Just going off the tweet about electric scooters being a scam: Nothing in that tweet is convincing.
Let's just take at face value the assertion that a KWh of energy in an electric scooter costs $5 (as an EV owner: I'm skeptical).
I'm going to use Lime (an SF based scooter rental company, chosen at random) as an example. I tried finding exact battery specs, and couldn't, but based on the range and some general scooter efficiency metrics I found, I doubt it has even a full KWh capacity, but let's round up, and assume that when fully charged, it has $5 worth of electricity in it.
Lime is charging $1.00 to unlock and $0.50/minute of use (somewhat cheaper with the subscription).
The claimed top speed is ~15 mph with a range of 20-30 miles. Let's the take the lower range value there. So assuming that the scooter is doing nothing but driving at it's full top speed for the entire rental period, it would use up the battery in ~1.3 hours. That's a total rental fee of ~$39. Doing nothing but driving it full speed seems like an unlikely use case, so I think this represents a close to worst-case scenario for rental fee paid to electricity used.
Now, I don't know what the rest of the overhead is. So I'm not going to claim that this is an obviously profitable business model, but the electricity costs in this equation are not the reason why it's going to fail.
If the author thinks that this tweet is a slam dunk, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of the article. I too am skeptical of batteries utility in flight especially, but there are probably better sources to get those analyses from.
He is for some reason comparing the levelized cost of energy. This is a metric used to analyze energy generating devices, not energy consuming devices.
His tweet says that if you wanted to buy electricity from an electric scooter and use it to run your house, it would cost the utility providing it $2 to $5/kWh, assuming that the sole function of the scooter is to provide its electricity to consumers directly.
LCOE goes up the further you get from the source, but his analysis is also based on outdated numbers and largely wrong.
That said, he isn’t totally wrong. Electric marine has a tough road ahead of itself due to the inefficiency of boats relative to cars. Boats can be calculated roughly as a car that is always going somewhat uphill.
Electric planes are a niche use case for the foreseeable future.
Electric marine operations seems like it makes more sense if you plan to do something clever with solar panels to generate electricity as you go, rather then try to store it all up front (I don't know what, flexible solar panels on a big parasail maybe?)
Was going to post something similar. I love me a screed where the author rails against some group saying they don't know what they are talking about, and then goes on to demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about. :-)
For a long time I didn't understand what 'talking past each other' meant but this article is a good example of that. Mostly it's bad form to make sweeping generalizations. But let's be specific;
From the article, here is the "TL;DR" --
Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable across the entire U.S. grid. The numbers don't lie: 60× worse energy density than jet fuel, 3.3× higher operating costs, 22% reduced asset utilization, and payback periods that consume 2/3 of the asset's lifespan. Anyone claiming otherwise is ignoring basic physics or hiding most of the energy and economic costs.
So first let's talk definitions. "profit" is, by definition, "gross revenue" - "costs". "costs" come in two flavors, "direct", "marginal", and "operational". Direct costs are what you pay, every time for the thing you need. Marginal cost is what you pay for just "a bit more" of the thing you need. And operational costs are the costs you pay so that you can operate your business.
So there is a direct cost of a lithium battery which is included in the manufacturing of a widget, there is the marginal cost of charging that battery up to full capacity, and there is the operational cost of maintaining the battery and presumably repairing or replacing it, when it doesn't do what you ask of it any more.
There is a fourth cost, which is "externalities", that covers the cost of remediating the environmental damage which is done by your energy source and while important, and the focus of climate change awareness, its rarely considered in the discussion of 'profitable' vs. 'unprofitable.'
If we keep this discussion on "lithium" which is the "gas" of these transportation modalities. You can say that building a battery pack is much more expensive than building a gas tank. So cost wise a gas is cheaper. The marginal cost of energy in Watts between gasoline and electricity leans heavily in electric's favor for a number of reasons. The operational costs of fueling and maintaining the "source power" for electric cars nominally similar.
But all of that, has to be put into the context of the system cost which includes vehicle fabrication, power 'converters' (aka motors) that turn fuel into motion, and mechanical maintenance.
