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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

  • Solar panels between railway tracks?

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  • Typically not for more than a few hours when it comes to in service track, and management actively despises those maintenance windows even when it’s necessary to the continued existence of the track, much less a third party startup.

    There is a reason why even when the entire track and ballest on a main line are wiped out by a natural disaster it will usually be up and running again in a few days.

    As such I would expect any non experimental contracts between the startup and the railway to come with not insignificant financial penalties if they interfere with service, such as requiring a shutdown of the track for repairing the panels being subjected to said harsh environment, thusly either delaying fixing the panels for the next scheduled major maintenance window in a few years or else like most railway inspections doing the work an an active line between trains.

    When the competition is a large open field of dirt that can be accessed at any time for maintenance, can leave the panels up for decades, is centrally located for easy grid access, and requires far less frequent cleaning, I just don’t see how this startup is going to outperform.

  • Solar panels between railway tracks?

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  • Don’t forget that maintaining all this means people working directly in the track trying to fix high voltage electrical issues while dodging trains and hoping dispatch doesn’t forget about them, or that ballast(the gravel between the ties) needs to be renewed regularly, much less all the things like realignment and rail grinding that use specialized machinery that needs to go right in the space between the rails.

    This means that those panels are going to have to be removed and installed often, at best vastly increasing wear and tear on them as compared to a fixed installation, and adding the risk that a failure in the pickup/deployment process could scrap a significant number of panels if not caught immediately.

    Or that the hard part of installing solar panels is the wireing, inverting, and grid interconnection, all of which are just made that much harder by having to have electricians doge trains.

    Look, if there really is absolutely no possible available space, like say desert, farmland, roofs, parking lots, yards, fences, well just put the panels up on a simple metal frame over the railway, maybe even integrate the catenary hangers if your feeling daring.

    This at least provides some benefit to running the railway by keeping snow and leaves off the tracks to some extent while also keeping the panels out of the way of running the railroad.

  • In the California desert, residents are struggling with the influx of massive solar projects

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  • But have you considered how much worse the poor NIMBY’s views out their windows will be, why you might even see something more interesting than desert, the horror./s

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    is this correct?

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  • If it is it’s not current, as the storm has dropped to a category 3 as it neared land. We were up to 171mph a few days ago as it was building though, so it may just be a forecast from around then.

  • Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

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  • Ya, if the article is using Finish survey data than it’s definitely ridiculous to talk about it being powered by coal, I had assumed that given the article’s presentation they were at least looking at gobal statistics.

    Given the the title of the paper they got this from, if they are not getting paid by an oil company somewhere already they really should work on collecting the free money for the work they are already doing.

  • Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

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  • Technically, it’s not wrong that worldwide the largest method of electricity generation is coal, but it does tend to be far smaller and shrinking in the richer western nations with lots of EV’s people are probably thinking of, even before getting to the whole electricity is on track to be made carbon neutral a lot sooner than gasoline thing.

    I’m actually very impressed that Finland managed to avoid the ‘clean LNG’ that North America got sold on, good work.

  • Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

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  • Generations? The average American passenger vehicle is 14 years old, so if tomorrow all new cars were electric, you would have haved car transport emissions within 15 years, and be at a 75 percent reduction within the first generation. Cut out fossil fuel subsidies so people are paying the 8 or so dollars per gallon it actually costs for gas and incentivize US manufacturers to actually build affordable cars and you’ll see much quicker adoption that what normal wear and tear causes.

    Of course that isn’t going to happen tomorrow in the US, but you are also going to have a lot of vehicles already sold in the decades prior and which tend to stay on the road longer.

    Compared to the fifteen or so years it takes to build a single light rail line, much less intercity high speed rail, and you are not going to be able to replace half of all car traffic in a single build cycle, much less reach 75 percent within thirty years, by which point you’re trying to replace all traffic in the very small towns and unincorporated areas that even nations renowned the world over for their public transit connectivity often struggle to reach.

    Does the US need to build more mass transit, yes. Can it do so faster than it already buys new cars, no.

  • Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

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  • There are, with the federal government alone paying 7k on most EVs sold in the US. The problem is that they are neoliberal flat subsidies applied at the point of sale that needed Republican support to enter law and as such companies just tack on 7k to the price customers are willing to pay anyway.

    What we need is to incentivize manufacturers to focus on bringing down costs by focusing on things like LFP batteries and smaller vehicles, but manufacturers are currently incentivized to make larger vehicles because people are willing to pay a lot more than the added space cost to make, thusly increasing margins. At the very least making the full subsidy only available on vehicles under 25k, with a decreasing subsidy for vehicles under 50k would probably help, but you would need to be ready and willing to call manufacturers on their near certain attempts to get around it.

    Some actual price wars between manufacturers would help too, but US auto manufacturers will fight tooth and nail to forestall that possibility.

  • Study shows EV owners have bigger carbon footprint than average because they are wealthier

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  • The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.

    This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.

    Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.

