Like many, I was looking forward to what Elon Musk would say about what is easily the most critical and expensive part of building an electric vehicle—the batteries. The presentation was literally breath-taking. Several times I found myself holding my breath as I tried not to miss any important details. Musk and company had gone to great lengths to simplify their descriptions of what they were attempting. Unfortunately for me, I hadn't taken a Chemistry course since 1966 so I found myself fishing in some forgotten waters. Fortunately, it was easy to watch repeats on YouTube so eventually the requisite understanding returned. (I needed four tries ;-)
There is really no sustainable energy future without effective storage. Anyone who has ever lost their electricity knows that life gets extremely difficult VERY fast. Yes, I know humans survived without electricity in hazardous places such a North Dakota in winter. But those people were unusually hardy, strong, and clever. Even so, preparations for winter began the first days of spring. If you had trees, you chopped wood. Trees are stored energy. Unfortunately, there aren't many trees in North Dakota. Fortunately, there are energy sources that will sustain human life up there—lignite coal and then after the 1950s, oil and natural gas. Now that burning fossil fuels has become a big no-no, North Dakota also has abundant wind power but harnessing it as a practical matter requires storage.
Energy storage has been the big scary boogieman since the invention of fire. We like to treat the problem socially the same way we treat hauling out the trash and for many of the same reasons—it is UGHLEE. Clear-cut forests, oil refineries and tank farms, and the like smell funny and in myriad ways are offensive if not serious health hazards. Storage is especially tricky when the energy is electricity. Electricity moves at roughly the speed of light. With tiny exceptions, therefore, electricity must be used the instant it's produced. While this nearly instantaneous speed is easily electricity's most useful characteristic, it seriously hampers more widespread adoption of renewable energy.
The Fridays for Futures movement inspired by the frankly incredible Greta Thunberg has been fun to follow since it started only a year ago. She was a disgusted child who decided to skip school to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament. The goal was to remind the politicians that they were not doing enough to arrest the climate crises. Her logic was absolutely impeccable:
The scientific consensus is that unless there are significant changes in how societies operate, we only have twelve years before the CO2 tipping points have been breached and all hell is going to break loose.
The most commonly reported tipping point was 1.5°C (2.7°F) We are almost there.
2018 broke records for high temperatures and widespread forest fires in Sweden. Anyone who wasn't frightened to death by these developments was probably clinically unconscious. It was an amazing demonstration of what environmental collapse could look like.
Greta did the math. She was 15. 12 years and she would be only 27. This is a very grim future.
"Why educate yourself to be a useful and productive citizen when the future is so hopeless?" reasoned Greta. Besides, she was extremely studious so missing a little school to make a political point seemed a logical path. Her grades weren't going to suffer.
A typical angry teenager, she distilled her beef with the world in the perfect summation, "You adults are shitting on my future." It is almost impossible to imagine a more powerful battle cry if the goal is to unite the world's young into a vast protest movement. But I am almost certain that not even Greta had any idea of the firestorm she was igniting.
She has spoken to the European, British, and French Parliaments. She went to Davos to scold the filthy rich for their role in the crimes against the climate. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And her latest was her decision to address the UN General Assembly which meant a transatlantic trip. Since she doesn't fly, this left her with few options. The one she chose was to sail on an environmentally-friendly racing yacht.
The 50th anniversary of the first moon walk has caused me a full-blown geek-out. I remember the space race with fondness. Aerospace was the biggest story out there. The 50s and 60s saw an explosion of technological growth. Some favorites of mine from that era include the F-104, the U-2, the SR-71, the Boeing 707, 727, and 747—the "jet age" planes that changed travel and even music by democratizing flight.
I "graduated" from my Erector Set stage straight into model airplanes—the ones that flew and made a bunch of noise. And even though the space race was on, I was never seduced into model rocketry. It was expensive and the available examples didn't do much—restricted as they were by the same sort of regulations as fireworks (which where I lived were essentially outlawed.)
Real-world rockets were kind of boring as well. The most notorious of the test pilots out at Edwards Air Force Base (Chuck Yeager) even labeled the early astronauts as nothing more than "spam in a can." After all, the first "American" in space was a chimp. But that wouldn't last long. The original astronauts were extremely competent test pilots and before long, they were demanding greater control of their missions.
