[K-Dog]

Easy to be more detached when you are in a climate-controlled metal box.

And detachment is at the root of many problems.  The experience of human life becomes meaningless inside the box if you can't ever get out.

[RE]

The problem here in the FSoA for EV trucking is the distances between charging stations once outside the major markets.  In Europe the distances are much shorter.  Either we need a huge upgrade in the grid here, or design the trucks with flow batteries.

RE

[K-Dog]

Well, there's plenty of selection out there now of the mini EVs and bike cars at least in Europe and China.  There are a couple designed for pulling cargo also, one of the companies has a contract with DHL.  The technology is all there, but reconstructing cities and suburbs around those type of vehicles will take quite some time.  Probably more time than we have before the current model fails.

RE

Beyond which there is no political will to get ANY of this done.  And I have felt no change in the wind.

[K-Dog]

The problem here in the FSoA for EV trucking is the distances between charging stations once outside the major markets.  In Europe the distances are much shorter.  Either we need a huge upgrade in the grid here, or design the trucks with flow batteries.

RE

I'll get offline (for a while) because I'm generating comments that are saying the same thing.  There is no political will to get ANY of this done.  Any such will is antithetical to freedum and the free market.  The next election cycle will ignore all social need. 

But repeating the disgusting facts gets in front of the good idea of changing what will fail, and fail soon.  Charging stations on inter-states is a really good idea.  So I'll be back.  With less negativity.

[RE]

Charging stations on inter-states is a really good idea.  So I'll be back.  With less negativity.

I'll handle the negativity.

Except for where they intersect with cities, the interstate runs through very low population areas, particularly out west.  Because the population is so low, they don't have any high voltage substations, no wiring.  The best you can do here is to upgrade the wiring at the truck stops that currently serve the ICE trucks for the 240V charging stations, but even with that, the batt packs for a semi that could pull a 20 ton load would take at least 12 hours to charge, probably more.  IOW, what currently takes 30 min to fill your tanks with diesel would take half a day, minimum.  Generally speaking when you are running you fill up every day or every other day.  So switching to EV trucks doubles how long it would take to ship...except...

At any truck stop you will usually have about 8-12 pumps all going filling trucks, all day.  Each one takes 15-30 min to fill.  If those all were electric charging stations, you would have a truck parked there all day charging.  If you even have enough electricity coming in to the stop to run 8 stations I would be surprised.  But that's nothing, a truckstop refuels 100-200 trucks every day.  There is no way you will ever get that much power running in to a truck stop.

EV trucks can work inside cities on local routes, charging overnight.  For the interstate OTR bizness, it can't work with charging this way.  Flow batteries could work though, maybe.  You would still need a lot of electricity to charge up the fuel in the truck stop storage tanks..

RE

[K-Dog]

Because the population is so low, they don't have any high voltage substations, no wiring.

Better get the linemen from the county working!


People who wear radios at work plant them in a charging stand overnight.  The same idea works for trucks if the charging stand scales up a couple of thousand times.  If a battery needs to be charged quickly the battery should be swapped for a battery that is already charged.  Flow technology is one way to do that.  There are others.

Perhaps we did buy into the idea that without diesel we all die a bit too much.  It might just only be that a HUGE NUMBER dies.

[K-Dog]

Over all those are very good numbers, I don't question the accuracy but a couple things to note, first what was the cargo weight moved? they give the gross weight, I would like to know the cargo weight. Also they have achieved that with a 80 km average speed. That will help keep wind resistance down. In Alberta Currently the hyways speeds are 110 to 120kmhr. Doing 80km would risk you being run over or off the road.

For 13 years (January 1974–April 1987]), federal law withheld Federal highway trust funds to states that had speed limits above 55 mph (89 km/h).

During World War II, the U.S. Office of Defense Transportation established a national 35 mph "Victory Speed Limit" (also known as "War Speed") to conserve gasoline and rubber for the American war effort.