  • Helene knocks top U.S. climate data center offline

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  • Hey, I think i’ve seen this movie.

  • Fortescue’s 6MW electric vehicle charger stuns the EV and mining industries

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  • Mostly its the fuel costs adding to operating costs, but dealing with a cryogenic and highly flammable liquid/gas and all the related fluid handling, pressure regulators, and piping necessary is always going to be more labor and repair intensive than just expanding and directly charging the battery the vehicle needs to have anyway.

  • Fortescue’s 6MW electric vehicle charger stuns the EV and mining industries

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  • Because green hydrogen is expensive, and the more realistic projections estimate it will remain so to at least 2050.

    If we use the CRU estimations, which notably are a trade group very much betting on green hydrogen adoption, we should be expecting at best a price of $3 dollars a kg in the distant future, with the current best price being more in the range of $6-$7 dollars a kg. With a 65% effective fuel cell that works out to the hauler getting its electricity at 28 cents a kwh with the possibility of going down to as low as 14 cents a kwh in future.

    For reference, the average industrial electricity rate in 2023 was 8 cents per kwh, and Lazard puts the cost of utility scale solar at between 3 and 9 cents a kwh if a mine wants to roll their own. Wholesale Diesel fuel has ranged from about $2 to about $2.8 a gallon so at a reasonable 38% efficiency you get about 14 to 20 cents per kwh.

    Not as bad as I expected offhand thanks to the current low cost of industrial green hydrogen, but your still looking at spending a massive amount of money for big platinum catalyst fuel cells and electric powertrains all so that you can spend thirty percent more on fuel than you do currently, as compared to using the grid directly for fifty percent less than you currently spend.

    And we haven’t even mentioned that these things are going up and down a steep grade all day, so not only do you want massive batteries anyway so you can recharge on the way down, but you need them because unlike a small FCEV where it’s fuel cell is nowhere near large enough to output full power (and as such is only used to charge the battery) you do actually need to be able to sustain full power for the whole trip up.

    TLDR: Industrial electricity is far cheaper than Diesel, let alone the more expensive green hydrogen. Hydrogen may be able to compete on a one or one level with Diesel in the far future, but given the upfront cost of the kit you might as well go all the way so you’re saving money over the long term.

  • Fortescue’s 6MW electric vehicle charger stuns the EV and mining industries

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  • Then your looking at almost an order of magnitude increase in fuel costs and a related increase in operating costs rather than savings.

  • always remember our heroes

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  • always remember our heroes

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  • OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out

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  • What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

  • Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution.

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  • I mean sulfur is also a natural part of our atmosphere that geologic activity has been spewing out into the air for as long as earth has had air, but I’m still going to call it pollution if you’re power plant pumps a vast quantity of it into the atmosphere and now it’s raining acid on me.

    We have more than doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, with half of that doubling having been done in the last thirty years alone. The very oceans are acidifying to the point large swaths of marine life are being wiped out, and thousands to hundreds of thousands of people are being killled by the effects of global warming each and every year. It’s pollution, it’s just the pollution is on such a vastly larger and more dangerous scale than any acid rain or smog people are used to thinking about.

  • How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

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  • Plenty if you don’t want grid tied, otherwise your local utility probably has an list of the ones they’ll accept somewhere. There is a list of things an inverter will have to be certified to be able to meet for grid tied such as anti-islanding requirements, and in this case i’m afraid you’re almost certainly better off to be going with a reseller the inverter manufacturer actually recommends than playing Amazon roulette.

    From my understanding here it tends to be easier to just stay off the grid for very small systems, either by just plugging in a few panels to a battery and small dc to ac inverter(with appropriately rated fuses between all connections) or else getting an automatic transfer switch and treating the whole thing like a generator.

    That being said RVs and camper vans are a thing here, and there may be some more plug and play systems in that direction but small 12v systems are a bit out of my wheelhouse.

  • How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

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  • Unless you’re meters have a whole lot more protections built into them than ours I don’t think that they would have anti-islanding or grid frequency protections built in, that latter at least seems like it has to be done at the inverter level.

    If it is the case than why bother with any registration or monitoring at all beyond requing a smart meter for anyone with a grid tied inverter?

    As for the meter reading itself it’s going to depend on whether the inverter is connected to the gird, and if it is whether or not the inverter is set to grid export or only to provide as much power as the home is using at the time, possibly minus something for reactive power or some such.

  • How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

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  • Surely ability is determined by having the proper inverter though? The panels are irrelevant as without a proper grid matching inverter all connecting to the grid is going to do is destroy the inverter.

    Also, as someone who is currently going through the process of registering a grid connected inverter here in the states, surely the whole point of the registration process is the part where an appropriately licensed electrician comes out to physically verify that the inverter is grid compliant and anti islanding, as that is the part that is likely to actually kill someone if it is improperly installed or configured.

    It’s also something the government/utility has to take on trust to be declared, as a miss wired generator or battery backup transfer switch poses the near exact same risk.