The Wisdom Wall
13 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“So I think that the numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can, if you can see a path, a pretty clear path to those numbers, with your system, then you probably have a pretty good shot of, of being competitive with…”
“And you, and you know that, you know, for a fuel, if you want, if you want to get anywhere close to economically competitive, you know, subsidies decide you have to have hydrogen that's going to be on the order of a dollar per kilogram, and you have to have CO two that's in that 100 to 200 dollar per ton range, and…”
“the numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can, if you can see a path, I mean, a pretty clear path to those numbers with your system, then you probably have a pretty good shot of, of being competitive with future…”
“So, so at the end of the day, if you're, if you're trying to scale down a Greenhaber Bosch plant, maybe, um, maybe you'll be able to do okay on the core parts of, of the electrolysis, uh, uh, side of the equation here, the cells and stuff and so forth. But the ammonia synthesis loop and, and the other kind of more…”
“If you want to make a synthetic Fuel. If it's going to be a hydrocarbon, you do need a source of carbon, and the source of that CO₂, carbon CO₂, matters from a carbon economic perspective. Um, but from a cost perspective, The thing that matters is number one, the hydrogen, number two, the hydrogen, and number three,…”
“if you get A better conversion of CO two and hydrogen to methanol on a single pass. It just really doesn't move the overall economics in a huge way because again, back to a previous point, CO two and hydrogen are the big cost drivers in that system.”
“it's better or, or, or it can be helpful just to put error bars and understand the sensitivities on things earlier on and, and go down the, the deeper, more detailed design rabbit holes when, when the higher level stuff is fixed.”
“it can be helpful just to put error bars and understand the sensitivities on things earlier on and, and go down the, the deeper, more detailed design rabbit holes when, when the higher level stuff is fixed.”
“You can get them at many, many different scales from small to, to, to world scale, and, um, and you see some big Economies of scale effects there, so hard to scale down.”
“thinking about sort of a chemical or a fuel synthesis type process, the core equipment, you know, might only, or the total installed cost of, Of a facility might be two, three, four, even more times the cost of the core componentry itself, and so if you end up focusing on just the core componentry, you, you, you might…”
“the biggest, biggest single line item cost in an electric vehicle is, is the batteries, and a lot of the drivetrain, you know, power conversion equipment, motors, and so forth, are really, really efficient, and so it could be tempting to kind of, if you're looking at a, at some piece of that drivetrain, say, hey, this…”
“And I think by exploring, you know, maybe A level further in terms of sensitivities and limits in the model, it helps you figure out what matters, what design decisions matter to affordability and hitting the customer value prop and, and which don't. And when you're a small company and you've got limited engineering…”
“But a few points in efficiency, Might actually matter a lot at the system level, because every kilowatt hour that you, that you waste in the drivetrain is a kilowatt hour that you have to store in your battery, and that's a really, really expensive kilowatt hour to store.”