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There's been much hay made over the fact that we now have improved electronics, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, but we also need to consider just how far these technologies must progress to provide like-kind replacements for internal combustion engines, along with hydrocarbon fuels.
Weight matters greatly for all forms of transportation that must move their own weight, plus the weight of a useful load, typically people and/or cargo of some kind.
The most energy-dense Lithium-ion battery packs in existence, in terms of Watt-hours per kilogram, store 160 Watt-hours per kilogram, at the battery pack level.
Gasoline stores 13,000 Watt-hours per kilogram.
The astute will note that electric motors and batteries are much more efficient than combustion engines, but what does that mean in terms of real-world weight-moving capability?
Let's compare modern internal combustion engine technology with modern Tesla Lithium-ion battery and electric motor technology. This is a fair comparison, and probably the closest apples-to-apples comparison that we're likely to get. Both vehicles are compact cars, are truly superlative examples of the latest automotive technology, and we can draw some basic conclusions based upon this comparison.
Tesla's Model 3 compact sedans achieve a real-world fuel efficiency of 290 to 310 Watt-hours per mile when driven at 70mph on the highway. They weigh approximately 1,730kg, have an aerodynamic drag coefficient of 0.23, their electric drive motors are between 95% and 98% efficient, and achieve a range of around 305 to 310 miles when driven at 70mph.
Mazda's Skyactiv-G gasoline engines are naturally-aspirated Inline-4 cylinder engines that achieve a real-world fuel efficiency of 49 miles per gallon on the highway, or around 18 miles per kilogram of gasoline consumed. In terms of Watt-hours per mile, that works out to 722 Watt-hours per mile. Despite the fact that the internal combustion engine is nowhere near as efficient as an electric motor, total energy expenditure is only approximately double that of the most efficient Lithium-ion battery powered vehicle in the world. Mazda 3 compact sedans equipped with Skyactiv-G engines have 13.5 gallon fuel tanks, weigh 1,295kg, have a drag coefficient of around 0.28, and achieve a highway range of approximately 660 miles on the highway.
The curb weight differential between the Tesla Model 3 (1,730kg) and the Mazda 3 (1,295kg) vehicles is a healthy 435kg or a bit over 958 pounds, which is approximately equal to the weight of a cast iron Big Block Chevy V8 engine, 4L80E automatic transmission, all accessories, and all fluids. Alternatively, it's equal to the weight of a GM DuraMax diesel engine by itself with all standard accessories and all fluids.
If you're not familiar enough with engines as a point of comparison, then that weight differential is equal to the weight of four 239.5 pound full-size American adults (corn fed farm boys from the American mid-west) riding around in the vehicle. I weigh in at around 190 pounds for a point of comparison. In most countries that I've been to, I would not be considered to be a "small person", but I'm a runt compared to many American and European men and women. You'd be hard-pressed to find many people on my street, who are not women or children, who weigh less than 200 pounds. As such, total vehicle weight and payload carrying capacity is "a real thing". If any vehicle is not built sufficiently strong to take the weight and punishment associated with driving, then it will not survive Houston's poor quality roads. I've spent enough money on realignment of the suspension often enough on passenger cars here to know.
Suffice to say, if either vehicle was carrying around that much extra payload weight inside of it, then neither would achieve their stated range or fuel economy figures- whether electrons or gasoline. Weight still matters to all motor vehicles, even very aerodynamic ones with properly inflated tires driven across high quality roads.
Q: What does all that mean in terms of battery energy density improvements required to match combustion engines?
A: Even at near-100% efficiency, the battery energy density will need to improve by 45 to 50 times, to compete with gasoline and diesel, in terms of total weight and volume.
The 82kWh Tesla Model 3 battery pack weighs 480kg all by itself, meaning 170.8 Watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level, despite the fact that the batteries are advertised at between 250 and 300 Watt-hours per kilogram at the individual battery cell level. The battery pack forms an integrated part of the vehicle's structure, and it has to, because it's so heavy relative to the weight of all the other vehicle components, including the rest of the chassis.
