Cool. Now can the local power companies (in cahoots with CPUC) stop changing the rules that make it less and less economically viable for people to have solar on our roofs? Every year they add bigger fees and pay tinier amounts for power generation. The ROI on solar is now measured in decades. And they're doing it on purpose.
No no no, you need to pay us a flat fee of $500 monthly no matter what, else how do we make profit for our shareholders. Because we can all agree on at least one thing right?? That a basic necessity like electricity definitely should not be publicly owned
Oh and yay for NEM 3, super beneficial to customers
But they need to actually sell them. Electric motorcycles were a thing before they weren't. The market didn't accept them, and I don't think unrealistic range is going to be a major selling feature.
That must be some crushing range anxiety! I don't think most motorcyclists would even want to sit on their bike for 10 hours at highway speeds for an entire day.
I am deeply skeptical at the 450 mile range figure, after searching for more detailed specs. This Cycleworld article says that the manufacturer officially described the battery as "700V, 50 Ah" yielding 35 kWh.
450 miles is 742 km. So the efficiency needed for that range would have to be 48 Wh/km (aka 702 MPGe). But that's problematic, because that sort of efficiency is in the (higher end; ie less-efficient) territory of ebikes, which are lighter and have lower top speeds. In an odd coincidence, my Bikonit MD750 Class 3 ebike achieves 48 Wh/km when cruising at 45 kph (28 mph) and weighs 44 kg, with dual batteries summing to 1.5 kWh.
So how will this electric motorbike equipped with a substantial-larger and heavier 35 kWh battery pack be able to achieve the same efficiency? Even accounting for the different testing regime -- US EPA cycle vs China CLTC -- there are significant questions here.
The Cycleworld article expresses similar doubts, suggesting a 333 mile range might be more reasonable. I agree, although even 65 Wh/km may be generous if this motorbike can't shave weight in other places beyond the battery pack.
Larger is not better with a motorcycle. It's gotta be quite heavy. Both of those things would take away from the biggest advantages a car has over a motorcycle.
I'd have to see a few things to care about this...
Braking time/distance. Sure it can go 126mph but how quick can it get back to zero.
How well can it corner or do a slolum maneuver? I don't how fast it can go in a straight line if it can't go though curves or swerve to avoid danger.
Police officers don't need to know the laws unfortunately. And depending on how much melanin you have determines if you should explain or if youre better off just saying "yes sir can I go".
A friend cycling in London was stopped for turning right at a "no right turns except cyclists" junction - police didn't even want to go read the sign that they were told to enforce!
I wonder to what extent they can take advantage of the ocean liquid cooling the cables to increase transmission capabilities.
Edit: On further thought, I guess they don't want excess heat as that would increase losses, so while the cooling could be beneficial, preventing the heat in the first place would be better.
Idiot troll. This platform is rife with y'all. It's become an issue, frankly. Honestly worse about it than Reddit, which is super unexpected. Fact is that solar is one of the best green energy industries that exist. A person using their big money to help it, especially in an INTERNATIONAL manner like this, isn't a negative. We don't have a method of free perpetual energy if you didn't notice, because somebody fucking murdered Nikola Tesla and destroyed his research to this effect. Probably there's even further people that have tried and been murdered and erased. You can thank capitalism for that, which if you ever bothered to read, you would know I am fully opposed to.
If a sociopath who has already extracted enough money for his own greed from society to have a catastrophic effect on the lives of ordinary people decides to invest in solar power, I'm going to be sceptical
I'd describe my feelings around the current solar boom as cautiously positive with a good sprinkle of skepticism.
I'd like to see billionaires investing in education towards self-regulating communities. I'd like to see them heavily investing in funding coops, not buying up startups. Billionaires investing in renewables means more money in billionaire's pockets, because they will just sell the clean energy back to you for a profit while remaining the owners of everything and then some.
I'd carefully agree that more solar panels are good, but I've now lived through enough eco hypes to not have at least a few concerns. In the worst case we will now quickly and thoughtlessly plaster solar panels over hectares and hectares of useful farmland, important ecological reserves, and poor people's homes, just because line go up. And probably trash them all in ten years when maintaining them proves too costly, or the next hype comes along. In the best case we actually start polluting less and use the time we buy to seek for more energy-saving ways of living in general.
