Have to wonder how this will effect the EV aficionados

valhalla360 wrote:

routeforty wrote:
Ohio has already started on extra charges. $100 extra for license plates for hybrid cars and $200 for electric vehicles. The plates for my Camry hybrid cost more than my dually, class c and other car-combined. :M :M

I'm confused. Why are you angry at being asked to provide a small percentage of your share to keep the roads up?

If you go back and read my post more carefully you will see that my beef is this-My Camry hybrid(NOT EV) gets the same mileage as my friends Camry(NON HYBRID) yet I pay $100 more for my registration than they do. We had a Prius for a while(until a deer totaled the car), with the great mileage that we got I had no problem with the extra fee. If I owned an EV I would have no problem with the fee as I would be using no gasoline, therefore no fuel tax-for road maintenance. I know it's only a hundred bucks, which is nothing to me, it's the principle of it.

valhalla360 wrote:

routeforty wrote:
Ohio has already started on extra charges. $100 extra for license plates for hybrid cars and $200 for electric vehicles. The plates for my Camry hybrid cost more than my dually, class c and other car-combined. :M :M

I'm confused. Why are you angry at being asked to provide a small percentage of your share to keep the roads up?

If you read his post, he's upset that his hybrid that apparently gets the same fuel mileage as the non hybrid model is being taxed as if it is not paying enough gas tax.
Seems like an unintneded consequence of newer legislation maybe, or lack of knowledge that apparently a Camry hybrid would not be as cost effective as a normal Camry. (His words not mine, idk what mileage they get)

pianotuna, the answer to your question is at least half of us starve. Most if not all plastic replacements have to be grown, and you need fertilizer to grow it, if you need big crops. This takes you back to Haber and natural gas, or syngas made from oil or coal.

I wish I could find who said: "If it can't be grown, it has to be mined". The quote is wrong, even most foods grown depend on mining (drilling).

When people started agriculture, and then the industrial revolution, we went down a path from which there is no return.

Read about the Club of Rome, their predictions are probably right, their timing is wrong. Farmers, Biologists, Engineers and others have found plenty of just in time solutions, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. I am always surprised how much my degrees in Biology and Petroleum Engineering overlap.

Oh, you had better hope that we do not run out of oil and gas. Read the Wikipedia article on the Haber process. It makes ammonia, which makes fertilizer, that makes food, that makes people. It uses 3 to 5 percent of all the natural gas produced on the planet, and 1 to 2 percent of all the world's energy. Estimates are we would all have to be farmers, and there is not enough arable land on the plant to feed us without the green revolution (1960 version) and chemical fertilizer. End of the article quote:

Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[50] Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[51]

Yes Virginia, you do eat oil and gas. I love telling people this little known fact. Just imagine going back to farming with a horse and plow (my grandads did this). Plus we used up all the bird and bat guano deposits already. Horizontal drilling and methane hydrates should prevent this for a long time.

I am amazed that Canada has no plan to clean up the tailings. In the US every ton of coal is taxed, to clean up the sins of the past. Of course the US government has only spent half of the money in the promised fashion:

"The AML Fund has collected $11.496 billion through a reclamation fee assessed on each ton of coal that is produced. OSMRE has distributed $5.935 billion in AML grants to states and tribes from the collected fees. An additional $1.511 billion was transferred to United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Health and Retirement Funds, and $1.816 billion has been used for OSMRE operating expenses and AML emergencies. $2.233 billion of the AML Fund remains unappropriated."

On the other hand, orphan (no owner can be established) oil and gas wells are plugged by the states, with funds generated by a tax/fee on production. The states put out a lot of effort to find the owners of wells and force plugging. I know of at least one well, that neither the state or the owner can find, but the state required it to be plugged anyways! Probably never drilled, but the records from the pre 1920's are incomplete to say the least. Oh, how do states make companies plug wells? Simple, if you do not meet your goals, no new drilling permits. Now there is an incentive.

QCMan wrote:
Think about how much better the world will be without oil. No tires, no plastics, no paints, no solvents, no lubricants or any other of thousands of products made from it. Life will be wonderful!

We seemed to manage before 1800 without plastics and with few fossil fuels.

Hemp can replace many of the items on your list. In fact, it can even be made into batteries.

