Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
Well, you're choosing to go up[0] while the plane is going forward[1], and you will lose forward speed the moment you're out of the cockpit. Which means that you have to be clear of the tail the moment it passes under[2] you, and preferably with some margin. If not you may well have a *much* shorter spine due to it being fragmented because of a collision with a bit of metal sticking up[3] at the back of the plane you just chose to get out of.
[0] relative to the plane. Might well be down relative to the earth.
[1] more or less.
[2] see [0]
[3] see [0] once more
Unless your Kangoo has a separate engine and alternator to charge the "conventional 12V battery" where the hell do you think it gets charged from?
The charge socket, where else? A fully charged 12V 70Ah battery can run the lights, wipers, ventilation, instruments and radio much longer than the traction battery can run the engine. And every time you hook up the car to a charger, the 12V battery gets charged too. Simple.
Lot of EVs driving around right now disprove that. Right now they work for lots of people.
We recently got a 2012 Kangoo ZE in addition to a 2003 Kangoo diesel we've been using for the past eight years. Even with its limited range (~100km) we're figuring it can do at least 90% of our car rides. And even on average days the solar panels on our roof generate more than would be needed for a full battery.
There are of course costs to owning two cars, like insurance and maintenance (though no road tax for BEV for at least the coming years), but maintenance for the diesel will go down, and city centre environment zones are accessible again.
and people running power-showers
I don't really get why you would use one of those instead of a storage heater. Maybe if you're space-constrained, but otherwise? 2kW over a couple of (night-time) hours would be much gentler on the grid than everybody pulling 10..15kW during a brief morning timewindow.
Huge bulk storage capacity that is mobile too.
For extremely small values of 'huge'. 100kWh can power a dozen houses for a day or two if they're a bit frugal, way less if cooking, showering and/or heating is electric.
I suspect EVs will not only be storing charge for the grid shortly but will be moving it too.
For data there may be a lot of bandwidth in a stationwagon, for energy less so (unless as hydrocarbons).
All good until the owners of said cars want o use them after they've silently dumped their battery content to prop up the grid.
You really think that EV owners will allow their car's batteries to be entirely depleted in feeding back to the grid? Even if the inverter in the car would have a controller setting to feed back until exhausted, the owner won't use that setting. And ultimately frobbing in a chip that fakes the battery level to be lower than it actually is if such a 'deplete' setting would become mandated.
Also, using your car's batteries for grid support might be a possibility in the future, but AFAIK no EV has that option yet.
And Petrol does not just burn, it can explode. That is far more dangerous than a battery fire.
Yes and no.
Conventional fires (petrol, wood, natural gas, coal) need oxygen, and the common method of extinguishing such a fire is to starve it of oxygen and/or cooling the fuel to a temperature below its ignition point. Which is old hat for any fire department.
Battery fires are utterly different, as those are converting the stored energy directly into heat. If you have cells shorting internally you can't stop it, and only cool them (to try prevent the undamaged cells joining in the fun) until the stored energy is exhausted.
“everyone can plug in at the same time, the cars will simply charge at the rate the grid can handle.”
No, that’s not the way electrical grids work.
Not the grids as a whole, but EV charging systems can adapt the charge rate, and thus the grid load, to what's available. This would require coordination between those systems, the other stuff that wants some of those electrons, and the substation feeding the area.
A lot of people seem to think that if this Mercedes is able to charge at 350kW, we'd need that capacity at every domestic charge socket too. Which is utterly daft. You want to charge a car at maximum power when 'filling up' at an actual roadside service station. At a domestic connection there's usually more time and less current available to charge, and the charge controller (which is in the car) can, and should, adapt to that.
but in the winter when it's cold,
Yes, that eats into your range. But at least some EVs can be fitted with a diesel-fueled heater.
dark and probably wet,
Our Kangoo ZE runs the lights and the other non-traction stuff on a hefty conventional 12V battery. Which lasts well beyond the traction battery range.
when over half of my commute is on motorways and when the battery is 5 years old that 150 mile range is suddenly very optimistic.
It is.
it's still going to be FUN supplying Nx350kW to those car parks.
Car parks associated with urban housing (i.e. where people live, and more specifically sleep) don't need to turbo charge every car that's parked there, nor do they have to be charged at the same time. In most cases they don't need to be charged from nearly empty to full either.
Capacity to charge all cars parked there overnight, plus a bit of leeway so that you can have a few getting charged at max power if necessary (and their owners getting charged appropriately so people selecting that option only when they actually need it) would appear to me to be quite sufficient.
Yes, charging daily could swap for filling monthly/weekly. But still need the infrastructure.
So you drive 20 miles a day, roughly, six days a week. At an average power use of 350Wh/mile you'd be using about 7kWh per day. Which, if you trickle charge overnight, would be like running half a kettle for six or seven hours. Which doesn't need any changes to infrastructure at your end
"Embedded generation", things like solar panels on houses or a few kW of local batteries must always disconnect when there's major distruption on the grid, for safety reasons.
That's right, but it doesn't need to stop your solar system charging your EV. Or just topping up your domestic battery or thermal storage; systems are increasingly designed and set up to operate that way. As long as the inverter is properly disconnected from the grid mains there's no problem with 'island' mode inverters running autonomously and delivering power to whatever can use it.
Maybe the charger would have to be intelligent and monitor your other loads, and turn down its power take if necessary.
I've just wired up a Type 2 EV charge point at home (3x 32A max). For a domestic feed you definitely need load monitoring, and while it's an option with this kit I have selected it. Just need to install the current transformers in the main distribution board, but as it's getting dark now it'll have to wait a bit as I don't relish working on electrics with only battery lighting if I can avoid it.
My aged HP LaserJet is somewhere in Deceased Printer Territory, and its functions taken over by two Brother laserprinters (one colour, one B/W) driven via CUPS.
Unfortunately I have to deal with HP (now HPE) professionally. That last word is not how I would describe HP's dealing with us.
“Condor would like to apologize to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of large paper coffee cups for your crew's comfort, refreshment and alertness during the journey. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. Cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again.”
Nah. In 1988 I did have a phone line (with a very fancy clear plastic T65 on it), and wanted to have tone dialling enabled so that I could use a second phone that I had just purchased in Denmark (lines were pulse dialling only by default). They wanted to see my telephone and test it, even despite it being a model that was electronically identical to one they were selling themselves, just styled differently.
Also around that time someone in the uncharted backwaters of Twente someone called in to a lunchtime radio program complaining that they never managed to get in to radio phone-in games because their exchange was still pulse-dial only, and from the connection quality apparently relying on barbed wire fencing doing double duty.
I was going to suggest that the obvious method for error free, restartable file transfers back in '93 would have been to use Kermit.
I'm quite sure that ZModem could deal with interrupted file transfers, though that might have been a later protocol extension or some external add-on. It definitely was pretty capable of dealing with hokey connections by adjusting packet sizes as needed, so when the error rate went up the packet size decrease and vice versa.
I have frequently hit problems with IO on USB 2, happens quite quickly when you're trying to use the disk and the network.
It's a tablet. Why as well as how would you be using one for an IO-intensive application? It doesn't have a wired Ethernet port and not much in the way of USB connectivity either. It's something you take with you, as a portable screen that's a bit bigger than the average phone, with some input capabilities so that you can enter bits of data More than just occasional text input makes nearly all users reach for an auxiliary BT keyboard. This particular tablet runs Raspbian, so its use cases may be diverging somewhat from the average Android or iPad ones, but it's still a tablet form factor which skews heavily towards screen output, not, for instance, data logging and processing.
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