It will be a long war or a 'long emergency'.  I vote for the long war.  The speed limit in 2045 could match the speed limit of 1945.  I prefer that over the long emergency libertarian nightmare of:

      35 and alive or 80 and Fred is dead.  I do not see this as a hard choice.  I too would like to know what 'fully loaded' means.  Popcorn?  I want the kilograms.

First technology must be able to  get the job done.  Then it has to be implemented the right way.

[RE]

If a battery needs to be charged quickly the battery should be swapped for a battery that is already charged.  Flow technology is one way to do that.  There are others.

Whatever the swapping method is, the issue is the number of trucks in a day that arrive with an empty fuel tank (or battery) and need to leave with a full one.

Say it is a relatively quiet stop that fills 100 tanks/day.  If you were swapping batts, the stop would need an inventory of about 200 batts on hand.  100 on chargers + 100 ready to be swapped when the truck rolls in.  Those are mighty big batt packs, and you need an average of 3 for every truck on the road.  That is a shit load of lithium if you are using Li-I technology.  You would also need some type of robotic forklift system to do all the swapping between charge station, drop station, ready station and onto the truck.  This could not be done by the driver alone like pumping diesel.

Then the problem of charging up the packs.  Say you could get the charge time down to 6 hours from empty to full charge.  That station would need to push a lot of juice, and in 24 hours 1 station can charge a max of 4 batt packs.  That means you need 25 of these stations running simultaneously.  Can you imagine how much electricity that is flowing through the supply line wire?  It basically would need its own high voltage cable running in there and transformer substation!  You would need to do this for all the major truckstops along the interstates.  All the TAs, all the Petros, all the Flying Js, all the Pilots.

Bottom line:  Even with flow batteries I don't see how this can be made to work without a grid upgrade that is way beyond what they have planned in even optimistic scenarios.  IMHO, EV trucks can only work for local market deliveries where the truck does a round trip to its home terminal each day and charges up overnight there.  There will need to be a change in the logistics to accomodate that.

The only way I can see is to use the rail system and truck only from rail hubs to distribution points.  However, the rail network would need to absorb all the freight currently using the interstate highways.  I don't think it has the capacity for that.

RE

[K-Dog]

The only way I can see is to use the rail system and truck only from rail hubs to distribution points.  However, the rail network would need to absorb all the freight currently using the interstate highways.  I don't think it has the capacity for that.

RE

Table 1

Summary data for comparing energy transmission costs in $/mile, $/MWh, and $/mile-MW                         Electrical        Liquid Pipeline               Gas PipelineEnergy carrier    HVDC    Crude Oil    MeOH    EtOH    NG    H2Total flow (Amp, kg/s)    6,000    1,969    1,863    1,859    368.9    69.54
Delivered power (MWe, MWLHV)    2,656    91,941    37,435    50,116    17,391    8,360
Capital cost ($M/mile)    $3.90    $1.47    $1.92    $1.92    $1.69    $1.38
Power loss in transmission    12.9%    0.78%    2.02%    1.51%    2.67%    1.94%
Capital cost ($/mile-MW)    $1,502    $16    $51    $38    $97    $166
Amortized cost ($/MWh/1000 mi)    $41.5    $0.77    $2.2    $1.7    $3.7    $5.0

Where I got this pile of facts.

I really do mean pile of facts.  It is quite a jumble.  Not the be all and end all but a place to start.

What does it mean for electricity to cost forty times what an oil pipeline costs to transmit the same power.  That ratio is huge, but an interstate itself is not cheap to build and maintain.  Would a parallel transmission line or two or three cost that much more?  I do not know. 

Before any analysis is done the question of total power consumption by a normal fleet of trucks on a thousand miles of freeway has to be answered.  10,000?  Ten per mile?  That could mean a lot of transmission lines.

Rail with truck hubs is definitely a better idea.  Trains are more aerodynamic and a better use of fuel anyway.

The normal way to approach this problem, and the way I used to do it makes the circle of abstraction too small.  Solve the problem for one truck and multiply up leaves a lot out.  A more correct way asks all the questions.  Where does the power come from.  How much will all the power lines cost to build and maintain over fifty years?  And so on.  Questions that in the collective we are too lazy to ask.

