It's not just about efficiency with a bus. It's about duty cycle and sensitivity to weight. Buses don't care about added weight much, and they're going to cycle that flywheel WAY WAY WAY more than a privately owned compact car HEV/BEV with regen braking.

B20 is a 4% increase in NOx for soy biodiesel. How is that worth even mentioning?

Wow, battle of the strawmen. Simple cycle natural gas costs $0.25 per watt when you convert an old coal plant, $0.60 new. A blended 50/50 cost of $0.43 per watt. So 234 gigawatts costs $100 billion vs. $1400 billion for nuclear.* Fuel cost would be in the big picture negligible (say 5 cents per kilowatt-hour in the UK fuel price at $7 per mmBTU), as you're running these 4% of the year ($150 million in fuel costs). Run it on biotmethane or just methane with a $100 per tonne carbon price if you wish - won't make much of a dent in the total price difference. So let's repurpose some Engineer-Poet vitriol: You have a clear concept of the size of the effort you're proposing, Engineer-Poet. You can even calculate the numbers - but you don't. Do you wonder why I think some "nuclear" advocates are despicable? It's because digging even slightly into their claims shows that they are are advocating something they *know* is financially deluded. If you're not getting paid to write this, you're despicable; if you are, you're even more despicable. @Engineer-Poet Henrik can't do math - that's his excuse. What's yours? How does it feel to be more despicable than what you contempt for? *There's also a time cost of money. At 7%, saving $1300 billion up front over 60 years is a real savings of *64 times that number*.

Simple cycle gas turbines are $600/kW but batteries can provide or accept a load, so are effectively 2:1 vs turbines. So the capital investment is the same price. Gas turbines take time to warm up, and have a fuel cost tied to natural gas prices. Batteries have a "fuel" cost of cycle wear plus cost of arbitraged power, which is likely to be topped off during cheap or even negative wholesale rates...and are available just about instantaneously.

@ai vin Germany's industry still pays the old, lower rate. So your conclusion doesn't follow.

60% of oil is used by light vehicles. Once light vehicle miles driven are 10% electric, a 20% sales growth rate destroys ALL oil demand growth plus some additional. Making oil very cheap basically forever. This inflection point will significantly stall electric uptake - the only thing that can break through it for electric is a carbon tax.

China's feed in tariff for nuclear is 84% higher than coal. These plants are being built by companies with a junk bond rating from Moody's - which doesn't matter because of the implicit central government guarantee of state owned enterprises. Free money and a tidy subsidy will do that. Wind and solar are on track to drop all feed in tariff support by 2020, which will kill nuclear in China 5 years later.

Yangjiang was announced at that price in 2008. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Official_start_to_the_Yangjiang_nuclear_power_plant_1712081.html With 20% of Chinese inflation since then. http://fxtop.com/en/inflation-calculator.php And at least 4 of the 6 are Gen II+ reactors, not Gen III+. Of the last two there is no word whether they will be Gen II+ or Gen III. Considering the Hualong One was finalized after construction started, most likely Gen II+. And those are construction costs which are quite a bit less than overnight capital, or even total project price. So the IEA-NEA numbers are closer to correct, not James Conca's cribbing of a number off of Wikipedia that is 7 years old. If anybody is interested in the overnight capital or total costs of power plants (vs. a simple 7 year old "construction cost" claim) see the PDF link below at page 35. http://csis.org/files/attachments/111129_EPIC_OvernightCost_Report.pdf The example has a construction cost of $2,479 per kilowatt and $3,925 overnight capital cost in 2008, and $6579 after 7 years of construction (finishing 2015) counting financing and 2.5% inflation. Engineer-Poet's $2,000 per kilowatt number is just a "construction cost" which isn't remotely the whole story.

@Engineer-Poet Chinese overnight capital cost is $3500 per kilowatt. PDF link here - page 26 . You can't just quote years old announced "construction costs" (usually announced a couple of years before the plant is even started on). "Construction costs" are NOT "overnight capital costs". Even overnight capital costs don't include owner and financing costs. As for your shrill double containment comment - even China's Hualong One has double containment. I think it's clear to any reader here who's full of it.

If 2 cent per kilowatt-hour electricity means you get $11.20 per million btu, then that is about an implied $160 per tonne carbon dioxide equivalent price based on $2.50 USA natural gas, half that based on UK prices. This is just the energy cost - it doesn't include capital costs...and of course wholesale electricity prices aren't actually that low (yet) but lets assume they will be. In addition if it comes to the point where there are big stretches of low/negative energy costs, batteries will outcompete electricity to hydrogen conversion anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Costs Keep in mind biomethane is about $6 per mmbtu not including capital costs, so power to hydrogen is just a total nonstarter.

@Henrik "Estes now operates only new trucks in California." They did change their behavior.

