chris222

Tesla might support it.

https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...

A high powered EV charger is 800 volts. Totally safe and outdoors in thousands of places.

I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.

Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:

* Very inflexible. * Very expensive to build. * Very time consuming to build. * Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.

I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?

Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...

Solar has tripled in 4 years: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...

So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?

I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.

Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.

The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.

Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).

The peak max solar record in ERCOT was hit today at over 31GW. Five years ago it was only 5.4GW.

The peak renewables to load was also hit today at 83%. Throughout the entire day solar, wind and battery storage provided the majority share of power.

Robert has a whole set of youtube channels on electric vehicles and other renewable technology. It’s quite impressive what he does now but I always see Kryten in him, strange.

https://youtu.be/TUi03zA4DAM?si=F55U2fbHjGcksHaK

Yah, check this one out.

https://www.docanpower.com/panda-52v-942ah-48kwh-prebuilt-pa...

The safety aspect of them is probably more important than in grid storage. Also the performance at colder temps.

I find it’s best to use it to actually give context. Like prompted with a peice of information that the LLM doesn’t know how to look up (such as a link to the status or logs for an internal system), give it a tool to perform the lookup.

The described version of community solar is nice. How it is usually implemented like in Maine ends up sucking.

The root cause is that they wanted community solar customers to be able to opt-in and opt-out any time. As such it isn’t really what you describe which is owning panels offsite, you are more or less doing a short term rental on them. As such you don’t get the full benefit from them but simply a 15% discount on the current residential rate.

https://www.wabi.tv/2025/02/18/maine-public-advocate-claims-...

I very much think that proper community solar would be a larger upfront investment just like panels on your roof are. With a small monthly cost to maintain the grounds and pay taxes on the real estate where the panels exist. All power generated would be metered for the specific panels you own using microinverters.

I consume about 17MWh a year between two EVs and a large heat pump for winter heating.

I will have overproduction now with the 2nd array. We do have net metering at about 80% of the cost on NEM 2.0. Our bill is split by transmission, generation, distribution and fees. We get 100% on transmission and generation and 25% on distribution.

https://www.energy.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt551/files/inli...

You can do bidirectional with most GM vehicles now with the GM energy solution. I don’t have this but I did have a call with them.

Thier max output is only 9.6kW so it can’t do a whole home backup and the car can only run in backup mode when the grid is out.

https://gmenergy.gm.com/

Part of it is the weight of a battery this size but the bigger issue is the aerodynamics of the large frontal area.

The Lucid Gravity has a 450 mile range with a 123kWh pack. It’s the only other vehicle with a range close to the GM large packs.

I’ve just done a legtimate 425 mile solar powered round trip which is the culmination of many things I will explain below. I can now effectively drive anywhere in a 225 mile radius and back for about $10 total cost and on 100% solar power.

I have a two complete solar systems on my house the first one was 10.98kW AC installed 4 years ago with the panels facing south. The second was just installed a few days ago and is a 9.9kW AC with the panels facing east/west. Combined the system will produce over 20MWh of power per year. Both systems are grid tied used EnPhase microinverters and are now combined together for monitoring in one site.

I have an EnPhase IQ EV Charger. This has a mode where it communicates with the solar system, understands how much power is being produced and consumed in the house and then adjusts the EV charger output to match the excess solar production.

I have an EV with the largest battery that is available. The Chevy Silverado EV truck has 24 battery modules with a total gross capacity of slightly over 200kWh. The efficiency on road trips at high speeds is about 2.1miles per kWh. I have verified this with a real world road trip of over 400 miles.

The cost of the solar is around 5 cents per kWh over the 25+ year lifespan of the system.

Dropbox does have a terminal level which I think was IC4 when I was there.

On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.

It should be funded by a carbon tax… the root cause of the more rapid and intense climate change.

Gas and carbon emitting electricity sources should be a LOT more expensive than they are. That would then push more people to EVs and renewables even faster and if there is demand than economies of scale will be reached and the prices of EVs and renewables will fall even further.

Why doesn’t the UK just deploy large battery banks like Tesla Megapack?

California is also going negative quite often now. Instead of dropping prices and encouraging usage during those times they curtail. The utility model is completely broken.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60822

California has the stupidest energy policy I have ever seen. And their PUC has some of the most corrupt people on it.

Public opinion changes if you ask someone if they want a Nuclear plant next to their house.

Nuclear is extremely expensive so if you poll on the cost of energy you will also have a different outcome.

Renewables plus storage is already cheaper than Nuclear. It also is safer and much faster to build.

There are some next generation reactor designs that are worth investment but for immediate generation capacity wind and solar is much better.

Not many people in tech are really aware of how the auto industry works. Mostly the insane lead times on new products. What is out there and for sale now is something that was likely designed 3-5 years ago.

You are right to point out the innovation coming out of China in the EV space. Every automaker is currently in a cycle of copying what they are doing for their next wave of products. To the extent that there is an EV “slowdown” right now is basically intentional until the next wave of BEVs starts coming out which are way more cost competitive.

As I pointed out in another comment the main driver is large format LFP prismatic cells in a cell-to-pack configuration. BYD blade and CATL qilin are examples to study.

The grid capacity isn’t really a monolithic topic either. Here in the Northeast we have easily enough generating capacity with already planned additions. Coal generation is also virtually extinct.

I don’t think the end state is everyone with an EV has home charging, that’s not practical.

The next generations of BEVs are getting faster and faster charging with longer ranges such that I don’t think this will be an issue.

Yes the Zeeker 001 is very impressive. Another 500kW+ charging EV is the Li Auto Mega van.

https://insideevs.com/news/710508/li-auto-mega-fast-charging...

I am confident the technology issues will be solved having studied the market for many years. What you see now for products does not represent the state of the art which is mostly coming out of China.

Most automakers are currently redesigning and retooling for the new reality of very cheap BEVs with lots of range and very fast charging. The largest shift currently underway is a major change over to LFP packs with cell-to-pack technology and large format prismatic cells like the BYD blade and CATL qilin. We also inch closer to solid state and sodium batteries which is likely the enablers for the next wave of innovative products at all price points in 5 years.

I don’t think 500-600 mile range BEVs with 500kW+ charging will be that rare in 11 years. We already have some current examples like the 2024 Zeeker 001. Based on those figures recharging is on par with refueling an ICE car.

Tax credits for EVs and the funding for charging in the IRA has been effective policy. The “bans” are just for show.

BEVs are likely already cheaper to produce than ICE/PHEV and that trend is going to continue. In automotive there is a pretty long lag between what is happening in new product development/the supply chain and what is reflected in products and prices in the current market. As an automaker you have to skate to where the puck is going.

Particularly the Chinese have mastered the truly low cost BEV which is being copied all over the globe (yes with North American crash standards). So many interesting things are happening in China in the EV/battery space.

Road tripping an EV in America is actually not that bad in a lot of regions. With NACS rolling out everyone will have access to Superchargers. I’m in the Northeast and fast charging is very dense here.

It doesnt even seem like it will utilize that much more land either. How much land does a Nuclear site take with all of the zones around it?

Nvidia has 26,000 employees and is worth 1.8 trillion which puts it at 69 million/employee.