Even so, I was far more interested in the flight testing at Edwards where they pushed the limits of supersonic flight with real airplanes like fighters jets. But soon, they eventually embraced rocketry with the incomparable X-15. They had to. If you want to set speed and altitude records, eventually you run out of atmosphere where air-breathing power-plants simply do not work. The X-15 was insanely fast, complex and dangerous. It wasn't going to be piloted by a chimp. In fact, these things required the skills of the best pilots we could find. And I had a favorite—Neil Armstrong.
Armstrong was a superb pilot. On one mission a failure of a new instrument caused him to fly nearly 50 miles beyond where he was supposed to turn back to Edwards. His propulsion was spent so he was flying a glider with the aerodynamic performance (4:1 glide ratio) of a brick. He nursed that X-15 back to Edwards coming over the lake bed at less than 100'. This would be the same guy who landed on the moon with less than 30 seconds worth of fuel.
His degree in aeronautical engineering came from Purdue. This is NOT a school that grants engineering degrees to goof-offs. In fact Purdue would contribute a serious fraction of the top engineers to the space program. The rest mostly came from State Universities in the USA Midwest like Michigan.
He grew up in Wapakoneta, Ohio about an hour north of Dayton—the home of the Wright Brothers. His father paid for a ride in a Ford Tri-motor at 6. He soloed an airplane on his 16th birthday (the legal minimum age) and spent much of his childhood building model airplanes. This last fact is what endeared him to me. I too built model airplanes which were insanely difficult to get to fly well. The problem is that models and real airplanes conform to the same laws of nature which means to indulge in this hobby, it really helps to learn things like fluid dynamics, lightweight structures, and drag coefficients. You know—kid stuff.
Yes that is me with a model that required at least 150 hours to build. Didn't fly very well—too little power and too much paint.
Flying is something that only happens on the boundaries of perfection. You can get 15,000 things right and one wrong and your precious airplane is a flaming heap. Good pilots are followers of check lists—as diligent on the 1000th time through as the first. They read the operator's manuals. They know what all those switches do. They understand that dishonesty and corner-cutting could end their lives.
Armstrong was notorious for insisting on understanding every part of his aircraft. He wanted to know what everything was supposed to do and what it COULD do in an emergency. But even better, he understood that flying is a team effort and it was critical for every member of the team to take their jobs seriously. Here's what he says about the people who built Apollo.
Armstrong: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and for the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.
I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.
The Triumph of the Squares
Nearly a year after the landing of Apollo 11, NASA head Thomas Paine gave a commencement address at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he declared that the successful moonshot was a triumph of the squares, the validation of the values of "Squareland" which he listed as foremost a profound faith in reason. It was "outward looking and mathematical," was "time oriented...and deeply concerned with future consequences." It "accepts as true only rational facts and theories which predict future events with mathematical precision under rigorous standards of reproducibility. Only Squareland's rationality could ensure the "crops yield, lights light, bridges carry loads, children avoid polio, and men walk on the moon." In fact. to Squarelanders, a solid definition of "truth" might be "that which successfully takes two men to the moon."
This speech made me groan and roll my eyes. On one hand, going to the moon really DID require the "square" virtues that Paine so celebrated. Beside, I was clearly a prototypical "square" (see photo above.) Building airplanes sort of demands squareness. I was also the son of a small-town clergyman—building airplanes was one way of staying above the reproach of the church ladies. On the other hand, this speech set off the scolds who assumed that "square" virtue included an unquestioning support of the Vietnam War, a marked preference for booze over pot, white shirts and neck ties, and above all, short hair for men.
Unfortunately, the space race had been sold as Cold War macho and a real-live Nazi named Wernher von Braun was chosen to head the effort. So the link between the space race and unbridled militarism was pretty damn short. NASA was acutely aware of this problem. It was one of the reasons that Neil Armstrong was chosen to take the first step—he was the only civilian pilot to have reached his advanced status. This turned out to be an excellent choice. In the goodwill tour following the moon landing, he charmed his listeners around the world into believing that this was a triumph of human (not American) genius. The reason this worked is because Armstrong deeply believed it was true.