Merely halving the pack weight won't double the range, although it would serve to bring vehicle curb weight more closely in-line with a gasoline powered vehicle (a virtuous circle for cost and weight of any type of vehicle- car / ship / train / aircraft, doesn't matter) than a small light duty truck, yet the total pack weight would have to be around 50kg to be equivalent in weight to the Mazda 3's 13.5 gallons of gasoline and the tank itself. To actually double the range for the same 480kg of battery pack weight, total energy density of the batteries at the cell level has to increase by at least a factor of 2, thus decreasing total pack weight by about a factor of 2, which is well beyond any commercial Lithium-ion battery cell.
Finally, we've come to the point of cost, and this is where most consumers simply cannot afford to purchase a Tesla, even if they really like many of the good qualities and features of the vehicle.
A new Tesla Model 3 equipped with the 82kWh battery pack will set you back about $50,000.
A new Mazda 3, all of which are equipped with the same engine design, starts at around $20,000.
The cost differential for someone who needs a basic functional compact motor vehicle, which describes most salaried workers living in the United States of America, though perhaps fewer in Europe or China, is more than double. Renting cars, by design, is more expensive than owning them, though neither option is particularly cheap, because otherwise there's no monetary incentive to rent cars to anyone.
Even at $3 per US gallon, you can drive 490,000 miles for equivalent cost. At current prices here in Houston, 588,000 miles.
Some of the highest mileage Teslas have driven around 500,000 miles before requiring battery pack replacements, which is truly superb longevity for any Lithium-ion battery pack.
A replacement battery pack, if Tesla does not cover repairs under warranty, will run around $13,500 for the pack itself and $2,500 for the labor. This is what Tesla actually charges their customers for the battery packs, not whatever rosy battery price projection that the company itself pays. Tesla is still a business and in business to make money, so no surprises there.
As a Tesla owner, you cannot take your vehicle to any other place, because nobody else can service the vehicle, because Tesla won't sell repair parts to anyone else. As such, you're completely beholden to the Tesla dealerships and parts / labor they wish to charge, unless you run your own automotive electronics repair shop or have access to junkyards containing wrecked Teslas. All cars get wrecked eventually, and Teslas are not unique in that regard.
I'd wager that the Skyactiv-G engine will probably run somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 with all parts and labor included. The refurbished examples I've seen for sale were around $3,000. A complete brand new cylinder head is $500 on Amazon, for example, which is about half as much as one of the computerized Tesla door handles will cost to replace. More importantly, nearly any automotive repair shop that works on cars can and will replace the cylinder head, if need be.
At some point, we're spending more energy to make / maintain / recycle electric vehicle motors and batteries than we would by simply synthesizing more gasoline and diesel fuel from scratch, given how much less material is ultimately required, and how much simpler it is to synthesize gasoline or diesel than it is to synthesize a combination of Lithium / Carbon / Cobalt / Manganese / numerous wires and electronics into a fully functional battery pack.
Both Tesla and Mazda and most other auto makers use Aluminum and steel in their vehicles, because those materials represent the lowest embodied energy while retaining the desired material properties, they're easy to recycle, infinitely recyclable- because metal is still just as good after the second re-melt as the second thousandth re-melt, and easy to fabricate into high-strength / high-quality automotive parts.
As a function of increased weight, all structural parts on a Tesla vehicle must weigh more and will therefore cost more to produce. The chassis is heavy duty, the body is heavy duty, and the brakes are heavy duty. Those are all good things, but again, having them will cost more money because they cost more energy to produce, no two ways about it.
Now for the parts that make Teslas a LOT less attractive:
1. All batteries, solar panels, metals, and plastics are made using copious quantities of fossil fuels. There are no solar-powered arc furnaces, no battery / solar powered mining trucks, and no wind or solar powered cargo ships to transport raw materials or finished products around the world. All of Tesla's "Giga Factories" are connected to the power grids, because it's functionally impossible to supply 100% of the power requirement using wind and solar alone. However, Tesla has wisely minimized shipping large vehicle sub-assemblies around the world several times by building "Giga Factories" in the US / Europe / China / likely Russia sometime soon to service all major motor vehicle markets, unlike other large auto makers like BMW or Mercedes-Benz or Ford or GM or VW or Chrysler-Fiat, which have their manufacturing facilities scattered around the world. Additionally, all electronics are strictly service life limited, because the entire universe is very unkind to microelectronics and always will be. A Tesla has more microelectronics in it than an intercontinental airliner, in much the same way that the Mercedes-Benz has as much or more wiring than most light aircraft. That's all very real complexity, should any of it malfunction in a significant way.
