AOC had her 5 minutes, don’t hold your breath for her “deal” to start.
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If and when the Green Deal is implemented - it’ll take years if not decades. This isn’t going to happen over night.
Richard , this is CarTalk . Me thinks you have posted to the wrong Forum
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You are welcome to your opinion, and as @VOLVO-V70 said, take it somewhere else. This has nothing to do with your choice, only with where you chose to express it.
Hold it, hold it, dang. Spit coffee all over my key board. I guess Viet Nam wasn’t very extreme after all.
Richard-Davis, yes this is Car Talk, where fans of automobile history, facts, figures, trouble shooting and fans of car humor gather. Your post and the follow up mean derogatory statements about the blog posters here were basically a poor excuse to squeeze in your unwelcome political views. Pease, go back under your rock.
OK, I’m going full political. I believe in great freedoms but this is one reason I am against legalizing pot.
What? You left a lot out. If it’s political, don’t bother.
That is quite the website. Not at all humble, is he?
He has a little more going on than this other Richard Davis.
Humble doesn’t pay the bills.
At the dawn of the 20th century, gasoline cars replaced horses as the primary mode of personal transportation because cars were superior to horses in almost every regard.
Today, EVs are replacing gasoline cars for the same reason.
After 120 years, wealthy enthusiasts still have horses, and there is still a Triple Crown.
I predict that in 100 years, wealthy enthusiasts will still have gasoline cars and there will still be non-EV race cars.
My kids drive EVs, but as for me, “when they pry my cold dead hand off my 5 speed stick” …Unless I win the lottery. Then I will buy a Tesla second gen roadster.
I think that down the road a lot of this green energy is going to disappear. Right now I’m in the middle of wind farm central. They’re going up everywhere just as fast as switch grass does.
A company affiliated with the local electric company is involved in those and solar panels. Just the other day they stated that when those wind turbines are “decommissioned” (a.k.a. scrapped) they will be recycled and all that will be left is a natural earth surface at no cost to taxpayers.
So I asked the obvious question; what about cost to the electric company ratepayers? No answer.
As for that mass of concrete foundation no answer on that either.
Right now they get 1.2 million in subsidies per turbine. In the future that is gone when they reach their projected service life of 20-25 years. And some of them have gone bellyup already at less than 5 years.
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Reliability is an issue as well as maintence. Tough to work that high up. Takes a helicopter to lift a rebuilt gen set.
You ever drive by a big wind farm and notice how many of the turbines are NOT turning? Seems like 30% are stationary. Are they not needed? Too costly to run? Or are they broken? I’d like to know.
Back when cars replaced horses, it was because of superior performance after the product was refined. The thing with the wind mills and other “clean” energy is that it has been mandated by law, not as a superior/cost-effective option. Each state has the requirement of so much “clean” production, so have at it. They are money makers for farmers. I forget the figures now but in rural S.D., a farmer would be a fool to turn down a long term lease and the payments for just a small patch of land. Of course not all locations were suitable, but for those that had sufficient wind, they made money. Of course the rate payers or tax payers make up for any difference.
I’m not sure which is the bigger blight on the landscape though, wind mills or the solar farms.
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I pick pipelines.
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The solar farm south of me chewed up 40 acres of prime farmland. Pipelines are not a problem because they’re buried underground.
Only once in a blue moon do all of the turbines run at the same time. Most of the time it’s 20 to 30%’ or less. All of the power generated here goes to Alabama via Dallas, TX. The turbine string 10 miles north sends that power to North Carolina. And NONE of those turbines produce anywhere near what they are rated at. They’re 1.5 MW but the electric company says they are most efficient when they are turning 18 to 22 RPM. The problem there is that in 5 years of operation none of them have ever come close to 18 RPM. When the wind is huffing along at 40 to 45 MPH they turn around 15 RPM. Wind gets stronger and brakes shut them down. And those turbines eat up existing grid power 24/7 even if the wind does not blow for a week as sensors have them constantly sniffing for wind and changing the yaw on the units. The generator/hub/blade unit weighs something like 200 tons and it takes a ton of juice to keep that mass rotating…
Helicopters won’t lift those gearbox/generator units. They’re as big as Winnebagos and weigh too much. They use massive cranes which have to be assembled. In the first year or so of operation about 40 of them suffered gearbox failures. I stopped one day to count noses and there were 28 semi loads of crane equipment just to change one gearbox on one turbine; not counting company pickups, cars, and so on.
When they assemble a turbine they put up the 3 tube sections first. Then a huge crane lifts the gearbox/generator unit into place. The hub and all 3 blades are assembled into one piece flat on stands on the ground. Then the same crane lifts the hub/3 blades into place. It can only be done on days where there is little or no wind.
One thing I have noticed is that they changed the migration of Canadian geese. The first year I stopped one day on the highway to watch flocks of geese heading north. They were right at mid-blade height.
Sure enough, they flew right through the spinning blades and I could see geese getting whacked and falling. After a couple of years the geese have disappeared. I have no idea which route they take now but I have not seen a flock of geese going north or south in roughly 3 years and we used to see them in droves every spring and fall.
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Incredibly oversized flatbed trucks frequently haul parts for wind turbines through here on the interstate, tying up traffic and giving the roads and bridges quite a load test. Those parts can ship by railcar only so far before requiring road transport.
I can’t stand the sound of wind turbines whenever I drive anywhere near one that is spinning. I’d thought years ago that driving past a massively huge solar farm in the California desert at the south end of Owens Valley was a bit unsettling but have since discovered that was nowhere as much so as being near a wind farm.
The Market will ultimately decide what we use for transportation and how we power it but the available infrastructure will determine the speed of adoption and that infrastructure will take years to develop.
Every vehicle has range limitations based on the amount of fuel it can carry but right now gasoline has the advantage because of 100 years of refueling infrastructure development from crude oil delivery, to refineries, to pipelines, to gas stations at every exit and on every corner so to be competitive any alternative fuel (electric, lpg, hydrogen, etc.) must have a similar supporting infrastructure.
Right now the Market seems to be saying that EV’s are the way of the future so what happens when all those new EV’s start drawing on our already strained power grids? More Brown Outs and Black Outs and are we willing to wait several years until it’s fixed?
The point is that although creation of new infrastructure isn’t currently economically viable, in a few years it will be but it will take years to implement so if we wait we’re going to be in a world of hurt. And that’s where Government comes in, to provide for future needs.
So those turbines may not be spinning right now but in a few years when all the new EV’s are coming on line, we’ll be happy that we made the early investment instead of writing to our Congressmen by candlelight about our lousy national power supply.
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