kgwilson

I grew up in NZ and billy carts were called dobbins. I never knew why till now when I looked it up. A Dobbin is a quiet plodding work horse or in NZ a cart used to move loose wool in a woolshed. We made them out of bits of old timber with an apple box with one end removed to sit in. The wheels were resurrected from old prams. I remember finding a pram (perambulator) with ball bearing wheels at the tip & I was then able to beat everyone once I put those on my dobbin.

Virtually no strong Westerlies this year at all. I flew every week in August.

Single electric motor front wheel drive EV must have some form of CV joint and differential & at least a diff at the rear. Electronic traction control though is much easier and far more precise. In wheel motors are not a new idea. The Lohner-Porsche of 1900 had in wheel electric motors. The Lightyear One has electric motors in each wheel. Also the Aptera, the most efficient electric car yet developed & about to hit the market has in wheel electric motors. With a 100 kWH battery it has real world range of 1600 km. In wheel electric motors are lighter more efficient & get rid of transmission issues but pose other problems. These though are being overcome as we speak. The issues are detailed in the link below though it is over a year old and weight issues have already been addressed.. https://evcentral.com.au/why-dont-evs-have-four-in-wheel-motors/

Zager & Evans prophetic song from 1969. I don't see mankind even getting to the start (2525).

I have 3 heat pumps. One for my hot water (which runs off the solar power generated from the PV panels on the roof) & the other 2 are inverter heat pumps more commonly called air conditioning units in Australia. Originally air conditioners were simple refrigeration units that turned off & on when the thermostat told them to, only had a single operation function and it was either on or off. Once technology got hold of them they became heat pumps able to work both ways (cold or hot output) and the inclusion of an inverter enabled the power requirement to reduce as the desired temperature setting was reached. My main Mitsubishi Electric heat pump produces 7.1 KW of cooling energy from the input of 2.01 KW of electric energy & 8.0 KW of heat energy from the input of 2.09 of electric energy. Once the desired temperature is reached the inverter enables the input energy requirement to be reduced. Cooling minimum input energy is 480 watts cooling & 420 watts heating. It is also possible to direct the exhaust cold air from the water heater in to the house in summer to cool the house while it is heating the water.

Sodium is heavier than Lithium but given that the Lithium makes up only around 5% of the total battery weight the extra weight is not that much of a disadvantage and energy density of sodium is about 160 Wh/Kg compared to lithiums 200 Wh/Kg. Both are improving with next generation Sodium Ion expected to reach more than 200Wh/Kg so the ball park is set to get very level except price which is Lithium Ions downfall.

Personally I think lithium is about at its peak now and due to the resource being relatively scarce and increasingly more expensive, sodium will replace it within a few years. Salt is half chlorine and half sodium so it is readily available and very cheap. https://www.dw.com/en/the-batteries-of-the-future-sodium-instead-of-lithium/a-54707542 Then there is Brisbane based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) that has produced a graphene aluminium ion battery that charges 70 times faster than lithium, lasts 3 times longer and is better for the environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWJSGKezHfA&t=9s

I think there are plenty of older age group Russians who yearn for the old Soviet days when everyone was poor but they had a roof over their head and were well fed. I agree though that there are probably few if any of the Putin worshipers who have the appropriate skills or balls to pick up his mantle. The younger generation who have embraced Western culture and its trappings are mostly keeping quiet to stay out of jail but will pretty quickly jump back on the freedom wagon if the wheels fall off Putins. The wealthy will have a bob each way. Whatever comes to pass they like corruption as it enables them to stay rich & get even richer.

At present it doesn't matter that Utes and SUVs are the most popular vehicle types purchased new in Australia because the demand for what is currently available (BEV cars & SUVs) far outstrips the supply anyway. A friend has placed a deposit on a Kia EV6 but won't get it till 2023. As for the mining industry among others BHP, Rio Tinto, FMG & others are investing in the electrification of their businesses starting with electric land cruisers, dump trucks and excavators.