2. If the convenience aspect of charging a Tesla is an actual selling point, then it's typically done at night after returning home from work, when there is no more sun and wind to provide electric power, which means that power comes from natural gas and coal. Those combustion engines can be 60% to 75% efficient, but the purported environmental benefit of not spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instantly vanishes. On top of that, 15% to 20% of the power is lost during transmission due to electrical resistance. Now we're right back to the basic efficiency of Mazda's Skyactiv combustion engines. But hey, at least we "feel" like we're accomplishing something useful, while we "virtue signal" to everyone else about how much more money we spent to put the exact same emissions into the atmosphere from a different location.
We have charging stations at work, but they're tied to Houston's electric grid, which is a mix of coal / gas / solar / wind / nuclear. I think we recently retired all of our coal plants, so now natural gas and the nuclear reactors backstop the wind and solar. Most of it is natural gas, to be honest, because natural gas is absurdly cheap and dispatchable at any time, at least here in Texas, whereas the wind and solar power plants are not.
3. The total quantity of high-embodied energy materials in all electric vehicles is much higher than it is for gasoline or diesel powered cars. We produce vastly more steel and Aluminum than Lithium or Copper or rare Earth metals or Silicon-based microelectronics for that reason. The more scarce the material in question, the greater the embodied energy cost to obtain it. All microelectronics are very wasteful of natural resources, with hundreds to thousands of times more materials sunk into each functional microchip.
4. The labor and energy costs associated with recycling of the hodge-podge of different materials used in all batteries and electronic devices, which is what all battery electronic vehicles necessarily consist of, is fair to poor, even with good basic design for recycling. I would argue that no modern motor vehicles from any manufacturer are well designed for ease of disassembly and recycling, and further that no vehicles made since the 1960s, when we started substituting large quantities of various plastics and Aluminum for wood or steel or cast iron, were made with ease of repair or recycling in mind. The labor costs associated with more frequent parts replacements may have been reduced in some ways, but even that's debatable. It's certainly not debatable that replacement of wear parts costs more money.
5. Most consumers keep a motor vehicle from 3 to 5 years, basically until the warranty runs out, and then it is sold to the used car market or scrapped if it's not economically repairable. The more high-embodied energy materials you have, the less sustainable that type of "planned obsolescence" practice becomes, the greater the marginal energy cost of each copy of any given vehicle design, and at a global scale, doing that ends up costing far more energy than it could ever possibly "save" through more efficient operation. The marginal cost increase is why they don't sell very many Cadillacs or Teslas in the US or in China, as compared to far less expensive domestic vehicles, whether battery electronic or gasoline or diesel powered.
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Here we go, solar fans:
This is how much electrical power the new solar system being built near Houston is losing to electrical conversion / heat, before it ever hits the feeder line into the rest of the grid:
Aktina Renewable Power Project - Wharton County, TX
From the article:
In southeastern Texas surrounded by farmland, Rosendin Renewable Energy Group is building the largest solar power project in the state. The Aktina Renewable Power Project calls for the installation of 1.4 million solar modules across 4,000 acres in Wharton County, located outside the Houston Metro area.
Rosendin partnered on the 500MWac/631MWdc solar installation with Tokyo Gas America, Ltd. (TGA), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan’s largest provider of city gas, Tokyo Gas Co. Ltd. (Tokyo Gas).
Aktina will provide the capacity to generate 500MWac/631MWdc of renewable energy, enough to power 100,000 homes annually. To meet growing regional demand, the power generated at Aktina will be brought online in blocks starting in mid-2021 and sold to the ERCOT wholesale market.
500MWac / 631MWdc = 79.1% direct current conversion efficiency to alternating current power.
That's what you're starting the electrical transmission process with, using solar photovoltaic farms. You lose more electrical power in transmission and then lose even more through the various power transformers required to convert the high-voltage (10,000 to 100,000 volts) power back into the 440AC or 220AC power that comes out of your wall outlet. In the end, your efficiency is marginally better than a combustion engine.
