So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production. As if that doesn’t carry any negative side effects.
This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.
> If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!
I only really skimmed the article, and didn't even load the underlying paper. But it seems like a big issue was custom orders. If we need wartime vehicle production, like in WWII, there would most likely be a single or small number of designs that a facility would produce. I would expect a lot more coordination between ordering, production, and supply chain as well --- if we need mass production, tradeoffs change.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
Busses are likely not really the national security concern, the concern would be having large vehicle manufacturing. It may be easier to retool a bus factory line to build large military vehicles than a compact car factory.
I'd imagine this is something like the Jones Act, where if it works, we keep the doors open for rapid changeover to military production. That's not really working for ships... the market has chosen alternate transportation rather than building large vessels for domestic transport, and so we don't really have large shipyards that could be pressed into building military vessels if needed --- the shipyards that can are the ones that build them in peace time and they don't have much excess capacity.
It's primarily a jobs program. We do not really care about a competitive domestic bus manufacturing industry, but we care more than this uncompetitive industry is hiring workers.
A literal bus factory may not be critical for national security, but the ability to manufacture a vehicle is. So the know-how, the supply lines, and the manufacturing facility are important. The ability to manufacture a fuel injector, a transmission, a windshield is going going to apply to a bus, a plane, a tank..
So subsidise the bus manufacturers to make competitive products directly, rather than an indirect subsidy via forcing transport authorities to buy uncompetitive junk.
Forcing transport authorities etc to buy local seems like clearly the worst way to subsidise industry; there is little incentive for the manufacturers to make a good or cost-competitive product.
Sure that's why the Hummer was a great vehicle with all the institutional knowledge from GM. /s Also modern engines in tanks and planes are turbine engines with nothing in common to lighter vehicles (APCs trucks etc). Tanks don't have windshields either.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them?
The contention is always around the debt that is created when you let them. If China never calls the debt, that's a huge win — you just got something for free! You'd be crazy not to take that deal. But others are concerned about what happens if they do call the debt. You might not like what you have to give up in return (e.g. houses, farmland, etc.). Just ask Canada.
Of course, there is always the option to stonewall their attempts to collect on the debt, but that creates all kinds of other negative effects when the USA can no longer be trusted to make good on its promises.
> So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production.
No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.
> Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.
> To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles
There's more than one way to accomplish the goals of protectionists, and the different options are usually not created equal. Some economic policies have worse side effects than others to accomplish similar tasks.
In this case, I think that placing a tax on imports (tariff) is always preferable to an inflexible ban on imports. This is not an unusual approach in economics; it is in fact very common that economists recommend replacing bans with taxes. In fact, even the current administration, which is radical by modern standards, basically always prefers tariffs to bans.
The left? The US doesn't have a leftist party. Any time a leftist starts looking like they are gaining both parties do everything possible to shut them down.
In American parlance, Joe Biden is "the left" and Nancy Pelosi is "the far left". I'm guessing both are probably considered center-right from an international perspective?
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against
Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government.
In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
All fun and games to point out seeming contradictions! Especially here.
Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
"Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over.
Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars.
Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
China is neither an open or free market. Opening the door to China and their industrial policy is exactly what distorts traditionally free and open markets.
Blaming this on the amorphous "left" is extraordinary, when offshoring has been a 40 year project of corporate America and "shareholder returns at any cost". A neoliberal global order has been the traditional Republican platform.
This is confusing. If I accept your statement, then it seems:
1) The democrats hypocritically supports offshoring while claiming to support workers
2) The republicans explicitly (prior to Trump, but MAGA is not very similar to traditional Republicans) support corporations and offshoring as a mechanism for increased profits
No they aren't exclusively to blame. But they were a big part of elimination of manufacturing jobs in the 90s, and were huge critics of attempts to bring them back. I don't want people thinking that the left are some kind of "underdog" that is championing the people. Also their fiscal policy doesn't depend on manufacturing jobs. They can just print more cash and hand it out in various "programs". They, as a party, profit off suffering of Americans because they are always there to sell their voters a solution. The worst thing that could happen for them is people doing well. Because they won't be needed anymore.
That's not refuting my claim. It's turning the claim into an ad-hominem by attacking my character. You can research who donates to Democratic candidates if you want to see evidence of my claim.
by and large, US Democrats are center-right by policy. relatively leftward from your rank and file GOP goosesteppers, sure. maybe we feel the same way, but i wouldn't make the mistake of categorizing someone like Chuck Schumer as a left politician.
> This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing.
They voted against trans rights and they voted to cause harm to people they dislike. It had absolutely nothing with buss prices or generic this. The vote for conservatives and Trump is ideological, about wish to wage culture war. It is about cruelty being the goal.
And I mean this 100% seriously. It is absurd to pretend it was about something like this.
The fuel cell tech isn’t the problem, it’s that there is no hydrogen gas infrastructure. And there’s certainly no robust H supply that doesn’t include fossil fuel to create the H gas.
Hydrogen fuel cells are just this constant pie in the sky thing. Stop making them and go solve the H infra problem, that’s the barrier.
Hydrogen is a terrible battery. Best case conversion to H2 is ~80%, while best case fuel cell efficiency is ~50%. That's 40% round trip while most batteries can do 90%.
That ignores losses due to leakage, but those are only a couple of percent. Also, ignore the hazards, but the cost of building safe low leakage infrastructure might exceed the cost of batteries and solar/wind to produce power. You're probably better off making H2 dynamically where you need it and just sending electrons or storing them locally in safe batteries.
> Hydrogen is a terrible battery. Best case conversion to H2 is ~80%, while best case fuel cell efficiency is ~50%. That's 40% round trip while most batteries can do 90%.
And batteries are terrible at storing energy if you care at all about weight... which airplanes very much do. Every extra gram impacts range, speed, usable capacity, etc. etc.
