Without going through everything with a fine tooth comb I imagine some of the money may have been spent upgrading the electric grid to support the chargers.
Fast chargers as I understand are more taxing to the electric grid and so are not simply able to be placed just anywhere there is electricity. Additionally a source paper in the govtech.com article also emphasizes looking at coverage rather than number of chargers. That is wanting to have chargers spread out such a way that people can complete longer trips.
That is categorically not true. Showing why something does not work (or is not advantageous over other methods) demonstrates you know how to properly conduct research which is good for ones resume.
The paper is irrelevant and will never get cited. There is essentially zero benefit to your career as it is nothing more than a single bullet point on your resume.
Discovering something that works is significant, discovering something that does not work is irrelevant.
Can you name a single scientist, e.g. from your field, who is known for showing that something does not work?
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.
> The company spreads crushed basalt on small farms in India and Africa. The silica-rich volcanic rock improves the quality of the soil for the crops but also helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. It does this by reacting with dissolved CO2 in the soil’s water, turning it into bicarbonate ions and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere
> Carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into rainwater, forming carbonic acid. As rocks are worn away (or weathered) by this slightly acidic water, silicate minerals in the rock dissolve. This releases calcium, magnesium, and other positively charged ions called cations. These cations react with carbonic acid in the water, forming bicarbonate ions.
Here is a dumb question: Would the basalt capture CO2 more effectively if released into the atmosphere or into rain storms?
I've been wondering for a while now about the viability of asteroid/lunar mining that involves returning the payload of rare earth minerals or titanium in flying wing shaped return vehicles that are wrapped in some sort of mineral that ablates in the atmosphere while absorbing CO2 like this stuff does.
The idea is that we could both eliminate the Earth based pollution associated with mining while sequestering co2 previously emitted by terrestrial mining at the same time.
AFAIK cationic calcium, et. al., combine with dissolved CO2 forming carbonates which having low water solubility eventually precipitate out of solution. Area with "hard water" often have issues with buildup of scale in water pipes. The scale is mainly calcium carbonate and sulfate.
This is normally a gradual process requiring ample moisture. Releasing finely ground rock into the air wouldn't likely be effective. For one thing, such dispersal would be rather dilute. IOW the dispersion wouldn't reliably react with CO3 ions before settling out of the air. Another consideration is the salicaceous content of the rock being a potential health hazard.
The original idea of adding crushed rock to water-containing soil is logically the best way for the project to accomplish its goals.
> Would the basalt capture CO2 more effectively if released into the atmosphere or into rain storms?
Guess: it would do so more quickly, but not necessarily more effectively in the long run to the extent it balances the energy required to loft it. (Even if it's all green. You could just that energy to grind and distribute more basalt to the ground.)
You’d need to, at the very least, make it into a powder or it would just fall to the ground anyway. That, in turn, would require you to crush basalt, which is pretty tough and, importantly, energy intensive. And you wouldn’t have any agricultural benefits either.
You can still do both things but if the primary goal is to capture carbon my question is if it would capture more if released in the atmosphere (by planes or similar).
You'd want to crush it much more finely for it to have a chance to actually capture anything while in the air, requiring more energy input and causing breathing hazards due to the fine particulates, not to mention staining everything it rains on with the fine basalt.
You could release it extremely high such that it stays suspended a bit longer, but then you'd waste even more energy getting it up there.
there will be very very little dust fine enough to become suspended in air, without running it through ball mills, which will be stupidly expensive.
"crusher dust" is the label given to the fines from rock crushers, that is suitable for use on trsditional "gravel paths" in parks.
Basalt is actualy quite friable, and crumbles fairly easily......depending on the type...., some would be more trouble than it's worth.....other types are very crumbly
and adding the rock to agricultural soils, has the added benifit of incresing soil fertility, while absorbing CO². So the initial payback from increased production and quality of food, ofsets
a portion of the costs, prrhaps all of the costs
in situations where the right types of rocks are located near good agricultural candidate areas.
The other agricultural carbon capture method is tera pretta or biochar, where organic waste is chared and mixed into soil, where it persists for many millenia, and provides a media for soil biota to live in, and reacts with varios harmfull contaminents to sequester and neutralise through chemical and biological reactions.