That is if you believe there is a god. Putin has to as his aggressive efforts to date have seen his armed forces severely weakened and his country and people suffering as well as being ostracised by almost everyone except Kim & Xi.

From 2035 there will not be many new ICE cars to choose from. There will continue to be quite a demand for oil for use in the chemical & plastics industry. Aramco & others are making their hay now while their sun still shines. The oil price may drop but it will never get down to prices we knew last century. Even when the price of crude went negative during the pandemic the average price at the pump never went below $1.29 a litre. By 2027 the costs of transport and refining will most likely mean prices well North of $2.50 a litre even if they give the crude away.

New battery technologies that are cheap to produce but unsuitable for EVs or technology items are easily able to be used in the home. The price is dropping all the time & it scares the crap out of the electricity retailers who only see a reducing market as people move off grid. The other option of course is neighbourhood batteries though they generally still use the existing supply network. The energy supply shakeup has only just begun even though Australia has the largest uptake of rooftop solar in the world with absolutely no thanks to the previous federal government.

There is a lot of information out there which is historically correct but is promoted by anti EV and efficiency circles to the nth degree to pour scorn on EV production. They don't look at the latest developments and the fact that battery technology is increasing at exponential pace. Things like Tesla installed almost 22 GWh of solar panels by the end of 21, its Nevada gigafactory is carbon neutral, & the manufacture in house of its new 4680 batteries has reduced energy consumption by more than 70% etc. The current demand for lithium for batteries will be quite short lived. Sodium ion batteries now have similar energy density & are 30% cheaper to make. There are dozens of new battery technologies under development which will make existing high end batteries look like the old Eveready carbon D cells of the 60s. The Apterra may not suit everyone but its efficiency and price were previously unheard of. Making the wheel the electric motor might be new but it is the most logical way to gain efficiency you can get at this stage. Swappable batteries are ideal for large trucks with a huge front end that used to house an enormous diesel engine & transmission but I personally don't think they will gain much traction in the personal transport market. There are 300 EV manufacturers in China alone producing more than 700 models of every size & shape and for multiple roles. 1000 km of real world range is already there in quite a few of the new larger sized Chinese EVs and the latest CATL innovation of cell cooling of LiFePo4 batteries has increased this even more. New batteries can be fully charged without degradation and last 500,000km, the latest from 10% to 80% in only 5 minutes. All this was unheard of only 1 year ago. And now the BYD Dolphin is being sold in Australia for about 35k so why would you buy a new ICE car that will cost more to run as time goes by and be virtually unsaleable within 10 years. There is absolutely no doubt that my next car will be an EV (if I live long enough). The only problem at present is demand is far exceeding supply.

Scomo is a failed marketing man & now a disgraced politician although most of us knew that already. I am always amazed that most of the worst religious nutcases end up as senior politicians.

Janus Electric had a prototype in 2020 & said they would begin operations in late 2021 between Sydney & Brisbane with Coffs Harbour being a major battery swap centre. The cost of conversion is about the same as a diesel overhaul and the trucks grill opens like a clamshell, the battery is quickly disconnected, removed by a forklift & a fully charged one put in all in under 4 minutes.

There is a 4 part doco on Netflix called "The Age of Tanks". It is French produced but in English and tracks the history of Tanks from their invention through many wars, invasions and insurrections etc to the modern day. It is well worth watching. The end conclusion is that while there are some pretty impressive technological developments in recent times their time is basically up.

The King Island design is ingenious deriving its concept from blowholes which concentrates the energy from the wave and unlike other designs sits on the sea floor. A lot of other designs have failed when they end up being damaged by rough seas. Tidal energy has been around for a long time using water turbines where there is a large tidal flow. The first one in the world was the Rance tidal power plant opened in 1966 in Brittany, France and at its peak generates 240 megawatts with an average of 57 megawatts.

After Hansons latest racist gaffe in the Senate I would not be surprised to see Dutton cuddling up to it/her.

