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We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio. VW's US boss has testified to Congress, blaming a few rogue software engineers. All the while, questions have raged about VW Group's future: which projects are safe, which ones are on the chopping block, and how exactly will the company recover from this?
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VW's board has finally started to answer some of those swirling questions. For starters, there's going to be much more emphasis on electrification. Electric vehicles and hybrids have played more of a bit part at VW, compared to Toyota, GM, and domestic rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz. That's going to change with a standard electric architecture that can be used across multiple vehicles and brands.VW Group isn't devoid of hybrid and EV know-how. Audi's Le Mans program has taught it a lot about high voltage automotive systems, and Porsche has a wealth of experience from the 918 Spyder, Panamera Hybrid, and even the 919 Hybrid racer. VW would be smart to leverage all these programs.
VW is the largest car company in Europe. This is what sudden, disruptive technological change looks like.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday October 16 2015, @03:12AM
OK, mister Balanced, let's assume that your 10,000 square mile figure is correct; the lower 48 states have an area of about 3,000,000 square miles, so we're talking about a third of one percent of the total land area.
Your estimate also ignores all the other non-fossil energy sources, like wind, hydro and nuclear, even those that are already operational. And you assume that solar panel efficiency, which has been steadily improving, is already as high as it'll ever get. And you assume that we can't improve the efficiency of any of our power-using devices.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 16 2015, @03:32AM
Moreover, the efficiency of deployed panels lags behind the efficiency of panels in the lab or in space. Although $/W is probably the more useful metric. We need cheap, wallpaper-like solar panels that can be placed everywhere.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @03:47AM
Don't be a PV efficiency snob. [ucsd.edu]
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:52PM
Despite all that, since that article was written, efficiency of commercially available panels has gone from 16% to 22%. [solarcity.com] That's about a 38% increase over 4 years.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday October 18 2015, @12:47PM
That entire argument is attacking a straw man. The problem is not that 15% is too low, it's that it's changing too fast. That article was written in 2011. I considered PV a couple of years before that and the panels were 8%-12% (with a fairly similar cost per Watt over that range). Now, panels are closer to 20-22%. The theoretical maximum is something around 38% (sort of. There are a few tricks that can boost it a bit higher). The gains between 10% and 30% are likely to be made fairly quickly, though I wouldn't be surprised if it slowed down after 30%.
If you're looking at a PV installation as a 20-year investment (most now come with at least a 20 year warranty), then waiting 3-4 years to get a 30% higher annual return seems like a good idea. If you're looking at it for immediate payback at commercial scales, then you probably don't care about efficiency at all, and dirt-cheap 8% panels that you can blanket a large area with would be a better bet than expensive 22% ones.
sudo mod me up