Whenever the Sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, which would be when I get up to go to work and when I come home from work, if I charged my battery powered car in my garage, which could lead to my house burning down, then I'm using 100% coal and natural gas for that purpose, along with all the various electrical power losses cited above.
131MW of power lost as heat, is an absolutely staggering amount of power, per 500MWac power generated. That means for every 1GWac power generated using solar photovoltaics, 262MWe+ is lost to electrical resistance, aka "heat", before the power touches the transmission lines. This is for brand spanking new solar panels being built from the middle of last year until the present day.
Naturally, all of this nonsense requires Silicon out the wazoo, Arsenic, Cadmium, Lead, Aluminum, Copper, steel, concrete, and complete clear-cutting of the land that the solar panels are placed upon to prevent any natural vegetation from casting a shadow on the panels. All of it was made with coal and natural gas if it was made in China, which is where 90% of the world's supply comes from.
Here's a great article on the new toxic wasteland we're creating using photovoltaic panels:
If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?
Here's part of the conclusion:
Many experts urge mandatory recycling. The main finding promoted by IRENA's in its 2016 report was that, “If fully injected back into the economy, the value of the recovered material [from used solar panels] could exceed USD 15 billion by 2050.”
But IRENA’s study did not compare the value of recovered material to the cost of new materials and admitted that “Recent studies agree that PV material availability is not a major concern in the near term, but critical materials might impose limitations in the long term.”
They might, but today recycling costs more than the economic value of the materials recovered, which is why most solar panels end up in landfills. “The absence of valuable metals/materials produces economic losses,” wrote a team of scientists in the International Journal of Photoenergy in their study of solar panel recycling last year, and “Results are coherent with the literature.”
Chinese and Japanese experts agree. “If a recycling plant carries out every step by the book,” a Chinese expert told The South China Morning Post, “their products can end up being more expensive than new raw materials.”
Toshiba Environmental Solutions told Nikkei Asian Review last year that,
Low demand for scrap and the high cost of employing workers to disassemble the aluminum frames and other components will make it difficult to create a profitable business unless recycling companies can charge several times more than the target set by [Japan’s environment ministry].
Can Solar Producers Take Responsibility?
In 2012, First Solar stopped putting a share of its revenues into a fund for long-term waste management. "Customers have the option to use our services when the panels get to the end of life stage," a spokesperson told Solar Power World. “We’ll do the recycling, and they’ll pay the price at that time.”
Or they won’t. “Either it becomes economical or it gets mandated. ” said EPRI’s Cara Libby. “But I’ve heard that it will have to be mandated because it won’t ever be economical.”
Last July, Washington became the first U.S. state to require manufacturers selling solar panels to have a plan to recycle. But the legislature did not require manufacturers to pay a fee for disposal. “Washington-based solar panel manufacturer Itek Energy assisted with the bill’s writing,” noted Solar Power World.
The problem with putting the responsibility for recycling or long-term storage of solar panels on manufacturers, says the insurance actuary Milliman, is that it increases the risk of more financial failures like the kinds that afflicted the solar industry over the last decade.
[A]ny mechanism that finances the cost of recycling PV modules with current revenues is not sustainable. This method raises the possibility of bankruptcy down the road by shifting today’s greater burden of ‘caused’ costs into the future. When growth levels off then PV producers would face rapidly increasing recycling costs as a percentage of revenues.
Since 2016, Sungevity, Beamreach, Verengo Solar, SunEdison, Yingli Green Energy, Solar World, and Suniva have gone bankrupt.
The result of such bankruptcies is that the cost of managing or recycling PV waste will be born by the public. “In the event of company bankruptcies, PV module producers would no longer contribute to the recycling cost of their products,” notes Milliman, “leaving governments to decide how to deal with cleanup.”
Force these companies to clean up their waste streams, and you'll see them vanish overnight, much like the nuclear power industry. For now, if you bother to read the rest of the article, it seems that we're shipping much of our electronic waste to other countries in the Middle East and Africa, in order to subject the poor people living there to our never-ending stream of hazardous electronic waste, instead of our people. I guess that might work so long as the governments there have plenty of land for cheap but degraded or damaged solar panels and the people remain oblivious to the poisonous substances they're being subjected to.
