This is the main issue. People simply cannot afford to use this extra power. If power was cheap then all kinds of devices would switch to electric, especially heating and cars.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
I think that DER (which is a binary format, although there are ways to make it from text formats) is better, which does have NaN and infinity and other stuff.
Wikipedia is a global resource, edited by educated—often academic—people all over the world. Why would anyone expect it to conform to the US idea of what is left and right? For most of Europe the American Democrats are to the right of their mainstream right-wing parties.
There is no bias to the left. The USA has shifted so far to the right that balance now looks leftist.
There is huge bias to the left. Wikipedia outright bans right wing sources from being used as citations, including non-US sources like the Daily Mail, so it's not true that it's something to do with US bias.
This isn't due to a quality problem. Daily Mail articles are usually highly accurate and they publish voluminously. It's because leftists on Wikipedia ban conservatives as part of their relentless ideological war, as they do in every other context.
> Daily Mail articles are usually highly accurate ...
Six decades of personal exposure to The Daily Mail and UK tabloid gutter press says otherwise.
Leaving aside its questionable history as a paper founded by an admirer of Mussolini and a supporter of Nazi Germany, its questionable present having remained in ownership by family within which the apples remained firmly attached to the tree, The Daily Heil has a business model predicated upon clickbait, outrage, deliberately misleading and emotionally loaded falsehoods and the entire gantlet of fake news predating modern social media, mobile devices, the world wide web, and the internet.
eg: Woman, 63, 'becomes PREGNANT in the mouth' with baby squid after eating calamari (2012)
Congrats on being an excellent example of why leftists should never be allowed anywhere near anything important, especially not Wikipedia.
You could have cited ANY story from the long history of the Daily Mail to demonstrate some kind of inaccuracy. It would have been only a single data point and not that useful, but you could have done it. But like always with this claim by the left, you picked a story that is fully accurate. In fact it's just a retelling of a medical case report written by doctors:
There's nothing inaccurate in the Daily Mail's coverage of this story.
Instead:
- You reacted to the headline for dumb aesthetic reasons
- You made assumptions instead of checking
- You engaged in nonsensical ad hominem attacks. The New York Times famously ran interference for Stalin. Do you consider that questionable history to disqualify all NYT coverage for Wikipedia too?
Your response is a perfect encapsulation of the problem that Wikipedians have. Like all leftists you aren't actually concerned about accuracy, you just hate any news source not controlled by your ideological allies, and want to censor them all out of existence.
The focus for these kind of alternatives should be on aviation—with the most difficult fuel to replace. Maybe we'd need this for classic cars, emergency generators and a few other smaller things, but even classic cars can get electric refits. Cars, motorbikes, trucks etc should be electric; shipping needs to embrace sail-electric hybrids; and bio-fuels/synthetic fuel should be aimed at aviation (and maybe as a stop-gap for shipping). My 10¢.
Obviously you're not a car guy if you earnestly believe classic cars should almost always be refitted with an electric engine rather than using a more environmentally friendly fuel replacement. We shouldn't just toss the old functional engine & ECU & other components into the landfill. You're seeing it from a tech perspective. No, Sam, the Porsche 964 is not comparable to the latest shiny MacBook where you can just throw it away after you've had your 2 years of fun and the non-replaceable battery looks like a pillow and Apple refuses to update your OS. My 10c is I'm all for the synthetic gasoline instead of completely gutting classics and just turning them into almost-sleeper "classic body & suspension with a Tesla motor thrown into it". That being said I don't mind the electric conversions but to imply they should be done rather than just switching fuels is silly at best. I see it in the same category of project as an engine swap, it's something that's done for fun or more power, not something that ought to happen to every classic.
My first car (in 1986) was a barn find 1964 Triumph TR4a. If I had that car today, I'd EV swap it in a heartbeat because
- The car is not super rare
- The inline 6 it came with is under-powered, un-reliable, and I've never seen a triumph engine that went more than a few years without a leak (have had 5 between myself and my parents)
- it would massively increase the likelyhood that I'd daily drive it, if I knew it would start and run reliably & wouldn't leave me stranded.
- engine parts are not easy to find.
But I'd never EV-swap something super rare, or something that has a better, more common, more reliable engine
I think there is space for both. While I like preserving the technology, there are cases where the EV conversion adds some charm to the original vehicle. The period-incorrectness is captivating in many instances.
Plus, there are designs where the internal combustion engine is not a goal, but the best tech available at the time - those designs can only be fully realized with technology that wasn't available when the original design came out.
Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.
You fight with the army you have. There are hundreds of millions of gas burning vehicles that are going to be on the road for years. Synthetic fuel allows you to transparently replace the source with a carbon neutral equivalent without any new hardware requirements. As you build out additional synthesis capacity, you can hit more markets.
Building an "army" of E-Gas synthesis capacity (and worse, an "army" of the 300+% increase in wind and solar to cover inefficiency) is harder than replacing that "army" of cars with EVs.
E-Gas greenwashes fossil fuel stranded assets, but it's not a serious attempt at an energy source.
I view classic cars as a "preservation" exercise, and the kind of thing where paying extra for synthetic gasoline is "worth it" for a historical demonstration.
That being said: For hobbyists who use a classic car as a base for something custom, I have no problem with whatever method of propulsion they use.
Because weight matters a lot in an airplane, and hydrocarbons are the densest form of fuel. Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal; adding that to a plane makes the entire enterprise fail.
If they can find a way to transform carbon-neutral electricity into a hydrocarbon, then they can keep airplanes going without having to burn fossil fuels. But it's hard to make that efficient enough to be economically viable.
> Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal
And typically the car can't go as far on a single charge as a tank of gas. I can usually go about 200 miles on a typical charge in my (cough) "300" mile EVs, but my last gas car could go about 400 miles between visits to the gas station. (But I don't care because I just plug in when I get home.)
That being said, I once rented an Infiniti that could barely do 200 miles on a single tank of gas.
To get back to the point: Batteries are just too heavy for airplanes, so unless there is a major breakthrough, synthetic gasoline is currently the most promising way to make airplanes carbon neutral.
The difference in energy density is much more important.
The specific energy of gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, while that of a Samsung inr18650 Li-Ion cell is 958.1 kJ/kg. Even accounting for the much lower efficiency of a turbofan engine the difference is quite significant.
