New all electric Denali

[202235f]

Yep, it's here. 754 horsepower and 400 miles on a charge. I know there are naysayers out there but this is a huge step......

[creativepart]

It will be a while before something like that can tow anything very far. But it is a big step.

For the record, I'm all in on electric vehicles. In March we ordered a BMW i4 eDrive40 - an all electric BMW sedan with 300+ miles of range. It's finally made it from Germany to Texas and will be delivered to the dealer tomorrow. We expect to take delivery on Saturday or Monday. So yeah, we're all in.

[202235f]

Originally Posted by creativepart

It will be a while before something like that can tow anything very far. But it is a big step.

For the record, I'm all in on electric vehicles. In March we ordered a BMW i4 eDrive40 - an all electric BMW sedan with 300+ miles of range. It's finally made it from Germany to Texas and will be delivered to the dealer tomorrow. We expect to take delivery on Saturday or Monday. So yeah, we're all in.

Right there with you, Creative. It won't be long before we have a suitable electric tow vehicle.
But 754 hp and 400 mile range is a combo that I didn't think was practical at this point. Is there a gasser on the market that can match those stats?

Congrats on the new ev. Beautiful!

[corvetteSS]

I am glad to see this. But it is hardly "available now".
Targeted for 2024 for a mere $108K? That is more than I paid for my RV!
So quite a few people over quite a few years will need to buy these things to bring the price down to something more affordable. By that time I will be dead. Thanks!

[creativepart]

Originally Posted by corvetteSS

I am glad to see this. But it is hardly "available now".

I think, to be honest, General Motors is pretty far behind Ford and Rivian. It's a 2024 model which is supposed to be available at the end of 2023... but only in this super limited super expensive model. By that time Ford will have produced and sold over 150,000 F-150 Lightenings.

Not to keep hyping my BMW i4 - but it's under $60k available now (with a 6-month waiting list). Mine was ordered in March, built in Sept and delivered in October. It has an EPA range of 301 mi on a full charge and can charge at a level 3 charger from 20% to 80% in 30 mins. Our home level two charger will charge it easily in 6 hours. Plus, it comes with 2-years of free ChargeAmerical Level 3 charging (30 min time limit on the "free" part).

It looks like a regular car. Drives like a BMW and is 100% electric. It's under $60k and available now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sr-GQz8ZMU

[jeb]

EV's don't work for us, but we've owned Prius V's for a few years now. And I certainly see where an EV could work for a lot of folks. But what makes this one a 'big step'? Seems like just another small iteration.

[Tw200guy]

Originally Posted by 202235f

Yep, it's here. 754 horsepower and 400 miles on a charge. I know there are naysayers out there but this is a huge step......

*
*
What is a Battery?

This is the first article I've seen covering all these areas .*

Thoughts about batteries and green energy ideas.
*
They do not*MAKE*electricity – they*store*electricity*produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, diesel-fueled generators or minerals.* So, to say an Electric Vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that*forty percent of the*EVs*on the road are*coal-powered!!!

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the STORAGE device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging.* That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it.* For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk.* It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper.*All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery."

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?" And the Chinese just bought most of these mines!

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.* "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

Wonder what the real reason for the Going Green campaign is?

[creativepart]

^ The above is not "an article" it was a letter to the Editor of an small town newspaper in Indiana by a non-professional. The details included in that editorial are one person's - they have not been fact checked, they are simply the personal opinion of Dave Cooper from Churubusco, Indiana.

Here's a link to the editorial published by KPC News in January:

https://www.kpcnews.com/opinions/art...7136fe5f4.html

[backtrack15]

That “article” was amusing. My career was in the oil and gas industry so I couldn’t help but laugh at the horrors of solar and wind power.

I’m fine with EVs (I power my PHEV with solar/wind). I’d not buy one if I had to power it with electricity from coal or use it for long-distance trips.

[Tw200guy]

THANKS for the enlightenment!!! I will admit that i am NOT an expert on electric automobiles and ICE for that matter. BUT as in ALL news/information we all have to glean and extract knowledge to satisfy ourselves. At this point in time i am open to learn more (without getting an MBA or DOCTORATE) regarding electric vehicles and their "GREEN" properties and even if HALF of what the aforementioned "open letter" is correct it is STILL an "open letter" worth reading and pondering.

[backtrack15]

Originally Posted by Tw200guy

THANKS for the enlightenment!!! I will admit that i am NOT an expert on electric automobiles and ICE for that matter. BUT as in ALL news/information we all have to glean and extract knowledge to satisfy ourselves. At this point in time i am open to learn more (without getting an MBA or DOCTORATE) regarding electric vehicles and their "GREEN" properties and even if HALF of what the aforementioned "open letter" is correct it is STILL an "open letter" worth reading and pondering.

Reading and pondering is good, provided we acknowledge the bias and the absence of an equivalent discussion about the alternatives. That's part of the reason I loathe partisan news. You're always hearing from the prosecution (whatever the subject/issue), and never hearing from the defense. Most people don't bother with searching out the other side of the story, content to believe the prosecuter is telling the whole story and that the defendant is just crazy/stupid/evil/corrupt.

In this case, it would be interesting to have a rebuttal covering the environmental/societal costs of oil and gas production and consumption (as that is the obvious alternative). I have neither the energy nor the data to do that with any accuracy.

I can say that oil and gas production is incredibly resource intensive. The sheer volumes of concrete, steel, water, and chemicals used are phenomenal. You should see the unbelievable number of wells, infield pipelines, and facilities at Prudhoe Bay. Both in Prudhoe and at most other facilities, natural gas from production is consumed 24/7 to power massive turbines for gas compression, water injection, and oil pumps. At Prudhoe the gas can't be sold, so it is reinjected into the reservoir (to the tune of 9+ billion cubic feet per day at 3000+ psi) using huge gas-turbine driven compressors. Water from the ocean is pumped into the Prudhoe Bay reservoir (for pressure support) at rates exceeding 750,000 barrels per day. In other areas where transportation of natural gas isn't possible (where no export pipeline is yet built), the natural gas produced with the oil is often simply burned rather than reinjected. North Dakota flared a huge amount of natural gas during the shale boom as producers wanted to monetize the oil (and the State let them). This wasted a precious natural resource and generated needless greenhouse gas emissions...but I digress. Operating facilities and their infield pipelines also can/do fall into disrepair over the years (ownerships change frequently, with each successive owner trying to make money from a smaller and smaller production stream) and leaks from corrosion and fugitive emissions from flanges become a problem. Unburned Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. If you've ever driven the stretch of US-84 between Snyder and Slaton TX, your nose surely told you about the derelict oil production there. And that is in the USA, other countries are not as focused on the environment. I could go on and on... This is before we say anything about accidents like the Deepwater Horizon. Then, of course, there is the distribution via pipelines and trucks. Ultimately, at the end of this process, each gallon of gasoline generates 19.5 lbs of CO2 (thanks to burning long-chain hydrocarbons and the mass of O2).

All of the above is just meant to provide a little more food for thought.