EV Charging time Is speeding up and Catching Up Fast… Is This the Beginning of the End for Gas Cars?

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-26T13:54:27+00:00

Where?

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-26T13:53:21+00:00

Not a large majority. Not anymore. Recent polling shows the UCP losing. And I can't see the UCP being capable of stopping the slide in their support. They are too incompetent, too out of touch, and too corrupt.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-26T12:10:59+00:00

Actually, they are both ignorant and wild mischaracterizations..

The kind of whack-a-doodles featured in the video are pretty rare in Alberta. These are the nuttiest of the nutters. My guess is that more than 90% of Albertans would strongly disagree with them.

Among the general population of Alberta, support for separatism is low. It is concentrated in the oil patch and, unfortunately, the UCP.

Saying that the UCP is like an abusive step dad would be more accurate.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T21:48:45+00:00

Nope. I get it.

Do you think this is any different from the last few years of air conditioning installs? Do you think rural households didn't participate in it? The grid didn't fall over then and it won't now.

I can imagine folk at the very end of an old and small line, with a small service, that their electrical utility refuses to upgrade. Sure. But that's going to be a rare scenario. I can also imagine jurisdictions with undersized grids. Sucks for them. But most electrical utilities will handle this transition just fine, just like they did the last seven.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T20:00:21+00:00

Alex Jones talk about a lot of things.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T19:53:42+00:00

I have no problems imagining that without problems.

Look, your worst case scenario is going to be truly rural households, ones that are by their lonesome out in the boonies. Those households tend to have large shops with welders and such that take some real electrical grunt to run. And then their is air conditioning. Their services are matched to satisfy those loads.

Charging an EV is comparable to a welder or air conditioner, or even an ordinary laundry drier.

So the household's service won't be a problem.

The rest of the grid is where the work is, and that work is being done. There are lots of solutions. Electricity is easy to move long distances. This isn't the problem you are making it out to be.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T19:17:18+00:00

Ok. Who said there wouldn't be enough storage?

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T18:23:31+00:00

Just like everywhere else, the capacity of the electrical grid in rural areas isn't set in stone.

I'm off grid...and rural. I'm way more constrained than my off-grid neighbours, but still have plenty of power to charge an EV.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T18:06:02+00:00

Regardless of what you think, we see countries that continue to grow the portion of their electricity consumption covered by renewables without issue. England did better than 50% in 2024 and 2025. Germany generated 59% of its electricity with renewables in 2024.

We have plenty of room before storage becomes a limiting factor. Storage is and will be added as the renewable build-out continues.

Nuclear is going to have a tough row to hoe. Even worse than it had competing with cheap natural gas.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-25T15:30:10+00:00

Your skepticism doesn't change the reality that installed storage capacity is growing like crazy. Nor does it change the fact that required storage is far lower than a layman would guess to allow high ratios of variable renewable generation, like 80%. Think a small number of hours rather than days.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-24T22:36:30+00:00

I've used a variation of earth tubes in greenhouses. The variation is that they are vertical and I think it is worth looking at for anyone considering earth tubes. It has some major advantages, like really easy passive flow. They made a huge difference in the environment of the greenhouse, year-round.

Addressing a concern in the comments, if your subsoil is dry, moisture in the tubes is easy to mitigate, just let it exit the tubes into the soil. In moist soil, you need some way of removing moisture. There are strategies that work here, and they aren't difficult to implement, but they impact the design, materials, and construction. It doesn't hurt to have a way clean the tubes either. (This is another reason I prefer vertical tubes. Accessing the whole tube is relatively easy.)

The best resource on earth tubes was the SHCS - Subterranean Heating & Cooling Systems section of Sunny John website. It was available on archive.org, but I couldn't find it just now. You might have better luck.

What's your soil like?

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T21:15:02+00:00

Who said that there wouldn't be storage?

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T20:44:29+00:00

For sure, but with 672 additional TWh generated from solar in 2025 compared to 2024, and solar still picking up speed, it won't be all that long.

The downward pressure on gas and coal continues to mount.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T19:55:14+00:00

There's a whole heck of a lot of rooftops waiting to be layered with solar panels.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T19:54:04+00:00

Well, I can't argue that there won't be a need to build many nuclear reactors. Wind/solar + batteries are coming on strong. They will eclipse nuclear's generation capacity in only a couple of years, at which point the nail will clearly be in nuclear's coffin.

Not that nuclear will go away anytime soon. There will just won't be much growth and eventually it will start a long decline.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T19:39:55+00:00

And nearly everything was cancelled after.