But while the moon landing was clearly a triumph of the squares, the squares would not triumph. By 1972 the Apollo program was ended and no human has gone beyond low-earth orbit since. The can-do attitude of Apollo has so completely disappeared from American culture that many now actually believe the landing was a hoax. It is probably more accurate to call Apollo "Peak Square" because the vast majority of my fellow citizens in 2019 look on a profound faith in reason as a weird psychological disorder.
BBC calling
In the summer of 1970, I found myself in UK. I kept running into people who wanted to talk about the moon landing. Most of them were very well informed. I had to scramble to keep up at times. One night in London, a waitress in a pub sat down next to me and asked if I was the American space expert she had overheard. I humbly admitted I was probably who she was looking for but I was FAR from being an expert. Then she asked, "How did they know how long the burn for the lunar insertion midflight correction should be? And how did they know they were pointing the engine in the right direction?" I didn't have a canned response so I pulled out my understanding of inertial navigation. It wasn't a very good answer but she seemed to understand, smiled and went back to work. I was left wondering just how a random London barmaid knew enough to even ask such good questions.
In 1978, PBS would air a 10-part series called Connections starring a fascinating storyteller named James Burke. (There was a companion coffee-table book by the same name). Burke had carved out an awesome assignment for himself. He wanted to explain the products of the modern world (computers, plastics, powered flight, etc.) in such a way that his listeners would understand how their world came to be. It was absolutely brilliant. Episode #1 The trigger effect traced the development of a modern city like New York back to the invention of the plow. The nine that would follow were equally good. Somewhere along the way we are informed that Burke was the man who covered Apollo for BBC.
AHA! That explained why the Brits knew so much about the moon landing—at least partly. So in the near-infinity of Apollo 11 at 50 coverage on YouTube, I went looking to see if I could find any of Burke's descriptions. I found a good one—an hour of Apollo highlights.
Just in case you need a reminder of how utterly lame the Apollo coverage was on USA corporate media, here is an example from ABC. I am pretty sure all the CBS and ABC coverage of the whole mission can be found at YouTube.
Of all the footage of the Apollo 11 mission that I have uncovered in the past few months, the following may be my favorite. It was done by NASA and has even more in capsule footage than the recently released Blu-Ray of Apollo 11. Of course, the new version has far superior imagery because restoration techniques are so much better. But this one is narrated by Wernher von Braun himself and the technique he used is to compare the 1969 effort against the description of a trip to the moon from Jules Verne's 1865 From Earth to the Moon.
As for the speculation that the Apollo program could provide a template for how this nation should take on the challenges of climate change, my responses are:
It might work
If we can restock our seriously depleted supply of "squares."
If we can find leadership that understands that this problem will be at LEAST 1000 times more difficult than the moon landing—and that's the best reason to do it.
Once in awhile, it's good to see what thoughtful grownups sound like when they discuss how exactly folks go about building a world that doesn't need to run on fossil fuels. Here Deutsche Welle follows some of the more promising strategies—e-mobility in Norway, the hydrogen strategy in Japan, etc. It's remarkably well done.
This YouTube interview of Sandy Monro is interesting to the point of being profound. Some background.
Monroe lives in Michigan and has a bunch of commercial ties to the car business. His specialty is tearing down cars to see how they were built and whether better production practices could make a better car. His company has about 100 employees, because cars are incredibly complex with dozens of systems so he needs a wide assortment of specialists.
The reason Monro has become a sensation is because he tore down an early Tesla Model 3. At first he was pretty critical but as time has gone on he has become convinced that most legacy automakers are now almost hopelessly behind. He has some wonderful stories about how institutional inertia works at a place like Ford Motor. His inside look at Teslas will probably sell well for at least a decade
And then he says some really enlightening things about China and their rapid industrialization plans. His observations may be skewed because he is probably meeting their best and brightest, but even taking a hefty discount for that, the story is still about as compelling a look at China as anything I have seen in a long time—maybe ever.
If I were to nominate anyone to run an integrated renewables project, it would be Statkraft They have been operating Norway's state-owned hydro-power infrastructure since 1895. That's a serious accumulation of institutional skills. And it looks like they are adding to their skill set with this project.
