[quote=“shadowfax, post:41, topic:176166”]
And I sure hope they keep that night lighting scheme. Automan would shed a tear of happiness.
That should make it very easily seen at night.
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Even Orville Wright once said that the airplane will amount to nothing more than a rich mans toy.
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From outer space. 
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True… yet many new “LED happy” designs also emit so much light all around that it blinds drivers… I hope for some restraint in this sense.
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I have seen an experimental storage system for a windfarm. It had two lakes, one near the top of a mountain and one at the bottom. During periods where demand was lower than production, the excess power was used to pump water from the lower lake to the upper lake. When demand exceeded supply, the water was release from the upper lake through a turbine/generator to the lower lake.
This only works for wind farms located in the mountains, not so good for Texas and Oklahoma wind farms.
To be able to charge and run large trucks, the batteries are going to need to be very high voltage, 10’s of thousands of volts. A DC grid for transmission is going to be needed to get that kind of energy from a wind farm to a charging station. Basically 600,000 volts DC. Our transmission grid should be changed to DC anyway, it is more efficient than AC. AC is more efficient for the local distribution grids.
+1 !
it will help on many fronts, yet inertia is quite big.
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I believe the original electric power grid in NYC was DC, but transmission distance was short. AC power became popular because of the long distances it could be transmitted with little loss.
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Milk?! Shouldn’t they be beer wagons? A higher use, for sure.
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In The UK, the local pub is such an esteemed institution that most folks probably drank beer at home for the first time during Lockdown.
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actually AC has quite a substantial inductive loss
AC adoption over DC was IMHO more to do with the ease of converting the voltage up and down on a simple transformer, something much more involved with DC
still, modern advances in high-power semiconductors made it possible to gain from DC adoption
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Inductive reactance is a lot like the reciprocating motion of pistons in an engine. It consumes no power. The energy given to a piston to accelerate it in the beginning of its stroke is returned to the flywheel when the piston is decelerated at the end of its stroke. The same is true for capacitive reactance. The energy needed to compress a valve spring is returned to the camshaft when the valve spring closes the valve.
“Ohms” is not necessarily a resistance, it’s also a volt to amp ratio. The conductor diameter and the distance apart determines the volt/amp ratio that is the transmission line’s sweet spot, where the capacitance and inductance cancel each other and the line itself is neither capacitive or inductive. When operated at that volt/amp ratio, the magnetic repulsion of the lines equals the electrostatic attraction of the lines and there is no net force acting on the wires.
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- Almost no supply network for gasoline. Since there were no cars. Today. Elec grid is unable to charge 100 million cars. In US? There is no infrastructure for charging. There is capacity. From coal and nuke and hydro. But coal is discouraged. So what is it? Batteries for 100 million Cars? Charging stations for 100 million cars? Power supply to charge 100 million cars? And trucks.
Really?
America Goes Electric: Mapping EV Charging Stations Nationwide (ceros.com)
Comparing Public Electric Vehicle Charging Networks (myev.com)
GM and EVgo to Triple Nationwide EV Charging Infrastructure (automobilemag.com)
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Not a showstopper, but some type of crane is going to be needed to pick up a battery of that size. The battery would need to be in an easily accessible location to minimize the labor involved.
As I suggested earlier: put it in a short tandem trailer.
Unhitch it and roll to a charging station, roll a charged battery trailer to the truck and hitch it to the back.
Connect some fat wires and go.
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OR…the battery pack is replaced from underneath and you just need a lift.
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Forklifts have been changing 3000 lb plus batteries for decades. There can be machines designed for this. It isn’t rocket science.
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Common carrier fleets use that stagecoach strategy now. They have many more drivers that tractors. The road driver does his 10 or 11 hour drive, pulls into the terminal and waits for a cab or shuttle to the motel and the tractor may just get fueled and out the gate with another driver and the same or different trailers before the first driver gets to the motel.
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Heck YEAH! There is a little bit of rocket science.
The most akward thing I’ve ever seen fly. And yet it did!
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