Logically circular

So… climate change is resulting in more and more severe storms of all kinds, and now (soon) one of the drivers of our gloriously enhanced CO2 budget will be able to power your home when the power gets knocked out because of those more severe storms:

Believe it or not, this battery-powered truck can really power your house when the lights go out, and better still, doing so won’t require a rat’s nest of extension cords or even a portable generator. What Ford calls Intelligent Backup Power enables this all-electric rig to feed power from its enormous battery pack through its hardwired wall charger directly into your home’s electrical system.

As you might suspect, electric cars store positively enormous amounts of energy in their batteries. After all, it takes a lot of juice to move a multi-ton vehicle at interstate speeds for hundreds of miles. When it goes on sale next year, the new Lightning will offer two battery pack sizes, the smaller of which should provide 230 miles of range and the bigger one about 300. Ford hasn’t said how large these electron reservoirs are, but we’re estimating they’ll clock in at roughly 110 and 150 kWh, respectively.

The F-150 Lightning can provide up to 9.6 kW of power output. According to Ford, that’s more than enough to fully power a house at any one time, and considering the size of the battery, it could do that for at least three days (based on a daily average of 30 kWh). The automaker says you can make that power last for up to 10 days if you ration the electricity accordingly. Kind of like hypermiling for your home.

Definitely some prepper fanboy-ing going on with this soothing new pickup, though we are far beyond any shyness or shame about making fun of things both ironically and unironically at the same time. Ah, the land of opportunity. No need to waste your time hating on only one brand of irony.

ETA – Actually, there is no real reason to be hating on much of anything and this example nutshells the fundamental conundrum as first articulated (over to your right, there >). Can we market our way out of this? It’s like the punchline to this entire site.

What does Green(e) Street mean?

I was just up in the city of New Amsterdam with a couple of ne’er-do-wells of mutual acquaintance. We were staying on a street that featured an interesting configuration of pavement designs.

2008_11_grandagain

That’s Grand Street. The arrows denote the bike lanes and the tourist buses that are now impaired from criss-crossing SoHo because of said bike lanes. Also offended: trucks of all kinds. It’s a one-way, with a line of parking separating the bike lanes from traffic – an excellent safety and alt transportation feature that snakes through SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy and has upset all kinds of other users. Bloomberg wanted 1,800 miles of bike lanes in the city and this is what that kind of conflict thinking looks like. Definitely still a work in progress.

Sharing the road is difficult, but not impossible, especially if the number of combustion-engine vehicles remains the same. Taking some number of C-E vehicles off the road: also very difficult.