What have we traded for reduced CO2 emissions?
A never-ending stream of electronic waste that costs more to recycle than it was worth, in terms of new materials, to begin with.
Clear-cut forests for wind turbines, voracious consumption of high-embodied energy metals / glass / composites, poisonous substances that will remain poisonous to humans for all-time, unlike even nuclear radiation, which will eventually subside.
Is a few more parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere a worse problem than having Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury in your ground water, no trees either due to clear-cutting to put wind and solar farms on them, or the idiocy practiced out in California of not trimming trees away from high-voltage power lines, causing them to catch fire and burn entire forests to the ground?
There have to be better ways of doing this, and there are. To being with, you learn to accept that electronic gadgets are not a panacea. They may solve certain problems, but they create brand new ones, sometimes worse ones that are even more difficult to rectify.
What was "good" about cast iron engine blocks?
The Iron metal was low-embodied energy for the intended purpose, it was very easy to recycle, it's non-toxic, Iron is a very abundant ore that doesn't require nearly as much energy input or toxic chemicals to refine as Aluminum or Magnesium, so far less energy and toxic waste was generated. Someone with power tools could disassemble an engine block design of the 1950s in a matter of minutes.
Is Aluminum a good alternative if you need to "go faster" by "being lighter"?
Sure, it's good for the intended purpose. However, the actual weight savings are around 40% at most, equivalent to 200 pounds of a metal requiring 3 times as much energy input as Iron, thus virtually no energy savings during manufacturing to speak of, and the vehicles that these snazzy new Aluminum blocks are going into, are every bit as heavy as the cars of the 1950s. The new compact sedans weigh well over 3,000 pounds, despite the fact that virtually all of them use Aluminum engine blocks / heads / pistons, all carefully controlled using every electronic gadget known to man.
Grandpa's "old timey" engine technology doesn't seem so stupid when total energy usage, fewer toxic chemicals used during manufacturing, reuse of the engine in another car, and eventual recycling are taken into account, now does it?
Anytime someone tells you there going to make something "more efficient", the very next question to that person should be, "More efficient in what way?"
Are they going to make whatever they concoct, tangibly better than what we have now, or simply less usable in some other aspect that's of material importance to the general usability and applicability of the solution?
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If the convenience aspect of charging a Tesla is an actual selling point, then it's typically done at night after returning home from work, when there is no more sun and wind to provide electric power, which means that power comes from natural gas and coal.
If you're saying we need to go all in on nuclear if we wish to switch to an all-electric society, then yes, I agree. Though you do get wind at night I suppose. But charging batteries during the day, then transmitting the power at night to charge more batteries... those losses are going to add up.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Terraformer,
I don't have any great love of nuclear power, or any other form of power, for that matter. What I "want" / "fancy" is totally irrelevant. The scheme either works or it doesn't, at the necessary scale and in the manner required. It's a bean counting exercise for me. I compare inputs and outputs, in terms of dollars spent and toxic waste generated that humanity will ultimately have to deal with. I refuse to hand-waive any unwanted side-effects.
There happen to be more negatives than positives associated with using dilute and intermittent energy sources, and the massive over-consumption of natural resources that using such energy sources dictate, which is why we quit doing that nonsense the moment coal / oil / gas became available. The problems also happen to be more profoundly negative, meaning structurally negative and therefore undesirable from any perspective not related to ideology.
If you go big on nuclear, then you have lots of fuel to breed and recycle. You also have to store the radioactive waste for long periods of time. Radiation is intrinsically hazardous to all life. None of that is up for debate. However, quantity matters greatly. Relative to nuclear power, the amount of environmental damage and toxic waste generated from wind and solar is on another level. The mere fact that so many people are willfully oblivious to it, only shows how much of a problem ideology is when comparing the practicality of all potential solutions.
If I told you I have 5 kilos of an unimaginably dangerous substance that would kill anyone within 500 feet, or 5 billion kilos of a still lethal over time, but less immediately lethal substance, that I spread all over the world, which substance do you believe poses the greater threat to human life?
