Truck factory dash cam video

[dash riposki]

@kamkar they may accept trade ins, your Suzuki and $180,000 US.

I haven't been to this Kenworth factory in a while, looks like it's not so busy right now. (Some parts come in from China, and Mexico.)
A Boeing plant is right up the street, and the new 737 Max fuselages used to be staged on railcars in sight.

There is a Kenworth/Toyota fuel cell tractor in the video towards the end, on the right. 1:23

 

[kamkar]

nice KW trucks, but here the nose of the truck also count in the total length of the rig, so all trucks are flat nose as its better to have 2 M more cargo room than 2 M of nose on the truck, at least when it come to the big haulers.

 

[Nigel]

nice KW trucks, but here the nose of the truck also count in the total length of the rig, so all trucks are flat nose as its better to have 2 M more cargo room than 2 M of nose on the truck, at least when it come to the big haulers.

They also would not go around our roundabouts, T-junctions etc., we need short wheelbase tractors.

Nice to see an electric one though, that must be the future, run them on electric/hydrogen generated by the wind farms.

 

[dash riposki]

The fuel cell truck makes sense at least in the application it is developed for. (Short trip use in one area) I'm not sure it's remotely economically feasible, but they need a working test bed somewhere. Why not inflict LA with them?

If we put up enough windfarms to charge trucks and power all homes in the US, there'd be no room for people. We'd all have to go to Canada.

 

[Nigel]

If we put up enough windfarms to charge trucks and power all homes in the US, there'd be no room for people. We'd all have to go to Canada.

We have the answer to that, unlimited wind power taking up zero land space:

World's first floating windfarm to take shape off coast of Scotland

Turbines for £200m Hywind project will be towed from Norway across North Sea and moored to seabed off north-east Scotland

www.theguardian.com

Currently over 30% of UK electricity comes from wind and increasing fast, places like Denmark manage over 100%. At 12MW per turbine for the latest turbines, we don't actually need a huge number. "One Haliade-X 12 MW turbine will generate up to 67 GWh annually, enough clean power for up to 5,000 households per turbine "

 

[kamkar]

yes thats about the only smart way i can see using surplus wind power, split water of its hydrogen atom.
That way you can even sell and move the product fairly easy, so i hope the Americans that are big on selling LNG, maybe we Danes can be big on LH

Right now they are talking about all the containers that go from my birth town Aarhus and to Hamburg Germany on trucks, but i don't get they want to sail them down there, why not use the railway.
Either way substantially less polluting that doing it on trucks.
I think at least 4 new massive wind farms are on the drawing board here,m they have come up now and then in the run up to the parliament election today.

 

[Nigel]

yes thats about the only smart way i can see using surplus wind power, split water of its hydrogen atom.
That way you can even sell and move the product fairly easy, so i hope the Americans that are big on selling LNG, maybe we Danes can be big on LH

Right now they are talking about all the containers that go from my birth town Aarhus and to Hamburg Germany on trucks, but i don't get they want to sail them down there, why not use the railway.
Either way substantially less polluting that doing it on trucks.
I think at least 4 new massive wind farms are on the drawing board here,m they have come up now and then in the run up to the parliament election today.

More important for the hydrogen is that you can store it for when there is not enough wind, so I think that has to be developed anyway fairly soon since we are already reaching the point where at times we have more surplus wind electricity than can be sold over the interconnectors and already a lot of our turbines get turned off frequently due to insufficient grid capacity to transport the power.

I think you are right about the railways, one offshore turbine will power a lot of electric trains cheaply and efficiently, much more efficient than a ship trying to sail up the Elbe into Hamburg - there is not much room for maneuver there and the oil "tanker" I was on when I did that was towering above the surrounding countryside so was having to fight the wind to stay in lane even though it had 3 big diesels and another 4 gas turbines on board, sailing ships need the wind to be in the right direction to make efficient and reliable progress, and that rarely happens.

 

[dash riposki]

I'm happy putting our windfarms in Denmark or off of Scotland.

The US only has one offshore operating wind farm at the time. They seem to try to put them up in rich peoples ocean playground areas, and they somehow don't get approved.

So how do you store the excess electricity? There's just no simple way, at this point.

 

[kamkar]

No thats the problem with wind, it is a good thing as most often there are plenty to go around, but the main issues are oversupply and storage.
I am a bit perplexed EU haven't implemented a forced must buy wind power if its there policy, as that would take care of some oversupply and mean that the people actually going this route are also rewarded in a sort of normal market way.
Have to remember the Danish wind adventure are started and funded on government subsidies for decades, and a return to a normal market situation must be the way to go.
And if you cant sell / use it all you can use the surplus to split hydrogen from water, or in the case of us Danes desalination plants, cuz really our ground water supply are not going to last forever as more and more wells are closed due to contamination.
Of course there are some limitations on how far you can transport electric power in a wire, but for us Danes it should be us powering as much as possible of Germany instead of them running on Russian LNG from a at best suspicious supplier.
I mean the Russians / Putin are the kind of people that build a 1 billion USD bridge to a island where a few thousand people live, so i am sorry but sanity from that part are not something i would expect or rely on.

