Utilities are publicly owned for a good reason. Your bill would otherwise shoot up sky high the very moment your provider became a monopoly, and utilities are natural monopolies.

Many of our collective bills would go down if we pushed for more public ownership of natural monopolies and let go of the failed conservative dogma that beneficial competition is what happens when there are no rules. Comcast is what happens when there are no rules and natural monopolies are allowed to be privatized.

What, and I can’t stress this enough, the fuck?

On paper, they look comparable to Tesla batteries. These new batteries are about half the size of Tesla’s, and the test was performed with a charging station that delivered more than twice the power of a typical Supercharger station. Try charging two of them at the speed our current charging infrastructure will support and it’ll take about 20 minutes.

What seems to be new and improved is that these batteries can apparently accept more energy from a charging station without overheating, and the rate at which they permanently lose maximum capacity from Level 3 charging is reduced.

I wonder how heavy they are compared to the competition?

Well said!

hammer is trigger

proto-Republicans emerging from the primordial ooze

the citrussy:

Maybe cleanup costs should be baked into the price of a building permit…

USA did it in 1991, day one of Desert Storm

It could be a little carbon negative, in the way planting trees is a little carbon negative.

Sourcing carbon from atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make liquid fuel would pull carbon out of the air and put it into your gas tank.

Methane is easier to work with than hydrogen, but it still needs to be kept colder than what’s practical. If it turns out that propane is much cheaper to make from (renewable energy + atmosphere + water), relative to the cost of making liquids like diesel, kerosene, or gasoline, then propane might be a winning choice for renewable transportation fuel.

TST exists as a means to build a counterpoint to the reach of other religions

False.

TST is just as real and valid as any other religion.

If there’s enough excess capacity of clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, that it can be converted into portable fuel . . . why hydrogen?

Its hard to contain, embrittles everything it touches, in gaseous form its density is low so its tanks need to be huge but in liquid form it needs to be kept unreasonably cold and is still low density and requires oversize fuel tanks, and its explosive when it mixes with air - not just flammable, but explosive.

Why not use that clean energy to pull CO2 out of the air and use it to build new hydrocarbon liquid fuels that are compatible with existing infrastructure?

Interesting, didn’t realize they had a geothermal loop in the concrete floors. I wonder if condensation will be an issue?

look at Mr Moneybags over here, able to afford a van down by the river

That extra weight will also mean that more force is required to accelerate and change directions.

The nimbleness of a vehicle can be expressed as the ratio:

(Tire Contact Area * Tire Stickiness) / Vehicle Mass

Increasing the vehicle’s mass while making the tires harder will lead to longer breaking distances and will cause a vehicle to understeer at lower speeds.

In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?

lol

So this big breakthrough in tire technology is . . . making them harder and reducing their grip?

There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever

That’s a bit of a stretch, unfortunately. The energy density of batteries is nowhere close to that of gasoline - joule for joule, gasoline weighs about 100 times less than batteries. Also, a fuel tank big enough to give its vehicle a 400 mile range will get lighter over the course of the trip, as the liquid fuel gets converted into polluting gas and exhausted into the atmosphere - batteries don’t get appreciably lighter as you discharge them.

Agree that 400 miles range with charging stations as ubiquitous as today’s gas stations would help EV adoption. I do worry about the rollout of charging stations being slowed down by competition with expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).

plot twist, cleaning up the source of that contamination would mean a local business endures lower profit margins. the bureaucrat who’s job it was to push the Approved! button got chased away from their terminal by a guy in a rubber mask who brought a fog machine and a projector

You gotta wonder WTF the French were thinking when they decided to force people into the sweltering insomnia of 80 degrees indoors at night just for the sake of creating the appearance that climate change is the fault of the dispossessed proletariat running air conditioners to survive global heating, and pretending like the owners of the means of production aren’t actually in a position to change how the economy functions.