- Ford’s CEO said Tesla’s Cybertruck is for “Silicon Valley people” not “real people who do real work.”
- Jim Farley said Tesla’s pickup truck won’t compete with the F-150 Lightning.
- Tesla is expected to release the EV pickup later this year, but it’s been delayed several times.
Living in tropical climates it would be understandable that the mechanics of more extreme latitudes wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
The closer you are to the equator, the more consistent your days and nights are throughout the year, and the more direct sunlight you’re getting. As you get closer to the poles, the winter days get shorter, the summer days get longer, the winter sun is less intense, and the Summer sun is more direct. The extreme of this is when you get up to the Arctic where the sun can be up for months at a time and then down for months at a time. As a result, you also see some massive temperature swings. There are regions that will see +40 and -40. It’s highly unusual tomreach either extreme, but Iroquois Falls, Ontario has seen official temperatures of as high as +41C in summer and as low as -58C in winter. In winter, you go to work in the dark and go home in the dark, and in summer you can wake up to bright sunshine at 5am and fall asleep in bright sunshine at 11pm.
This combination of factors means that solar power is not appropriate for winter weather the closer to get to the poles. As as a country as a whole, in Canada in 2022, solar panels produced 105,000MW-h of energy in January, 404,000MW-h of energy in July according to statscan, the federal government’s stats arm. That’s an aggregate including regions such as southern Ontario, which is significantly further south than most of the country and do not see the extreme temperatures I’m talking about.
Air conditioning is not comparable to heating. Air conditioning moves cold to hot areas and hot to cold areas. Heat pumps like this are capable of efficiencies above 100% since you use just a little energy to move heat from where it’s unwanted to where it’s wanted. By contrast, resistive heating can only achieve 100% efficiency because it needs to generate the heat that’s in use. That’s a massive drain on batteries. You might ask “well why not use a heat pump like air conditioning?”, But heat pumps become inefficient for heating at low ambient temperatures. Most heat pumps don’t work below -10C ambient, and cold climate heating pumps are a new product that can operate down to -30 but there can still be efficiency issues.
Not to mention that if the sun isn’t sending enough energy to warm the environment to more than -40, then thermodynamically you can’t use solar power to heat something like the inside of a vehicle or the battery of an EV without massively derating the solar panels so you’d need a massive solar panel compared to what you were trying to do.
Thanks. I do intellectually know some of this but I don’t grok it or the implications.
There’s things that are really fundamental to our local environment and it’s hard to wrap our heads around when we go elsewhere.
Up here, other than evergreens, everything appears to die in the winter. The trees all lose their leaves, the grass turns brown, surface plants whither. It has to be this way because nothing not very explicitly evolved for the environment can survive the winter weather.
When I went to cuba for a vacation about 10-15 years ago, it was sort of hard to wrap my head around the fact that all the trees were always growing because their winter was nothing like ours (in fact, it was early spring when I went, and we nearly crashed the car on black ice driving 8 hours from the northern community I lived in at the time to the big city airport). It’s only natural, but the concept of a year-round growing season seemed totally alien to me.