Well, I was talking about infrastructure for transporting Hydrogen to the airfield. But wait, there is some low weight safe storage mechanism for high density hydrogen storage in a commercial passenger aircraft?
Oh, not cryogenic that's not just heavy, it's dangerous and bulky which is a real problem for realistic volumes. Not ultra high pressure tanks, since those are relatively bulky, dangerous, and heavy. Certainly not metal hydrides! To achieve the energy density of diesel you need about 4000:1 better than STP (300K 15psi). So at 100K and carbon fiber tanks at 10,000psi you can get about half the density (easy to calculate since H2 is close to ideal). That's dangerous heavy, expensive, and bulky!
Problem is the size and weight of the fuel cells and the cooling/heating you have to do to keep them efficient are comparable to the weight and size of the hydrogen storage. You can't really ramp them up quickly and the difference in peak power vs cruising power is easily 5x and usually you want margin. So you need a lot of fuel cells, but usually also for redundancy batteries for several minutes, in case there's a failure during take off. So you're gonna have batteries anyway. Most of the demos have been with just batteries or only running a single engine off of hydrogen. It's pretty funny.
p.s. I have friends in that very fuel cell plane company.
> Hydrogen is a terrible battery. Best case conversion to H2 is ~80%, while best case fuel cell efficiency is ~50%. That's 40% round trip while most batteries can do 90%.
While there's no arguing with the physics here, don't forget the economics either. The price of electricity in Denmark on a cloudy, windless early evening can easily be 10 or more times the price in Newfoundland. Then start factoring in that a plane carrying hydrogen is significantly lighter than a plane carrying batteries.
While you might be using 10x as much electricity at the point of generation, you're paying a lot less for it, and you're using it more efficiently.
People say stuff like this a lot, my guess is that you don’t fly airplanes. The fact that the airplane gets lighter as it burns fuel is kind of important and is used to simplify airplane design a lot (check out the difference between MTOW and MLW of a 777) . Batteries don’t get lighter.
To be polite, my guess is you've never tried storing dense hydrogen or running high power fuel cells. The solutions are large, heavy, expensive, and not very safe in enclosed areas. The solutions under consideration involve batteries for backup.
Who (other than ZeroAvia) is talking about batteries for flight?
For more information, please reread.
"the cost of building safe low leakage infrastructure might exceed the cost of
batteries and solar/wind to produce power. You're probably better off making H2
dynamically where you need it and just sending electrons or storing them locally
in safe batteries."
Water electrolysis will produce hydrogen. Of course then you also need to compress it. And the fuel cell itself is yet another even more woeful knefficiency. But maybe solar continues to get cheaper to the point where we don't care about the inefficiency. Not likely, not what I believe, but maybe it could work out. For a sea plane especially, it feels like you have what you need in abundance for this infrastructure: water, and open space for solar.
MIT also talked up a solar thermochemical hydrogen production system ~9 months ago, which claims a 40% efficiency. One still needs to compress that down but still a huge leap if that promise can be delivered on. https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-design-harness-suns-heat-produ...
There is something really compelling about hydrogen, as the most energy dense fuel we can use, that is in mass abundance, that doesn't pollute. Conceptually it's very very cool. I'd love like heck to see X-33 or Venture Star designs dusted off with modern compositeaterial sciences, see something like Skylon make it to the sky. But it does seem incredibly cumbersome & hard & weighty to make infrastructure & fuel storage for. It doesn't seem likely. It seems like an illogical investment given the downsides difficulties & inefficiencies. But I still allow: maybe.
> And there’s certainly no robust H supply that doesn’t include fossil fuel to create the H gas
The government of Chile published a pretty clear national strategy to address this very issue [1]. And with Chile being on the Pacific Ocean, and these seaplanes most likely being used in islands in the Pacific, it's not hard to imagine a relatively simple solution to the infrastructure issue.
Green hydrogen infrastructure is not the barrier, at least not in the sense that most people think it. Hydrogen is very difficult/expensive to transport and store. So much so that local production is likely to be solution. IOW, the airport will require electricity and water infrastructure, and will create hydrogen at the airport. So the infrastructure that is required is having small-scale electrolysis equipment on the market.
If the article is anything to go by, the clue isn't as much the fuel cell itself, but the idea of having an engine that can be powered by any source of electricity. So instead of swapping out the engine for a different type, you only swap out the power storage method. If they have lithium and fuel cells now, but something else comes along later, it means a very localised change is all it takes to try it out and if feasible, put it in production.
For ICE propulsion you'd have to change a ton of things if you were to switch fuel types as the engine, the pumps, the tank, the hoses, sensors are all over the place and all have to change when you need to support a different fuel. (i.e. when switching from say, a liquid fuel to a gas or something like that) If I'm not mistaken, that's also why all the changes (not even innovation) have such small impact so far, because all they really can do is make sure that 'new' fuels behave the same way as old fuels, and new engines behave the same on the fame fuel as old engines. It's a deadlock.
But it takes a decade to design and test a new airliner, so of course we should expect to hear mostly about the startups developing planes at this point.
There's no point building the infrastructure if there are no planes to use it, though. When cars were first invented, you bought the fuel from the local chemist, and petrol stations only came years afterwards.
If you have electricity and water you can make H2 gas. Storing it is quite costly, so you probably want to make it on demand (like the Hybrit project will do).
Main Pixar characters are all computer animated by humans. Physics effects like water, hair, clothing, smoke and background crowds use computer physics simulation but there are handles allowing an animator to direct the motion as per the directors wishes.
“Shipping the org chart” refers to a phenomenon in product development where the structure of an organization is reflected in its products. This concept suggests that the design and functionality of a product can inadvertently mirror the internal structure of the company that created it.
This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.