@Engineer-Poet What you're describing doesn't apply to Keyes, CA - which is in the Turlock sub-basin. The subsidence issues are a problem further south, near Merced. Further aquifer depletion is only a problem with mispriced water , not something inherently a problem with farming in semi-arid regions. Corn uses about an acre-foot of water for an acre of corn. Sorghum is about 2/3 of that. GM sorghum even less. Brazil was grossing $1237.50 per hectare (so $501 per acre), and their sorghum breed was 3 feet shorter (9-12 feet) vs 12-15 feet - and took 110 days vs. 90 for this. Basically by the Brazil numbers it is 22.5 tons for 0.66 acre-feet of water. Compare that to 1 ton of alfalfa for 0.8 acre feet of water - sells for $200 per ton. It's really simple - you price pumped water in California at some nominal price of like $200 per acre-foot (you can even make it revenue neutral - all water fees are returned to farmers as a generic subsidy). So alfalfa's water alone would now cost 80% of the gross sale price, making it uneconomic in California. GM sorghum? That gross amount of $501 per acre would incur a water cost of $133 based on non-GM sorghum, 26.5% of the gross sale price. California was making 25-33% more per acre (based on height) and using less water, so in actuality less than that 26.5%. GM biomass sorghum is a great fit for San Joaquin valley, all that is needed is for some sensible water costing discipline to be enacted.

Whoops, 5.9 cents per kilowatt-hour

@Engineer-Poet You could have spent a couple minutes actually reading closely and using a search engine to get the missing data you were complaining about. Instead you chose to be lazy. The water used was too briny/salty for regular agriculture, so using it in a drought is not "the height of foolishness" but rather quite the opposite. Current yield in Brazil (over 10,000 hectares under cultivation, presumably numbers are per year) is 220-25 dry tons per hectare and 12-30 MWh per hectare biomass power(depending on conversion efficiency) that was then sold for $50-60 per dry ton. That's 1.16 cents per kilowatt-hour for a fuel using the midpoint numbers of the above. Not bad at all, considering genetically modified sorghum can grow on crap land with crap water. And if you don't there's other advantages "rotating soybeans with sorghum can increase soybean yields by 15% relative to leaving the land fallow between plantings." Link here

There are GM versions that can grow using water too salty for conventional crops Aemetis harvesting biomass sorghum in California "The water supply for the biomass sorghum crop was lower-quality pump water containing salts that typically damage crops. The project was located in the western San Joaquin Valley which has received a low water allocation from state and federal sources for the past several years."

@JMartin I have a 100 mile EV (Fiat 500e) and I'm able to charge at work (my wife can too at her work); it is a significant upside for its viability for me. I live and work in Silicon Valley, however - it will be a while before other parts of the USA catch up to being as EV-friendly.

@electric-car-insider.com When electrification reaches about 5% of light vehicle miles driven, and is growing about 20% per year, the price of oil will be permanently suppressed to such a point that the market will keep ICEs, because oil will be very cheap (like $28 per barrel cheap). There will be an equilibrium of electrification market share that then won't increase robustly. The only way to reach the scenario you're describing is a fuel tax (or unrealistically large carbon tax) to keep fuel costs higher.

@Bob Wallace TDIs are supposed to replace the timing belt at about 110,000 miles; that labor is synergistic with an engine rebuilt/refurbished for lower emissions (timing belt is about half the cost of an engine swap). I wouldn't be surprised if we see rebuilt engines as being part of a recall, at least for higher mileage TDIs.

Ah, I see. I didn't realize so few models had urea injection. Yeah, I don't see a clear way forward with VW in that case for USA emissions. They'll need to retrofit in an SCR solution to pass. That or put an entirely new engine in. I don't see software tweaks cutting it. Perhaps regulators may let them spend a handful of billions on fixed power plant NOx reduction upgrades if that turns out to be significantly cheaper than fixing the cars.

My guess is they'll triple the AdBlue (Urea solution for reducing NOx) consumption from what they're using now. So it will be 1 liter for 333km instead of 1000km. At $3 per liter that goes from 0.3 cents per mile to 0.9 cents per mile, a $72 per year hit for a 12,000 mile per year driver, paid for by Volkswagen. I'm not sure if if extensive boost/EGR changes will be needed in that scenario.

Elemental lithium content in batteries http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/B/584.PDF For the two highest volume: 308 grams per kWh for NCA with graphite. 142 grams per kWh for Lithium Manganese Oxided with graphite.

Algenol has never created a product yet, no. So their claims of 8000 gallons per acre at this point are pure supposition.

This cathode about matches the NCA ones used in e-vehicles (680-760 Wh/kg), so if this is easier to manufacture, has a better cycle life, faster charge/discharge etc. it is still an upgrade.

No tritium based reactor like this one is feasible at those power densities. The neutron loading in the center is way too high for this to ever consequently be affordable. Never ever going to happen. Period.

@kalendjay Your data is extremely out in the weeds incorrect. The largest power market in the work is PJM http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/103285-pjm-auction-likely-to-boost-regions-natgas-fired-capacity They pay extra for capacity availability. They expect capacity payments to run $185 per MW-day. So even if a nameplate watt of wind that only generated at 30% capacity factor was forced to pay for the full and entire cost of a capacity payment to another generator for an ENTIRE watt (a ludicrous strawman scenario) it would cost them 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour in capacity charges. So even in that extreme straw-man scenario it still means wind is competitive if PPAs are coming in at 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour (NOT $0.235/kWh like you posted - you're off by 10x), even with a ludicrous strawman payment of 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour for capacity backup. Levelized cost of wind being about $0.16/kWh is not remotely correct, nor is nuclear at "about one quarter that". The last nuclear PPA price was Austin Energy's bid for a pair of AP1000s at 13.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Wind at 2.35 cents even in strawman scenarios crushes that. Lifetime of power generating assets out to 55 years becomes increasingly irrelevant due to the nature of net present values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value