I usually stop my analysis when I get the answer I want.  Do you do different?  <-- rhetorical question

[RE]

Actually, I figured out what is probably the only plausible way to do this.  You need to use Simon Marchaux's mini-nukes.

You drop a mini nuke at each of the main truckstops, which are all spaced out at about 300 mile intervals.  The nuke charges the trucks.  No grid upgrade necessary.  The nuke could support super fast charging pushng really high loads.

Estimating the number of mini-nukes needed, I think about 50 would be enough.  100 tops.

RE

[K-Dog]

Simon Marchaux's mini-nukes.

So after spending a few trillion to upgrade the transportation network what gets shipped?

If we have no diesel there is no bunker fuel.  Nothing is coming in from China.  Trade between American city states?  Chicago sends its laundry to Detroit and Detroit sends dirty laundry to Chicago.  What kind of economy is that.  If we do not know what the world will look like, how do we know what to build?  Have city workers put down video games and moved to the boondocks to do farmin?  The new world is a transformed world, and the interstate transport system has nothing to transport if they have not.

What happens when they don't want to stop playing video games and won't move to nowhere do farmin?

[RE]

True that in the long term there will be much less being shipped around, but as long as we have people in cities in New York and Los Angeles and most of the food is grown in Iowa and Nebraska cornfields, the food needs to move around.

Once we hit the year of the Great Famine, when we have crop failures in say 2 of the main growing regions of the world like the midwest and SE Asia or Ukraine, all bets are off.  So many people will die in such a short period of time none of the big systems we have will survive, or be needed.  Same with a powerful pandemic (like Covid except 1000X worse).

However, as long as it remains a gradual shrinkage, we'll need to transition as much as possible from FFs to EV.  Far as shipping is concerned, those big container ships are ideal for powering with a nuke, we already do that with aircraft carriers.

Is it really plausible that we can build that many mini nuke reastors and mine up all the thorium salts needed to fuel them for powering the whole global transportation fleet land and sea?  Probably not, but we're supposed to not be negative and try to come up with solutions, right?  Not just throw up our hands and say we're mostly gonna die anyway and live like stone age H-Gs.  That's what I really think will happen, but I'm not supposed to say that because it's too Dr. McStinksion.

RE

[monsta666]

I don't think a transition of the trucking fleet in the US (or anywhere else for that matter) is really on the cards barring some short distance local deliveries. The way trucks are used, the mileages they accumulate, the loads they carry just make an EV transition fanciful. People will stick with diesel for as long as possible.

If things start going south there won't be the money to fund any major investment in nuclear technology. And I am assuming there is the political will to do that which is far from certain considering the amount of people who are against nuclear energy. Also, nuclear energy production and their associated industries have a significant lead time.

[UnhingedBecauseLucid]

"...  Trade between American city states?  Chicago sends its laundry to Detroit and Detroit sends dirty laundry to Chicago.  What kind of economy is that.  If we do not know what the world will look like, how do we know what to build? ..."

That pretty much sums up two thirds of the problem ... the other third being that we actually have a few clues as to what that world will look like ... but many just get shell shocked by them; others really just get truly butthurt by the realization of having been duped into believing a childish fantasy.

[RE]

As if Teslas weren't unrealistic enough as the Future of Transportation, these so-called "next gen" EVs take the fantasies of rich technophiles to a whole new level.  As you might expect, the pricetags on all but one of them are stratospheric, and they boast performance specs that make a Ferrari ICE 12 cylinder look like a lawnmower engine.

You will positively puke when you listen to the advertising text that the narrator gushes out, as he practically has an orgasm describing the features of each of these vehicles.

There are some good concepts in here, a mini cargo vehicle system and a monorail vehicle that takes a standard railroad track and turns it into a bidirectional public transit system, but even these ideas are totally overwhelmed by impracticalities and outrageous pricetags.

Stuff looks great at the annual car show, and keeps a few lucky auto engineers who are probably related to the Ford family or Toyota family in a high paying job.  Otherwise, you'll never see them in production.  John DeLorean is smiling in his grave.

RE