What happens to us when oil becomes "unobtainium"?

valhalla360 wrote:

jdc1 wrote:
I'm going to weigh in on solar. I have an all-electric, 3,000 square foot home. I have no electric bill. I have a plug-in Prius. I will soon have an electric car, replacing the Prius. I have not paid for electricity in over 8 years. PG&E actually owes me money (which I do not care about). I have an 8.2K solar system on my roof. With net metering and grid connectivity, I do not worry about anything. Power outage? I just start my Honda generator I have for camping. My initial investment was $15,000. My return on investment (ROI) was just over 4 years (50 months). I will have saved over $100,000 in electric costs in 25 years (plus any increases of PG&E Costs). My system will last in excess of 40 years. All parts are warrantied for 25 years. Panasonic, the panel manufacture, has been around since 1918, so I do not see them disappearing anytime soon. Enphase, the micro-inverter manufacture, is a worldwide Fortune 500 corporation. There is no maintenance per se. I hook my RV brush to a hose. Climb up my extension ladder and brush off the dust and dirt twice a year. It takes less than 10 minutes. I can monitor each panel separately through my phone or computers. If I ever needed to replace a panel or micro-inverter, it requires removing 4 nuts and unplugging the panel. Yes....it is that simple. 95% of solar panels are recyclable, more than a car.
Solar is here to stay. Electric cars will become the norm. It may take some time, but, it will happen. Somewhere along the line, a newer source of energy will replace solar, hydro, wind, fossil fuels, geo thermal, ect. My guess is hydrogen.

So where does your electricity come from when the sun isn't up? And more importantly, who pays for it?

You do realize the actual fuel is only a small part of the cost of providing a KWH at a house. Effectively, your neighbors are subsidizing your electric bill.

When houses with solar are 0.1% of houses, govt initiatives like this work because they are so small as to be irrelevant.

Germany has taken it further and now has electric prices that are around 3-4 times as high as the USA. Australia is facing blackouts when the sun doesn't shine. They are then buying large battery banks at huge expense because the spot price of electricity has gone crazy as they give solar first dibs to sell power undermining traditional plants, so it artificially creates higher prices from traditional plants.

So far lots of folks saying the article is wrong but not providing any factual data to refute it.

Like a camper, it likely comes from batteries. The TESLA walls are more than capable of providing power for about a week from a stored charge. f he depletes his batteries, then he goes to the grid, which he pays for.

Renewable is more than individual rooftop solar. There are solar and wind "power plants" in TX and CA. TX in particular (NOT Ca, go figure) leads in alternate, renewable sources of power, with WIND exceeding nuclear power generation in TX by a factor of more than 2x. Solar seems to be around 1% but is growing quickly as costs continue come down.

"Texas produces and consumes far more electrical energy than any other U.S. state. It generates almost twice as much electricity as the next highest generating state, Florida. Texas has an expanding variety of generating sources to meet consumption growth. Installed wind capacity grew to 28,800 MW and solar capacity grew to 3,100 MW at the end of 2019. Wind generation exceeded nuclear in 2014 and was near to surpassing coal in the number two position in 2019. Fossil-fuel and nuclear generation has remained nearly constant over the past two decades, with natural gas gradually replacing coal."

I had a BMW 5 series plug-in hybrid that I loved. I never plugged it in at home, but always plugged it in at work where we had a large solar array tied into the charging stations. It was a huge and heavy sedan that was unbelievably quick and got 32 MPGs. The only thing I missed was engine noise, and many cars (especially higher-end performance cars) will "pipe in" engine noise through the speakers.

There's no reason to fear solar, it's here to stay.
People always resist change, but this is like trying to stop the tides. It's coming.

GDS-3950BH wrote:


Sure....solar and wind and hydro oh my. Those silly Chinese.

A little article on an oil sands tailing ponds. Cleanup will only cost about 51 BILLION dollars.

https://thenarwhal.ca/no-sure-plans-funding-51-billion-cleanup-and-rehabilitation-oilsands-tailings-ponds/

valhalla360 wrote:

routeforty wrote:
Ohio has already started on extra charges. $100 extra for license plates for hybrid cars and $200 for electric vehicles. The plates for my Camry hybrid cost more than my dually, class c and other car-combined. :M :M

I'm confused. Why are you angry at being asked to provide a small percentage of your share to keep the roads up?

I think the issue you are seeing is how do states tax road usage of EV equably to fossil fueled vehicles.
Until they can devise a way to track mileage driven then higher registration fees are one method.
It would be nice to have a method to track mileage without invading privacy.

For jdc1, ROI is a poor way to look at an investment. You need to use Discounted Cash Flow Rate of Return (aka Internal Rate of Return). This method allows you to put a percentage return on any investment. Thus you can compare it to treasuries, stock market indices, or heck fire, drilling oil wells. Then you need to factor in risk, if it doesn't return 2 or 3 times the 10 year treasury rate, why would you invest in it?

Make sure you include the costs of remove/install the solar when you need a new roof, etc, and etc. Since I live where we have short winter days, low sol angles, and snow; the math just didn't work out. Much better to buy electric and invest the money.

I did put a 50 amp in the garage, for the welder and a possible EV, as soon as we can buy one with 400 mile cold and snow range (special trip every 2 weeks, no stops), and is comparable over its lifetime costs to a Honda CRV. Right now depreciation kills an EV over the 8 to 10 years we keep a car. They are a gitting there, but not quite yet.

And yes, I really do look at the world this way, by nature and training.