Statkraft virtual plant integrates renewables, storage and gas in UK
March 5, 2019 Emiliano Bellini
The virtual facility is monitoring approximately 1 GW of combined wind, solar, storage and flexible gas engines in the U.K. and its capacity may double in the summer. The energy managed by the plant is being sold on the British energy market.
Statkraft says its VPP is the first in the U.K. to aggregate power from solar, wind, battery storage and flexible gas generation.
Norwegian hydropower and energy provider Statkraft has announced it has developed what it calls the U.K.’s first virtual power plant (VPP) to integrate renewables, storage and gas.
The company said the facility functions as a conventional power plant, as it would be able to operate within various energy markets. The plant is monitoring around 1 GW of wind and solar power, battery storage and flexible gas engines, with the power output of all the facilities traded on the U.K. energy market by using day ahead, on-the-day and cash-out price forecasts, Statkraft said. The electricity is being sold automatically by algorithms developed by the company which are said to minimize risk to customers while maximizing return by capitalizing on the VPP’s flexibility.
The capacity of the VPP may be doubled by the end of summer, the company added, and the software for the project, which is said to enable controllable loads via a common intelligent control centre, was provided by Germany’s energy & meteo systems.
German forerunner
“We are already successful partners in Germany and believe that this new project is an important step in enabling Statkraft UK to make the most of renewable energy,” said the German company’s managing director, Ulrich Focken.
Statkraft’s virtual plant in Germany connects around 12 GW of wind and solar power. It was launched in 2012 and has more than 100 solar energy generators in its system, along with 1,300 wind farms and numerous hydropower and bioenergy producers.
Sister Ellen—Keep on preaching the truth as demonstrated by the successful social actions of North Dakota's Non-Partisan League, the KfW Bank of Germany, and FDR's RFC. The BIGGEST single impediment to a more enlightened approach to the oncoming catastrophe that is climate change is the fact that we allow our monetary system to be run by thieves.
The Financial Secret Behind Germany’s Green Energy Revolution
Ellen Brown | January 26, 2019
The “Green New Deal” endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., and more than 40 other House members has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it. However, taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding would come primarily from certain public agencies, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and “a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.”
Funding through the Federal Reserve may be controversial, but establishing a national public infrastructure and development bank should be a no-brainer. The real question is why we don’t already have one, as do China, Germany and other countries that are running circles around us in infrastructure development. Many European, Asian and Latin American countries have their own national development banks, as well as belong to bilateral or multinational development institutions that are jointly owned by multiple governments. Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve, which considers itself “independent” of government, national development banks are wholly owned by their governments and carry out public development policies.
China not only has its own China Infrastructure Bank but has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which counts many Asian and Middle Eastern countries in its membership, including Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative. China is so far ahead of the United States in building infrastructure that Dan Slane, a former adviser on President Donald Trump’s transition team, has warned, “If we don’t get our act together very soon, we should all be brushing up on our Mandarin.”
The guy who was an ultra-capacitor geek n college has purchased probably the most promising next-gen storage technology. My guess is that this is the start of a promising relationship. Capacitors will probably never run an EV for a host of real-world reasons. But because they can charge and discharge so rapidly, they can certainly help—especially in leveling the loads in real-world traffic conditions.
But the real reason for Tesla's hookup with Maxwell is likely to be their ability to make a superior anode that doeasn't use cobalt. Cobalt is found greatest quantities in parts of the world known for corruption, major human rights abuses, and violence. Relying on such a rickety supply chain for a critical part of a manufacturing process is something to be avoided at all costs. With this purchase, Tesla will be able to make cobalt-free anodes that are objectively better.
IF this works, it will truly be the game-changer. Storing energy has been the ultimate quest since forever. So far, the best we can do is lithium-ion batteries—good enough to give us Teslas but unlikely to provide us with base loads and eliminate coal plants. But the idea that we could capture solar energy and store it in a liquid form means we could reuse a bunch of the petroleum infrastructure.