Then you jump into a bigger frame of reference and consider all transportation modalities and how they combine as a system to get someone from point A to point B, and what are the costs of building, expanding, and operating that?
The author doesn't see a path between 'here' and what they know to 'there' where Lithium batteries have "improved" non-vehicle transportation modalities over what fossil fuels can do. That's fair, I don't see one either precisely, but there are interesting paths to explore. Foreclosing one's thinking to possibilities on those paths is not usually the right thing to do. A better strategy is to think about it in terms of what would have to be true in order for these paths to be viable updates to the way we travel/ship/transport.
"Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable (..)"
It's annoying (and ignorant) author lumps aircraft & boats into 1 category.
Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
But there's also short-haul flights. Routes with say, 15..20min between take-off & landing. For such flights, electric aircraft is entirely feasible. And being done (successfully) in some places. Not to mention eg. training aircraft.
Boats: veeerry different. Weight isn't a biggie, neither is volume. And there's short-haul ferries, long(er)-haul ferries, cruise ships, 10000+ container giants, tug boats, recreational boats that hardly ever leave lakes/canals/rivers, sailboats with engine that's mostly used while entering/leaving port but not out @ sea, etc etc.
Each of these have their own economics. Where they're used and (energy) infrastructure there, is also a factor. Container giant on Asia-Europe route? Good luck electrifying that. Small tourist boat doing 20..30km/day in a natural park? Electric is a no-brainer, today.
And there's existing vessels vs. newly built ones. Most boats get old (like aircraft), more so than cars. Retrofits can be difficult/expensive. But for yet-to-build boats, different story.
Lumping that all in 1 aircraft/boat category, and claiming "uneconomical!" is just dumb.
Clearly the whole article is wasting hundreds if not thousands of peoples time.
> Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
That's making me think that hydrogen-filled airships (Zeppelins/dirigibles) might be practical with some kind of electric propulsion. That way, the weight is no longer so much of an issue, though the trade-off is that they'll need to be bigger. Their speed (or slowness) could be an advantage in that they should be much easier to fly and collisions would hopefully be infrequent and not so catastrophic (I'm picturing more of a bounce than a collision).
In the larger discuss is of course, solar panels, and how they can be installed cheaply enough and with enough storage to make it feasible. Vertical integration is the key here and yes it's additional initial capital outlay, but if someone wants to run the numbers, I bet there's somewhere where it makes sense.
He is wrong on the price of electricity by a factor of 100. The LCOE of solar and Bess is below cost of coal in China already ie around $0.04-0.05/kwh. Recently UAE signed a contract for 1 Gwh 24 hour solar and BESS supply for 10 years at around $6 billion which is approximately $0.07/kwh but after 10 years the solar and batteries will still be working at 85-90% capacity cost 0.
I cant say about planes but as far as ocean freight shipping goes we are very close to the tipping point. Battery prices have already reached a point where it is cheaper to go battery electric for small voyages.
A bit later, he claims the lifetime cost of a vehicle is $345/kwh. It’s unclear if that’s capacity (an SUV with a $100kwh battery costs $34.5K new, which is the low end of retail pricing, and actually great news), or energy costs (that SUV will cost $34.5M over its lifetime, assuming 1000 charge cycles), which is clearly off by a factor of >100.
Either way, he concludes the time to payoff of switching to the planes is 2/3rds their expected lifetimes. I didn’t get far enough to find out what that’s versus, but most airlines would happily roll over to a new technology that “only” reduced their fleet costs by 33%.
For comparison, the 737 MAX reduced fuel costs by 14% and is still selling despite all the safety issues.
Edit: My 33% math is a bit off. It assumes the fuel costs dominate. Still, payoff before end of life is still saving money.
Driving it full speed is how you drive these things. They are safer when the speed delta is minimal between you and the rest of the traffic and you are charged by the minute so the incentive is full speed short of obligatory stopping for traffic lights or stops (really blown through) or slight slowing for turns.
Battery estimates fwiw are very optimistic on the app in my experience. Assume error of 1/3 in range to be safe.
> Driving it full speed is how you drive these things
Except for the parts where you have to accelerate and brake because, of course, you're obeying the rules of the road and you are in a city.