if they made electric cars more attractive, that would only be via some kind of subsidy which still costs money. Either way it comes out of people's pockets. And there will probably be many unintended consequences.

In Australia there were and still are subsidies for solar power. So we get a glut of power around midday and wholesale power prices actually go negative fairly often. This is not good for producers who can't easily increase or decrease their power production, which is just about everyone except gas. Peak energy consumption comes later in the afternoon and evening, when solar diminishes. Prices rise then and consumers suffer. Overall electricity prices have been rising nearly continuously since 2007.

Price variability generally is not good for anyone, since it effectively means periods of wasted production and scarcity.

There's talk of getting massive, expensive, batteries to store this energy. I'd always known batteries were expensive but couldn't put a number to it until now. A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD. As more coal power plants are decommissioned without replacement, the situation will deteriorate further.

This is the key problem with solar. Electricity is hard to store. If someone (eg Tesla) solves the storage use problem solar plants overnight become super affordable and useful. If they don’t, solar plants are terrible.

I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.

Did anything ever come of that?

The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.

A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD.

How is this possible? Surely a Tesla car can’t go O(100) miles on $3 of electricity… can it? How can the Powerwall (apparently) be so inefficient compared to the batteries in Tesla cars?

According to wikipedia, the range of a Tesla Model 3 is 491 km. It costs $43,490 USD. Its usable battery capacity is 57.5 kilowatts.

Electricity in Australia (NSW specifically) costs 28.7 cents per kilowatt hour AUD, or 19.15 cents USD. So a Tesla stores 11 USD worth of electricity at the cost of $43,490 USD. There might be a bit of complication in that the battery transformation of stored energy to output electricity isn't perfectly efficient but it'll do for my purposes. 1$ of power needs $4000 of Tesla to store it, which is roughly the same as the battery.

Teslas have economies of scale on their side vs powerwalls (which also have to be installed and hooked up to solar which is different in each house) but with a Tesla you get a whole car as well.

Whatever holes there are in my maths, I conclude that batteries are very expensive relative to the power that they store. I think I'm going to put 'Just build nuclear plants' in my flair.

It's true. The powerwall has about 13 kWh of capacity. At $0.15 per kWh that comes out to around $2 in my electricity to charge. It would also last maybe 90-120 minutes running my household with the AC and Oven on. It wouldn't scratch the surface of my needs. My solar array when it's really humming along in the spring, summer and fall generates over 60 kWh a day, at a peak of 11.4 kW, most of which gets dumped back to the grid. I'd probably need at least 40 kWh of battery capacity to bank enough power to get me through cold nights, or just not waste it, if I didn't have net metering with my power company. It would cost almost as much as the entire rest of my solar array and inverter. Probably around $30k-40k.

When my solar installer was trying to sell me on the batteries, he had me come out to another site he was working on. That homeowner had a battery system which was already failing inside of 2 years, and the manufacturer was fighting him tooth and nail on the warrantee. I was unimpressed.

According to random web sources, it takes 34kWh to go 100 miles in a Tesla, which would cost about AUD9.18 at retail in 2021. Wholesale electricity costs seem to vary considerably.

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