6th Gen Fail - Hybrid for Overlanding

Couldn’t resist.

Was literally in Presque Isle this morning and there were people speaking En’ Francais at breakfast.

 

In the Valley they do. I delivered furniture and got to travel all over. Definitely different world up there. They say it’s not god country, but you can see it from there.

 

Wow, long way from home.

 

Yeah, picked up a plane in Aberdeen Scotland yesterday and spent the night in Presque Isle for the new owner to visit “a lady friend” before heading down to Tampa.

 

Need to careful up there, I hear some folks carry a good amount of seafood around, but yet they are a long ways from the ocean.

 

Hahahahahahaha, I did have some lobstah for dinner.

 

Hahahahaha

 

My wife grew up just outside New York City, learned Spanish in school, never used it until we moved up to northern Maine and she got a job working with the migrant farm workers kids.

 

LOL!

 

I've heard that the diesel emissions regulations are a big part of the blame (your #1 above) but #2 is interesting, I've never read that before. Something I have heard (which is probably just speculation) is that because diesel is used by the transportation industry here in the US in a way not seen in Europe (trains and 18-wheelers), there have been deliberate policy decisions to keep passenger vehicles leaning towards gas to keep the demand and prices of diesel fuel lower and reduce our cross country shipping costs. Not sure if true but sounds reasonable

I saw someone post about the new Ram in this, or another, thread on this site the other day. That's what kicked off my thoughts about diesel/electric. I made a post in a different thread a few weeks ago (I probably spend too much time on here) about diesel/electric being an older technology. I thought the Tiger tank was almost diesel/electric back in WW2 but I just looked it up and was wrong - the prototype was gas/electric.

 

I have seen ideas for California to put solar on aqueducts and canals to slow the evaporation of water in drought prone areas plus produce electricity. I thought that was pretty brilliant... and I don't say that often about ideas from there

 

My ex is from up there, yeah, they speak something that isn't English (but it isn't really french either, it's a bastardized version of french).

Yeah, I saw that, it's a good idea and it doesn't take away farm land to do it...

 

they tried the black balls in the water holding ponds and that reduced the evaps from them but man that was a lot of balls (> 1mil per holding tank if i remember)

old article

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/91305...lifornias-most-mesmerizing-water-saving-trick

 

Yeah, I've seen that on an episode of "What on Earth". Interesting show. That's an outside-the-box solution as well.

If we could find a way to transfer electricity more efficiently, the energy issues could (probably) be solved with huge solar farms in the desert and geothermal in active areas. Unfortunately, I think an enormous amount of energy is lost through our current transmission methods. I keep seeing articles about breakthroughs in room temperature superconductors with near 100% efficiency but alas, we still wait for that one breakthrough. For comparison, the current US power grid operates at about 40% efficiency from what I've read

 

You’re correct about the large amount of loss from long distance electrical transmission lines. In California the utilities love that, and since they’ve neglected maintenance such as tree trimming, they are now promoting undergrounding high voltage transmission lines so they won’t burn down any more communities like Paradise. Since they are guaranteed a rate of return on any improvements, that’s the way they want to go. The consumer rate payers fund all the construction costs so there’s no incentive to keep costs low. Plus, whatever they spend they get a guaranteed profit on top of that. This also applies to constructing utility-owned solar farms and long distance transmission from them to urban centers.

The most effective and efficient methods are local rooftop solar panels and community solar for apartment buildings and lower income housing. But then utilities don’t make massive profits. PG&E and the other big utilities in California have hobbled that when they lobbied the California Public Utilities Commission into approving the NEM3 rules. Not such a great payback when compared to NEM2 and the only way for it to make sense is to go full monty with solar panels and local battery storage. Which will cost the average homeowner ~$50K and a break even time of ~12 years. And since loan interest rates are still high this has caused the solar industry to crash this year. Lots of contractors going out of business and something like 16,000 jobs lost. Other states’ PUCs are no doubt looking into changing their solar rules like this too. So watch out.

 

Apropos of two discussions: your Californians got nothing on our Quebecois.

 

…

it’s all about money. Line the pockets of those in power, screw consumers.

 

just a gee whiz info

The U.S. grid is divided into three major regions: (east, west, texas)

• The Eastern Interconnection, which operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains.
• The Western Interconnection, which covers the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountain states.
• The Texas Interconnected system.