I'm also for community solutions and I don't oppose this. The rich are unfortunately also part of the world, they should be utilized as much as anybody in this crisis. More so, arguably.
This seems pretty cool. It's no crazier than putting a communication cable across the oceans and we already have the support for that. Is there something I'm missing?
Transmission over long distances is much harder with power since you have to send it through cables that have some resistance; fiber optic cables are reflecting light that doesn't degrade as quick.
I think this is doable, the only question is, at what cost? Losing a lot of energy is inefficient, but that's only if you care about the efficiency more than the result (getting cleaner energy to a place that wouldn't have it otherwise). There may be better solutions, but I appreciate the desire to get this going here.
I wonder what happens if the cable that carries this much power breaks under water. And even if it doesn't break the elecro-magnetic field around it is gonna be massive.
But anyway, other similar projects have either failed (plans to build such a giant solar-farm in Morocco) or have pivoted to "green" hydrogen as the energy transport medium.
It's also one of the many reasons power lines are typically aerial, and only underground at last mile locations when necessary. High electrical current experiences impedance due to the surrounding medium, and air offers the lowest impedance.
It's starting to become increasingly common - there's a project in the offing to run a cable from Morocco to the UK to take advantage of all that Saharan sunshine. There's long been talk of stringing a few across the Med and building large numbers of solar farms across North Africa to speed up the green transition in Europe (at one point there was talk of worried insurance companies bankrolling such projects as climate change could bankrupt them). Eventually there will be a web of such cables into and across Europe shuttling energy around - excess British being stored in Norwegian HEP facilities, etc.
I suppose the craziness comes from it being a $21B undertaken to build two of the largest renewable projects yet, which rely on both working properly. That's quite a bold move and it's risking a lot of cash.
This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.
It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.
And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.
Battery costs keep falling while quality rises. As volumes increased, battery costs plummeted and energy density — a key metric of a battery's quality — rose steadily. Over the past 30 years, battery costs have fallen by a dramatic 99 percent; meanwhile, the density of top-tier cells has risen fivefold
...
With regards to anodes, a number of chemistry changes have the potential to improve energy density (watt-hour per kilogram, or Wh/kg). For example, silicon can be used to replace all or some of the graphite in the anode in order to make it lighter and thus increase the energy density. Silicon-doped graphite already entered the market a few years ago, and now around 30% of anodes contain silicon. Another option is innovative lithium metal anodes, which could yield even greater energy density when they become commercially available.
What's more, the Chinese market is both the leading producer and consumer of battery technology. So its weird to reflexively doubt that a Chinese firm would release a new higher-efficiency battery design.
Given that this is a prototype, its entirely unclear if the model is cost-efficient to mass manufacture or efficiently scalable based on available resources. But I'm hard pressed to discount the claim on its face simply because its got "China" in the headline.
Its not even like "China" invented a new battery tech. It's some battery plant in China which is the place where most batteries are created that's innovated on a design.
There are battery plants in Atlanta, Georgia and Heide, Germany who are pursuing similar advancements. They just don't have the money or the manpower equal to their Chinese peers.
If the company is able to scale this technology large enough for consumer vehicles while keeping prices down, it could easily double the range of the farthest-driving EVs on the road today.
That's a big IF.
TL;DR: They haven't developed a means of making this scalable and able to be mass manufactured. Until they do, this is another "revolutionary" battery tech that may or may not actually be used due to cost of production. Most likely in the "not" category.
If you want to make EVs more popular, make them with Sodium-Ion batteries that are cheaper than ICE vehicles. They'll sell better as a result.
Hardly anybody needs an EV with more than 200 miles of range if they're plugging in each night. Most people's commute is round-trip sub-50 miles. "Range anxiety" is 95%+ of the time a "problem" that stupid people have for their theoretical future that never actually happens. Most people are impractical idiots.
Most people have the option of plugging in where they live and/or work. The only argument would be for apartment complexes. Townhouses, single family homes, etc. are easy to switch to electric.
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