I can afford to cordon off and guard that 5 kilos of nuclear material, in order to prevent it from harming anyone not required to handle it. I know that it's very dangerous, but I can also muster the labor and material resources to manage the danger it poses.
What the hell am I supposed to do to protect people from 5 billion kilos of heavy metal that my alternative energy technology has scattered across the entire planet?
Beyond that, there's simple math problems like this one:
If a mere 5% of the vehicles in the US were electric vehicles, and all of their owners decided to "fast-charge" them at the same time (as in, "filling up" before going to work, we would exceed the total electric generating capacity of the US. The notion that 100% will be electric "in a few short years", is a complete absurd fantasy, unless we also have a wholesale increase in generating capacity and complete grid transformation for distribution of the quantity of power required.
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We could look forward to more fires since to many go through the woods...
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I'll put it to the crowd like this:
There are combustion engines and electric motors made during the early 1900s that are still in use today, because they're every bit as usable today as the day they were made, 100+ years ago. To clarify, I don't mean that there are a literal handful of carefully preserved museum pieces that still function for demonstration purposes, I mean there are still hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of engines and electric motors that have been in routine use since before Lithium-ion batteries existed in a laboratory. The simple reason those "relics" continue to be used, is that they still work!
There's no such thing as a battery made 100 years ago that's still powering anything today. There's no such thing as a laptop or a cell phone that was made a mere 20 years ago that's still in common use today. Both technological development and the universe itself assures that there never will be.
Disposable appliance mentality is a very large part of what has driven energy usage to the levels seen today. We now have electronically-controlled internal combustion engine and battery electronic vehicles that cost as much as a house to produce, because that's how much energy and labor went into making them. Vanishingly few of those insanely expensive vehicles will still be on the road 20 years from today, no matter who made them. Whereas computers have come down in cost dramatically, every computer-controlled device that's closely associated with modern life has become absurdly expensive by way of comparison, and frequently impossible to repair for any reasonable cost.
So, my questions are as follows:
What's so great about cartoonishly expensive refrigerators, washers and driers, motor vehicles that were made to last 5 to 10 years at most?
If the manufacturers start asking for more money for their latest and greatest technology than you can afford to pay for, then what's your fallback plan?
Do you think your toaster needs to have a microchip in it, for example? Is 1 chip okay? Is having 5 chips too many? Does your toaster need to be voice-activated and AI-enabled to achieve the perfect level of "toasty-ness", or is a simpler rheostat temperature control and a bail lever sufficient for the task? At what point has technology transitioned from addition of highly desirable features or practical utility, to senseless frivolity? What's the "crossover point" for the cost-to-benefit ratio? The toaster manufacturers are perfectly willing to make toasters as cheap or as expensive as consumer are willing to pay for, so this seems like a fair question.
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That's just a loaded assertion. Yes the costs add up but do they add up to more than nuclear, coal, and gas?
As things stand in many parts of the world solar plus storage is already way cheaper than nuclear.
The direction of travel for solar, wind and storage is clear: down. down, down.
If the convenience aspect of charging a Tesla is an actual selling point, then it's typically done at night after returning home from work, when there is no more sun and wind to provide electric power, which means that power comes from natural gas and coal.
If you're saying we need to go all in on nuclear if we wish to switch to an all-electric society, then yes, I agree. Though you do get wind at night I suppose. But charging batteries during the day, then transmitting the power at night to charge more batteries... those losses are going to add up.
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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Louis,
You have to outright ignore every other part of all existing solar implementations, except for the panels themselves, to believe what you believe. To begin with, there is no "solar plus storage". You keep trying to peddle that farce, and one of us keeps telling you how much nonsense it truly is.
There is solar power for 12 hours at most, plus all the hydrocarbon energy used to create and maintain solar powered anything, to provide energy for the other 12 hours of every day when the Sun doesn't shine. That is all that exists at a human civilization scale.
There are no solar powered trucks, ships, mining operations, metal smelters, or factories. Every GigaFactory on this planet is hooked up to a power grid that supplies electricity from coal or natural gas power plant. They make the damn batteries there, but the factories don't run off the very product they make that you think is so great for storing energy. Why is that, do you suppose?
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