The Skeptics Guide #858 - Dec 18 2021 (Ad Free)
Added 2021-12-18 17:58:45 +0000 UTCWhat's The Word: Substrate; News Items: Storing Energy with Air and Water, Zoom Fatigue, Challenging Einstein, Webb Launching; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction
Comments
I just posted this on Discord but thought I'd share here too... I've written to Jay to voice my concern about their lack of basic knowledge on EVs and their anti-Tesla bias but like so many other commenters on Discord, didn't get any reply. Back in the summer in the segment Jay did on self driving cars the absence of any reference to Tesla's progress with the Full Self Driving (FSD) software was utterly astonishing as Andrej Karpathy had recently presented at CPVR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous driving in June. I ended up so frustrated that I tracked down the source article published by New Scientist that Jay had referenced. The original article was very poorly researched and not current and the comparison of autonomous miles driven by the highly geofenced Level III systems with the millions of miles driven by Teslas using FSD was a joke, just like Biden saying GM and Mary Barra moved the industry to electric cars. Here's the link to the presentation by Andrej which is a super informative piece https://youtu.be/gZ2SeiLjaEc Then Dave Lee had James Douma (Expert in Machine Learning) on his channel to explain why Tesla deleted Radar from their sensor suite. This video was the first of a multi part series there James explains the Karpathy presentation in plain english. These two talks are absolutely fundamental to understanding how the autonomous software suite does it's work and interprets the world around Tesla vehicles with FSD. https://youtu.be/dslDwfvVWh8 Then there was the Tesla AI day that was totally ignored by the SGU. Which I would have thought would have got Bob's or Evan's attention especially with the 9 PetaFLOP training tile with 36 Tb/s I/O bandwidth that they build 12 tiles to a cabinet at 100+ PetaFLOPs and then link 10 cabinets together to create the DOJO Machine Learning cluster that has over 1.1 ExaFLOPS. These are things that no other OEM is doing, yet not a peep from the SGU on these advances. See https://youtu.be/keWEE9FwS9o for a supercut version of the AI presentation.
Brodie Wolstenholme
2021-12-22 21:23:10 +0000 UTCExcellent comments. I learned alot. Thanks for following up.
Michael O Donovan
2021-12-22 18:29:57 +0000 UTCRogues - I found the compressed air as an energy store interesting and informative. But the comments of Bob at 22:11 where he reasons by analogy from his experience with his iPhone battery that grid storage Lithium-Ion batteries will have a short working life is just plain wrong. This was followed by everyone joining in with similar ill-informed comments. The energy density requirements of a Cell Phone are totally different to that of grid storage. The chemistry is different. Cell phone batteries have a high Cobalt content and have very aggressive charge/discharge cycles without active cooling. The Battery Management systems are primitive. Phone users frequently charge to 100% and hold for hours overnight then discharge to 0% the next day with some interim charging to get through the workday. These operational requirements are different to batteries designed for grid support where high cycle life is high priority. Grid support batteries are Lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4), with no Cobalt. The packs are actively thermally managed, and their charge/discharge cycle is far less aggressive and managed not to charge to 100% or discharge to 0%. Consequently, their service life is decades not years. That was followed by Cara saying that there's nothing that you can do with the phone battery. And she raises the bogus claim that they are full of rare earth materials as if “rare earth” elements are scarce, which they are not. Steve then says they're hard to recycle and Evan agrees the only thing to do is throw them in a landfill. These seeming throw away comments do a huge disservice to your listeners and as EVs had been mentioned in these comments and not the story, propagate the myth that electric cars are going to be a major environmental disaster as all those batteries get thrown away when even today there are recyclers in action. Their largest issue being the lack of batteries to recycle to build to scale to get the economics to the point where battery material from recycling is cheaper than mining the original minerals. However, J.B. Straubel former CTO at Tesla and founder of Redwood Materials is already recycling used consumer appliance Lithium-Ion batteries, EV batteries and scrap from battery manufacturing. In a recent interview, which I link below and implore you all to watch, J.B. discusses the recycling of batteries and explains the carbon footprint of recycling. Cautioned that the ramp of EVs by traditional OEMs that the OEMs “haven’t fully done the math” for the supply chain to from mine to vehicle. Another thought provoking comment towards the end of the interview is J.B’s statement that there’s enough Cobalt in 100 cellphone batteries to provide the Cobalt needed for an EV battery pack. This demonstrates the progress that EV battery formulation has made in eliminating Cobalt from EVs. Start of discussion of Redwood Materials https://youtu.be/aWR5-mo8f1g Whole interview starts at https://youtu.be/aWR5-mo8f1g?t=1328 But at the end of the day, I am very concerned that by making the throw away comments that all four of you have done you’re pushing a false narrative and appear ignorant of the progress that has already been made. Which is an issue for overall credibility. I still am a Patreon supporter and usually find the podcasts informative. But please all of you, become better informed about this issue of battery service life, repurposing and recycling.
Brodie Wolstenholme
2021-12-21 20:56:07 +0000 UTCWhenever you are talking about energy storage, don't forget the one that has the highest round trip efficiency and can also give not only the strongest response, but also the quickest - supercapacitors. Yes, they are expensive for the amount of watt hours stored. Yes, they can't hold on to that power very long without it leaking away. You would never use them as you only energy storage option. But they are great for second by second fluctuations in production and demand, and used properly they can greatly extend battery life, and their life is as close to forever as any energy storage device can be.
Ted Apelt
2021-12-18 20:15:11 +0000 UTC