The impilimentation of any carbon capture method is going to be dependent on local conditions, that will vary quite considerably, ie: what makes sense and is actualy benificial in one area, could easily be a net carbon cost, somewhere else.
The main variables will be crushing ,trucking, and spreading costs, and then I think,actual soil ph and chemistry, as certain soil types would prevent any reaction with the rock, and atmospheric carbon. The whole thing, bieng a thing, and a deap rabbit hole wanting dedicated local expertise and knowledge.
A personal observation of "carbonate beds" leads me to believe that under certain conditions, the amount of material produced is truely huge.
That is just for the base model. There is an option for an electric window opener.
It is also not a finished product yet so wait and see what actually becomes of this. The modularity is nice along with the promise of easy to install upgrades and so forth.
Delivering on all those customizable options though may be easier said than done.
It could be if that yields more profit in the end.
For example,
It costs the company 10 dollars, and that 100 out of 110 people will purchase the upgrade for $20. That is $100 profit. Maybe the company also finds that 80 of those 110 people would also buy the same upgrade for $150 and yields like $11,200 in profit.
So it makes sense for the company, the persons running it, and the investors in the company to have the markup as high as it will maximize their profits.
> lack of profit when I said "anywhere near".
Sorry, to me I interpret markup to be assumed as double the cost but would not consider that "near" cost.
Well "anywhere near" is a wider range than "near". I think.
And absolute profit matters too. For a cheap enough part, a higher percentage is okay.
> It costs the company 10 dollars, and that 100 out of 110 people will purchase the upgrade for $20. That is $100 profit. Maybe the company also finds that 80 of those 110 people would also buy the same upgrade for $150 and yields like $11,200 in profit.
> So it makes sense for the company, the persons running it, and the investors in the company to have the markup as high as it will maximize their profits.
Yeah, and screw them.
Nickle and diming is bad and anyone doing it should feel bad.
>A small affordable truck works great as a commuter
Not if it has two seats and you want to carry more than two people.
>picking up supplies from a hardware store for home improvement.
I don't remember where I heard it. But it was something like "most people buy cars for reasons least likely to happen". If you aren't using your bed daily you bought the wrong car. Buy a trailer if you need to go to a hardware store once a month.
> A tiny minority of Americans are so often at a home supply store that choosing a pickup over a trailer would make any sense.
Your scenario here makes even less sense because most cars do not come with a trailer hitch (trucks on other hand...), you're buying another thing (which lowers that this is supposed to be an "affordable" EV), you have to renew registration for the trailer, and have a place on top of your vehicle to store it.
A truck bed is nice to have sometimes. You can quickly throw things in it (like plywood, a new large flat screen, bicycles, fishing gear, a dead deer, etc). You don't have to hookup a trailer or fiddle with wiggling things between doors and so forth.
It sounds like the gauge cluster will in fact be a screen, and it will probably display the federally mandated backup camera feed. I think this is a good middle ground.
> VOGEL: It's such a large market so that anything which California acquires for its own product sold in its state is going to resonate among national and global companies. If you don't want to have to make separate products for California and the rest of the country, you might as well just make them according to California's standards.
It's a problem because once the state gets revenue from a vice, they have an incentive to promote that vice. This is particularly common with gambling, where you have state propaganda (billboards, TV and radio ads, etc) encouraging people to gamble, even portraying gambling as some sort of way to invest your money.
A stable / consistent source of funding not connected to one industry.
Nobody is going to be better off if the funding for their mental health services is cut off because X industry is having a bad time or gets reclassified or something else.
I see this happen with sin taxes and other funding sources with education programs all the time. Programs cut, people fired because their funding is some sin tax or very specific source that dried up. Important services like mental health and etc should be funded consistently.
Fast chargers as I understand are more taxing to the electric grid and so are not simply able to be placed just anywhere there is electricity. Additionally a source paper in the govtech.com article also emphasizes looking at coverage rather than number of chargers. That is wanting to have chargers spread out such a way that people can complete longer trips.
https://cyberswitching.com/understanding-grid-connections-dc...