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http://www.reuters.com/article/gm-bolt-idUSL1N1D51Z2
General Motors Co is ramping up production of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars at a factory north of Detroit and is on track to start delivering vehicles as promised by the end of the year, company officials said on Friday.
Barring a last-minute stumble, GM will be first to offer an electric car with more than 200 miles of driving range at a starting price of less than $40,000 before tax credits. Silicon Valley electric car maker Tesla has said its entry in this new market segment, the Model 3, will launch next year.
Also at Business Insider and ABC.
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General Motors Ramps Up Chevrolet Bolt Electric Car Production
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @08:35PM
Rooftop solar can handle residential needs pretty well. Most of us aren't running smelters in our backyards. And if Germany, whose insolation is worse than ours (think the bright sunny weather you get in Seattle), can do OK with it the US can too.
To that there's also wind. Wind farms are sprouting up everywhere. You see the turbines in Rhode Island as well as across the Great Plains. The Columbia River Gorge alone could probably power the Pacific Northwest with the constant powerful winds that howl along it.
I haven't seen what the theoretical solar & wind potential is in the United States, but I'm sure somebody has and I'm certain we're nowhere close to that limit. An updated grid would help smooth out local/regional supply/demand fluctuations; that's something the federal government would have to take on because corporations won't undertake that kind of investment on their own.
After all that is done, it's likely nuclear can fill in the gaps.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @08:44PM
I thought nuclear fixed the gap. Permanently :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @09:37PM
Is Germany doing OK? I thought they were just importing the power they need from the outside.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:26PM
Depends on how you define "OK". Basically we are fucking up our neighbors' nets by overproducing electricity during hours of low demand and keep burning coal (including mercury-releasing lignite) the rest of the day. Solar seems to be falling out of fashion a bit now that all the panel production has moved to China and subsidies have been reduced, but wind turbines keep getting built even on low hilltops in the midst of relatively remote forests and near habitats of endangered birds and bats. Low interest rates have helped to create a market for project development companies that collect money from local investors with sometimes overly optimistic estimates of local wind conditions, while the grid topology is still dominated by current or recent locations of conventional large-scale powerplants. High-tension lines from the already operational North Sea wind farms to the economic and population centers in the south have yet to be built and are facing strong opposition despite a recent decision to use buried cables instead of overhead lines. In all this is more a lobbyist clusterfuck than a thought-out engineering plan. Pessimists keep warning of brown-outs but the last couple of winters have been rather mild.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:39AM
I have thought from reading Stratfor that a big reason for the Energiewende is that it makes Germany less vulnerable to interruption in the Russian gas supply. Is any of that perceived on the ground in Germany, or talked about in academic- and professional circles?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:46AM
Not likely as long as there is no large-scale storage for energy sources that peak at inconvenient times. Without appropriate battery systems, best you can do is pump up water into some large artificial lake in the mountains and release it through a series of hydroelectric powerplants when needed (few such pumped-storage facilities exist, building more is not popular with the affected locals). As far as I know, the potential supply problem with natural gas is not that only the Russians have it, rather nobody built significant pipeline capacity across the other borders or LNG tanker facilities in major ports as it is not economic as long as the Russian supply is there.
As I see it, Energiewende is mostly a combination of somewhat irrational public opinion about nuclear energy and creating an artificial economic sector.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:09AM
> I haven't seen what the theoretical solar & wind potential is in the United States,
Wind capacity, for off-shore alone, is over 4,200 gigawatts. [cleantechnica.com] To put that in perspective, our current capacity is roughly 1,000 gigawatts [eia.gov] and our levels of consumption is holding steady (improved efficiencies are mostly balancing increasing numbers of users).