Yup. We also overestimate how much range we need. Average American driver drives 60km a day. The average Tesla has >500km range, meaning you need to charge fewer than once every 8 days.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
Tesla with lowest range has 430km, highest range 650. Let's average it to 500km.
The average American driver drives 60km per day. In other words you need to charge less than every 8 days.
You can charge to 80% in about 20-30 minutes.
In other words if you find yourself near a charge (easy) for 20-30 minutes a week (easy), then on average there is no range issue.
You're either in a rural area in a single-family home with home charging, or in low-density urban area with single family home charging, or in a dense urban area with lots of public charging. Very few sit outside these three categories that don't enable them home charging or 20-30 minutes a week public charging.
And that's only going one direction. The number of fastchargers 10x'd in ten years, the range of the model S grew by 50% in the last 15 years, the charging speeds roughly tripled. Sufficient charging infrastructure seems like a solved problem, resolving it is a matter of a mere operational roll-out everywhere rather than a political/technical/economical challenge, a matter of when, not if, and a matter of increasingly smaller pockets of the country that are yet to be fully connected. (whether it's 1% or some other small percentage, range shouldn't be a driving factor for tesla sales anymore).
Heatpumps are a proven technology, have been in use for more than a hundred years, and are one of the most efficient (and thereby cost-effective) ways to manage heat.
They're also technically simpler and have fewer components that can wear out. And they're a single system that works both for cooling and heating, rather than needing multiple system investments.
The majority of experts believe that its the future technology stack to manage heat, not a gimmick at all.
That having been said, always start with good insulation first.
In my house I only run LED lighting and an occasional oven, some phones and laptops, a cycling fridge and two weekly wash cycles, in other words, virtually no electricity. I'm at like 2 kWh per day.
The ~45 kWh a day for this family is gigantic compared to mine, like >20 of my homes in one.
But I don't have an electric car, nor electric heating or cooling, nor an electric stove.
If you have say a standard electric car like a Peugeot 208 which uses 15 kWh per 100km, and you both drive one hour (say 60km) to work and back, five days a week, that's already 25 kWh per day.
My heating bill (gas, europe) is an order of magnitude of my electric bill. Even if I'd electrify it (cheaper), it'd likely be an additional 10 kWh per day.
If you have slightly more fancy lifestyle (they run home-servers and a hottub for example), you can easily get to 45 kWh.
I think the fair comparison is to look at a household total energy expenditure (energy & $). My household has a low electrical share, theirs has an almost exclusive electrical share.
I ran my power bill for a small single family home through chatGPT and it was interesting. Cold winters/hot summers, electric stove, air conditioning during summers, and nothing else out of the ordinary that uses power.
- Base electricity: 17 kWh/day (10 in months without AC)
- Heating (currently gas): 33 kWh/day
- Heating (if I switched to heat pump with COP 3): 10 kWh/day
- EV charging at 10k miles/yr: 9 kWh/day
Total if I was fully electrified: 36 kWh/day, or 13 MWh/yr
Is it priceless? I literally wouldn't pay more than $200 to have electricity for a day while the whole neighborhood doesn't. Anything more and I'd prefer to just keep the money in my pocket to be honest.
In my country I've never had to deal with more than 15 minutes, twice in my life. In other countries its sometimes been a day but really I just go on with my life.
Tldr; their full costs of the system are returned in 11 years.
Whether that's good depends on your perspective and assumptions, you can take a look at opportunity costs.
Imagine you have 100k for say 30 years, and you have three choices:
1. put it in a UK government bond at 4.4% -> 100 * 1.044^30 = 363k
2. put it in the S&P500 (dividend reinvested) at nominal 10% rate -> 1.7 million
3. buy a system that can't be made liquid after 30 years, but returns 11k flat per year = 330k.
1 is very safe and virtually guaranteed. 2 is considered less safe, but over 30 years broad based stock indexes are far less risky than short-term stock investing.
3 is perhaps the most difficult to make assumptions, as its house-tied and operational. Switch houses for any personal reasons, and you'll not be able to fully make your investment liquid and recuperate it. Blow an inverter, see panels degrade and replacement costs must be factored in. This pushes down the final cash position of 330k.
We could be generous and say that the 11k flat savings will increase, as electricity prices rise. Prices grew by 5% yearly in the UK, under that rate so the 11k savings today would grow to 47k annual savings in year 30, and total savings over 30 years would be 870k, pushing up the final cash position, but still not getting close to a long-term stock index investment.
But even that's somewhat generous for two reasons: one is that the 5% inflation was unnaturally high due to the EU's energy crisis from the Russian invasion, and not necessarily indicative of the next 30 years. Various countries in the EU are also curtailing renewable production because there's too much of it (precisely during the moments solar systems were making their biggest profits < 2020, you since see curtailment growing), and with more storage coming online rapidly the profits from their battery system are expected to decline, not increase. -- generally speaking, solar energy producers were more profitable a few years ago, and are becoming less and less profitable over time as competition from cheap panels undercuts them. Many countries have begun to cut the reward from exporting back to the grid from the retail prices of €0.30 to the puny wholesale prices of €0.05 and all countries are expected to go down this road eventually.
On the other hand, AI seems likely to push electricity prices higher for a long time... but it's the newest and biggest question mark compared to the other assumptions we've made above.
Wdym you were eating healthy for a decade and still obese? How does that work. A diet where you eat to obesity isn't healthy.
And how did surpressing your hunger via GLP-1 drugs (a pure change to a more healthy diet for you) lead to big changes, if you apparently already had such a healthy diet.
Seems to me your diet was unhealthy for a decade and now isn't.
Think of it this way - once you're in a state of obesity, resolving that situation is quite difficult. Eating healthy may not be enough, particularly if there are other metabolic issues going on.
The imbalance of fat to muscle leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance gets in the way of weight loss. After a long time of trying other means, I decided to directly tackle the insulin resistance problem. And it's been the only thing that's worked.
Agreed, but thermodynamics (calorie in/out) still holds. If you actually eat healthy (say 2500 calories), you will lose weight if you're obese and need >3000 to maintain weight, period.
Sustaining that healthy diet is harder insulin resistance, agreed!
But you said you ate healthy for a decade. To me that's not eating obesity-maintenance level amounts of otherwise healthy foods, but rather eating healthy foods at a normal (say 2500 kcal daily) amount.
In other words, under your statement the behavioral impact of insulin resistance was already overcome, you were eating properly, and still didn't lose weight. And that's just not conform the science, which states that you lose weight even with high insulin resistance, as long as you're eating healthy (i.e. in a caloric deficit vis-a-vis obesity level maintenance).
In excess or a normal body's caloric need, not in excess of what you need to maintain your current weight. The latter would lead to infinite growth.
Once you're 140kg, a sedentary lifestyle requires you to take something like 800 more calories as the same person with the same lifestyle at 70kg, to each maintain your weight.
So excess eating of 500 calories over what a normal bodyweight (say 70kg) needs to maintain, leads to fat people (say 110kg) who at some point stop gaining weight and stay at that fat level (of say 110kg).
To be honest I don't even have a single fat friend, and I'm not picking my friends on looks. I couldn't imagine anywhere close to 1/6 taking this medication.
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