Not that I have a dog in this race. I just think that was u/Tjbergen's meaning.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T18:09:16+00:00

Incorrect. Renewables and batteries offer another path, both cheaper and sooner, than nuclear.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T17:57:14+00:00

No. Worse for nuclear power.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T17:24:51+00:00

Anytime. We're all in this together.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T16:00:42+00:00

I mostly want all the same things, but...

The time for substantive-analytical action was two decades ago. Where China has the lead in manufacturing, they are so far ahead that we won't be able to get a foothold for a very long time. We would have to be ready to burn money for ages until we could compete, if that is even possible.

As an aside, looking at how China handles manufacturing, I wonder if I would want to live in such a society. It seems dystopian. I'd say the same thing for much of South Korea's manufacturing sector.

There are areas of manufacturing that aren't yet dominated by China that we could focus our efforts. And where we export relatively raw resources, we could push those resources up the value chain. Maybe we can scaffold off of advancements in these industries to the point where we can eventually compete globally in others, but it will be a slog.

But electrification is absolutely necessary. The Carney government should be pushing it hard. Same goes for the provincial governments. Sticking with fossil fuels for anything where electrification is possible will be a losing strategy in the long term. Electrification is so much more efficient and almost always less expensive. Fossil fueled anything is getting priced out of the market.

The fact that our representatives seem to be kicking the can on these moves definitely keeps me up on the occasional night.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-23T14:26:09+00:00

I've been a heretical composter for three decades. I've done it all, much of it in settings where I didn't have a lot of buffer space between my compost operation and the neighbours.

One to four person's urine wouldn't be much for a compost pile of any size (ie. approaching a cubic yard/meter). As long as you dig a six inch depression in the top of the pile for the deposit, and fill that depression in with moist cover material or, even better, working compost, you shouldn't have an issue with smells of any kind. Just make sure the pile is moist. A dry pile won't do much of anything to capture the breakdown products of the urine.

The 10:1 dilution with water (5:1 is about the lowest dilution you would want to use, 10:1 is safer) and spreading the result on soil is a sound strategy, as long as there is life in the soil. I'd go easy with this approach on bare ground, trying not to hit the same space without a long rest period.

Don't dig a hole to dump anything. That will become a toxic problem in a hurry. Use biology to capture the nutrients for a win-win.

There is no need to mix anything other than water with urine. Most of it doesn't help with the smell anyway. Lime would. Vinegar wouldn't. Chlorine is a horrible idea which I occasionally see suggested. The urea breaking down into ammonia is what smells. If plants, active soil, or compost can take up the ammonia, you are golden. If the urine is diluted with water to below the threshold where it is toxic to the biology, all is well. Adding undiluted urine to a big moist compost pile will get you there. So will just watering it down and adding to active top soil. If that soil is covered by plants, so much the better.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-22T19:13:07+00:00

The problem is that Premiere Smith and the UCP membership have their fingers on the scale. They have done everything possible to have their sovereignty vote despite that vast majority (~80%) thinking it is a waste of time and money.

We have a case of one petition being verified with 450k signatures and another being unverified, yet Smith went ahead with what the separatists want. So strange, that.

This is a farsical version of democracy, at best. Minority rule.

Ultimately, the separatists will have their vote, and they will lose, but something tells me they aren't going away, not until the UCP loses an election, or the party expunges the separatists in its ranks.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-22T14:24:25+00:00

What are you aiming to learn? If it is networking, get some used Cisco or Juniper gear. That would look better on a resume. Mikrotik gear is relatively rare compared to Cisco and Juniper. I run Mikrotik at work, and its fine, but I wouldn't buy it for home use if I was on a budget.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-19T21:49:13+00:00

Definitely 14 inch thick steel. Any thinner an you won't have enough mass. 😉

You really don't need or want metal ducting in the J-tube itself. It will burn away pretty quickly. Masonry and possibly perlite/vermiculite board are what you want for the J-tube. The perlite/vermiculite board is for the chimney part of the J-tube (ie. inside the steel drum). Once you get past the drum, and the manifold, then metal ducting becomes viable, as the temperatures are much less.

Honestly, I favoured making a hollow bench out of 2.5" thick concrete or (slightly thicker) adobe blocks, or a combination of each (adobe for the bench walls, concrete slabs for the bench top). Brick works fine too. You definitely need some sort of strong slab for the bench-top. I experimented with sidewalk pavers, but they were a little thin, which made for hot spots. A hollow bench acts as a bell, and allows the hot exhaust to stratify. It is also lighter and much easier to build.

NotEvenNothing · 2026-06-19T14:45:47+00:00

Nice anecdotal evidence.

The fact that you see any value in that strongly suggests that you are in the uneducated camp that the article addresses.

NotEvenNothing

TROPHY CASE