I do think there are a loss factor in splitting water for hydrogen, but as it is a loss of a renewable material that don't pollute then it cant be all that bad comparing to the alternatives.

And sure they are not pretty, but so much better than the alternative at the moment, if / when we get fusion power to work, then we can take down wind turbines, at least i would not resist that.

 

[Dashmellow]

So how do you store the excess electricity? There's just no simple way, at this point.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rd-time/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.32f9fda0b345

https://electrek.co/2018/01/23/tesla-giant-battery-australia-1-million/

 

[Nigel]

We have been storing it in our 9.1-gigawatt-hour electric mountain since the 1980s, along with a few similar systems. Mainly charged by wind these days, trouble is that even that size of battery doesn't last very long. Turning it into hydrogen by splitting water gives longer term storage but so far we only have small schemes doing that. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190327-the-tiny-islands-leading-the-way-in-hydrogen-power

But for Orkney, hydrogen via electricity works just fine. The islands already boast one of the highest densities of electric vehicles in the United Kingdom. And most crucially, thanks to sources like tidal and wave energy, Orkney creates more clean electricity that its inhabitants need. Even after exporting to the UK national grid, the islands’ winds, waves and tides generate about 130% of the electricity its population needs – all of it from clean sources.

 

[kamkar]

we could also make hydrogen pellet ( ammo ) for fusion plants of the future, one 10 mm Danish hydrogen pellet = power for your town all day.

 

[Nigel]

Just saw an interview on TV, it appears that Prince Charles has converted President Trump to support environmental change during his UK visit, Trump actually said that he wanted to leave a good environment for future generations, then paused when he remembered that he is supposed to be supporting the USA coal industry

 

[Dashmellow]

We have been storing it in our 9.1-gigawatt-hour electric mountain since the 1980s, along with a few similar systems. Mainly charged by wind these days, trouble is that even that size of battery doesn't last very long. Turning it into hydrogen by splitting water gives longer term storage but so far we only have small schemes doing that. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190327-the-tiny-islands-leading-the-way-in-hydrogen-power

Yeah, pumped-storage hydroelectric has been widely used here in the US for decades. Apparently, solar and wind power require a different approach for optimal load balancing efficiency and speed.

 

[Nigel]

Yeah, pumped-storage hydroelectric has been widely used here in the US for decades. Apparently, solar and wind power require a different approach for optimal load balancing efficiency and speed.

Yours may work differently to ours, ours has always been set up to store power overnight and release it during peak load times during the day so is ideal for storing overnight wind energy which is going spare since there is little demand overnight. These days it releases it over a lot of the day rather than just peak times so that there is plenty of capacity to store the almost free wind power again at night, making the pump storage a lot more profitable than it used to be. Doesn't do much for solar, but solar just reduces the mid-day demand making it flat rather than a peak, so there is never any spare to store.

 

[kamkar]

supporting the USA coal industry

Well sending people back in under the mountains are not the trade mark of a visionary, but rather a populist,,,,,,, at least from where i see it.
But our American friends should do what they feel are best in the situation, i sure as hell are not going to force their hand cuz no one are going to force mine.

 

[Dashmellow]

Yours may work differently to ours, ours has always been set up to store power overnight and release it during peak load times during the day so is ideal for storing overnight wind energy which is going spare since there is little demand overnight. These days it releases it over a lot of the day rather than just peak times so that there is plenty of capacity to store the almost free wind power again at night, making the pump storage a lot more profitable than it used to be. Doesn't do much for solar, but solar just reduces the mid-day demand making it flat rather than a peak, so there is never any spare to store.

The system is used differently according to where it is a located and on the particular requirements. Many locations (including a local one I've visited on several occasions) work much as you decribe in the UK. While useful, pumped hydro storage is a methodology dating back to the nineteenth century that is inefficient in that it requires energy for pumping vast quantities of water up hill. Twenty first century electric grids will require greater scale and efficiency and be needed in locations where the proper terrain and water supply won't accommodate such systems.

 

[Dashmellow]

Well sending people back in under the mountains are not the trade mark of a visionary, but rather a populist,,,,,,, at least from where i see it.
But our American friends should do what they feel are best in the situation, i sure as hell are not going to force their hand cuz no one are going to force mine.

The coal industry in the US is essentially dead, or at least breathing its last breaths despite what Trump and his ilk may have us believe.

 

[kamkar]

Yeah really you would want to tear that stuff directly out of the ground with huge machines in a open pit, not climb around on your hands and knees.

 

[Nigel]

I'm happy putting our windfarms in Denmark or off of Scotland.

The US only has one offshore operating wind farm at the time. They seem to try to put them up in rich peoples ocean playground areas, and they somehow don't get approved.

We are building them 120Km from shore, even President Trump and his golf course in Scotland, which failed in it's court case to stop our new wind farms, can't see that far!

The UK has a generating capacity of 8.2 gigawatts, accounting for 44 per cent of all offshore wind capacity in Europe...
there’s perhaps no bigger embarrassment than the U.S., which has just 30 megawatts (or 0.03 gigawatts) of offshore wind capacity.

the worlds largest offshore wind farm just came online off the coast of grimsby - Gizmodo

We come from the future.

www.gizmodo.co.uk