how much longer for the ICE now Americia's best selling Vehicle has gone electric?

[Isaac Zachary]

It's not the house building that's expensive. It's everything else. At least before COVID. The labor and materials of a decent sized house about $50,000. (Of course now materials are three times the price... so it will cost more today). But the land, fees, taxes, utilities and other such costs drive the price up way up, double, tripple or even quadruple that.

Making houses cheaper to build has been an ongoing thing. Drywall is much cheaper than plaster. But the problem is in the end homes are more disposible. Plaster is much more water resistant, for an example. You get a small flood, fire or other thing and there goes everything.

Ideally we'd spend a bit more on making the house better built. Brick and mortar with plaster. Mineral or Rock wool or areated concrete for insulation that are fire resistant. Cement or rock siding. Smaller and fewer windows. Polished concrete and ceramic tile floors. The greatest cost of a house is the long term maintenance. Termites, water damage, fire damage, mold, etc. Make a house resist those things and it won't need as much maintenance and insurance prices could be lower.

Focusing on just making the initial building as cheap as possible doesn't help long term unless people are to treat their house like everything else, a throw away item.

[freebeard]

Brick and mortar with plaster.
Mineral or Rock wool or areated concrete for insulation that are fire resistant.
Cement or rock siding.
Smaller and fewer windows.
Polished concrete and ceramic tile floors.
The greatest cost of a house is the long term maintenance.

All good suggestions. I've lived in a dome with a ceramic tile floor. You don't want to drop anything or trip and hit your head. And the radiant floor heat can get so hot in winter you can't walk barefoot.

The important window is an oculus at the summit. With smaller view windows at the floor level[s].

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by freebeard

All good suggestions. I've lived in a dome with a ceramic tile floor. You don't want to drop anything or trip and hit your head. And the radiant floor heat can get so hot in winter you can't walk barefoot.

The important window is an oculus at the summit. With smaller view windows at the floor level[s].

Idealy I'd want a lot of thermal wall and ceiling mass that's also heated/cooled. That way you could heat or cool it during the part of the day or night that best heats or cools, and then just leave it the rest of the time since a large thermal mass. You also wouldn't have to cook your tooties since if the walls and ceilings are all warm there's no need to heat the floor much more than room temperature. With the exception of Pheonix, air conditioning could become unnecesary and solar heating would be enough for most of the winter in places that have sunshine.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

It's not the house building that's expensive.

Building a house properly, avoiding waste of material and handling it properly, has never been so inexpensive at all. And even though in countries such as mine a stonemason is seen as an unskilled laborer, the skills required to build a house properly are getting scarce.

[freebeard]

It's all been downhill since the antediluvian polygonal masonry. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_masonry

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Why should I always expect you to come with such references? On a sidenote, what about those reports about the mortar used during the build of the Roman Colosseum containing egg whites? I guess there were enough leftover yolks to make a considerable amount of those Portuguese-style egg tarts...

[freebeard]

I guess I'm just predictable.

They knew things in those times. There is a goblet made from glass that is red when you look at it but green when light shines through it. A mystery until we discovered nano-technology; now we know how they did it.

[Piotrsko]

The Romans knew about how sticky eggs were, and weren't into consuming milk which was the other traditional enhancer. What they were doing was increasing the rock to cement bond interface shear strength which is where these joints typically fail. They also used fly ash to fill the gaps between sand particles. You know proper sand needs to be sharp? You also know that cement doesn't make the structure stronger than the base rock?

[freebeard]

Yes and yes.

The Romans used wiki/Pozzolana as an amendment.

The designation pozzolana is derived from one of the primary deposits of volcanic ash used by the Romans in Italy, at Pozzuoli. The modern definition of pozzolana encompasses any volcanic material (pumice or volcanic ash), predominantly composed of fine volcanic glass, that is used as a pozzolan.

The Grand Coule Dam and possibly others on the Columbia used pozzolan.I can't find a reference so that's IIRC.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

3.2 trillion miles a year sounds right. There are some 276 million cars registered in the USA and at a little over 11,500 miles per year would equal 3.2 trillion.

So 3.2 trillion at 0.3kWh per mile would equal 960TWh of electricity per year. But the USA can produce at least 4PWh (4,000TWh) of electricty per year (it did in 2018), or more than 4 times that.

So we'd need to increase the total power output by about 25% or 960TWh, right? Divide 960TWh into 3,650 hours (10 hours charging per night if spread out evenly) would be 260GW needed.

So we'd need a 1GW station every week for the next 260 weeks and we haven't even factored in the extra electricity already available during night charging hours...

So 260 weeks would make for 5 years. That would put us at 2026, not 2035. To reach 2035 we'd need that kind of power (a GW power plant every week) if everyone charged during the same 3.5 hour period, again, not factoring in the currently off-peak power available.

Great post. The doom and gloom predictions are always based on converting 100% of miles to EVs and having everyone plug in at the same time. They also have us going 100% EV in impossibly short times.

The key number is that going 100% EV would require us to increase power generation by about 25%. As the link I posted from the DOE points out we have added more than that in short period of times twice in the past. With EVs we have a much longer window.