I have just installed a new water heater. The original that was installed when the house was built in 2010 was a heat pump and after 4 years the compressor unit failed. It was out of warranty but it was replaced for free anyway with a series 2 unit so credit to Rheem for that. It was still going but had a fault and the backup 3.6kw element was now operating. I only noticed it when making my monthly energy usage check & it had skyrocketed. The model I had got the worst rating from consumers of any on the market but when it was working properly provided about 2900 watts of energy for 800 watts of input. It had a 325 litre tank which is way bigger than needed by 2 people The new one is far better and got many excellent reviews and came out on top of an industry test of a whole lot of different brands. It is from Brisbane company Evoheat and uses 450 watts of energy to create over 1700 watts with a tank size of 150 litres. It has all sorts of excellent features including a timer so I have set it to run only when my solar PV system is producing power so it essentially costs nothing to run. It is also hooked up to my wifi so I can change anything and check the water temperature etc from anywhere. Quality isn't cheap though & it cost $3,400.00 but I got just under $1000.00 by selling the STCs so the total cost was $2,400.00 plus the plumbers $220.00 installation charge.

Most LPG (62%) actually is refined from natural gas & the rest from the petro-chemical industry. Currently it only provides about 3% of all energy consumed and burns very cleanly (mostly butane & propane) producing no soot, very little sulphur and no ground water pollutants but it does produce a lot of CO2 so is a source of green house gas. Like everything we will adapt to not having it so long as a race we survive till then. It has only been around for 100 years or so & in common use for less than 50 years.

While the Russians now control most of the cities in the Donbas they have nothing to offer as they have a scorched earth policy so most of the cities are rubble and burned out buildings devoid of people. Ukraine says it still controls 45% of the Dondas region.

Many countries have either banned or set a date for banning of new gas connections. Even the days of LPG BBQs are numbered. This will creep up on us faster than we might think (but I will probably be dead then).

The Russians, well it was the Soviets then, won by the overwhelming supply of man/women power. In Stalingrad many were sent in without arms & were told to pick up the rifles from their fallen comrades. They lost over 20 million people in WW2. They killed more of their own people than the US lost during the entire war. They also built factories so remote from the war that the Germans had no way of combatting their war machine. They got a lot of stuff from the US & Britain during the time they were ramping up their own production. For example they built over 57,000 T34 tanks during WW2. They built between 31,000 & 36,000 Ilyushin II-2s more than any other combat aircraft of WW2.

Governments should always do better but they always do worse. They set up a department to do something but because the people charged with running that dept have no idea how to do anything, they employ people who say they do. These people don't know so they get in consultants and then they employ all sorts of people who either know everything about nothing or nothing about everything & very soon a new bureaucracy is in place. The bureaucrats think up all sorts of ways to make everything so complex that even they don't know how anything works so they employ even more people to explain everything to the public. In the end they decide it is all far too hard and it would be far better to privatise it. Simples.

About 80%of the batteries made for EVs come from just 4 manufacturers. CATL is the largest followed by LG, Panasonic & BYD. Tesla gets its batteries from the top 3 & Panasonic is to make its new 4680 batteries. Development is expanding at an exponential rate with the cost decreasing per KW as capacity and quantity increases. Battery life is also increasing dramatically with latest offerings providing up to 1 million km & even after that they are still good for installing in your home. Tesla has its own battery recycling plant but it has recycled virtually none of the batteries from old vehicles as they get used for other purposes so is only recycling damaged or defective batteries at this stage. So as a potential EV purchaser what do I do. Prices are decreasing. The cheapest now come from Chinese manufacturer BYD. The Atto 3 is now available in Australia for under $45k & the Dolphin is likely to be around the $35k mark. Reviews from motoring experts are heaping praise on both vehicles with the only complaints being the crappy Chinese tyres. The only problem is supply. All of the production for Australia so far is pre sold. With demand outstripping supply by miles there won't be any discounts till new models start appearing with longer range batteries & current owners start trading in their existing EVs. It looks like I may have to wait a while yet.