But this is a lab experiment. We do not know how the process scales. We don't know how much energy it requires to make nor do we know how many storage cycles this magic liquid can do before it loses its transformative powers.
But good luck! May the land of Linnaeus and Celsius and Nobel get it right one more time.
The Diamond-Star auto manufacturing facility in Normal Illinois was shut down by Mitsubishi in 2015. Selling an old auto plant is amazingly difficult. They tend to be very large (2.6 million square feet—242,000 sq. meters) surrounded by rail yards an other transportation hubs. When in operation, an auto plant is an operating investment of roughly $1billion, with 1200 skilled operators to make it all work. At one point, this operation cranked out 200, 000 cars per year—or about one a minute.
This plant is being refitted to make electric pickups called Rivian. The selling price was $16 million. Some of the equipment is unusable. Some, like a paint shop, is extremely valuable. But the biggest advantage is that the plant has only been closed for four years. This means that many of those valuable producer-class types it takes to create a working production plant are still in the area. My guess is that the Rivian roll-out will be a lot smoother than the Tesla Model 3.
When I was in college, I worked at an auto-parts store that was part of a small chain. The head of purchasing once told me to never order parts from California—parts made in the Midwest were better-built, cheaper, and they arrived as promised. He was right in 1970. It will be interesting to see if the Midwest is still home to some world-class manufacturing expertise.
I am NOT a truck guy so I have NO idea if these things will sell to the folks who like their pick-ups loud and petroleum-fired. Scaringe looks like HE knows trucks so this might work.
A car nut from Croatia, Mate Rimac, has grown up to be a VERY deep thinker on the future of transportation—who also happens to build beautiful hypercars on the side. In this presentation, he explains the problems and potential of autonomous vehicles. He also explains why making all this work is so important.
The importance of "sunk costs" looms larger by the day. Turns out it is really, REALLY hard to replace old technology with new. And it only makes sense even IF the only consideration is how much money has been invested over the years in the electrical grid, filling stations, etc—things that by rights should be rotting in technology graveyards by now. Of course, it isn't just the interests of pension and hedge funds at stake here—there is also matters of pride in technology, etc. We have successfully made the transition from one technology to another: tubes to transistors, film to digital photography, fax to email attachments, etc. but nothing on this scale.
So now we see that the people with the least infrastructure to displace happen to live in areas with the most sunlight. So it is really no surprise that the least developed countries in the world are embracing solar power with the most enthusiasm. It is the cheapest energy solution by far.
One sparkling August morning in 1970, I awoke in the small town of Roskilde Denmark. I was hitchhiking to Copenhagen but had been warned that the youth hostels were full so I stopped short. So that morning I knew I was 30 km from downtown Copenhagen and absolutely nothing else about Denmark. By the end of the day I had become a serious fan of things Viking because of a 1962 find of five ships of various sizes in the mud near the main harbor. The good people of Roskilde had built a museum in 1969 to house these finds that from the looks of things, has grown in size and sophistication since then.
I have a sister who has compiled a thorough genealogy of our family. All eight of my great-grandparents came from the Viking "belt" that extends from Denmark in the south to Uppsala / Birka in the north. Because of geography, the explorations / raids / settlements of the Danes and Norwegians went west. These are the best known Vikings because of their importance to British history—William the Conqueror was a Norman (northman / Norwegian), after all. The Swedish Vikings went east and influenced the history of Russia and the Ukraine. Between a great-grandfather from Bergen Norway and two great-grandparents from Gotland, I have the range of Viking roots well covered.
In 1970, I knew none of this. In fact, the universe of Viking historians was pretty damn tiny. As my interest in the subject grew, I discovered I had latched onto a very obscure topic. For example: I found my way into a relationship with a woman who was half Norwegian. Since I was still a redhead, tall, and pretty good with a hammer, I thought that as a romantic gesture I would make her a Mjolnir (Thor's hammer) as a piece of costume jewelry / good luck charm. I made it of wood and leather and it turned out quite nice. It might have worked as romantic gift except that 1) She had never heard of Mjolnir. 2) She had never heard of the Viking pantheon of gods. 3) She had no idea what this gesture was supposed to mean. This was 1994. Amazingly, pop culture has caught up with my obscure hobby. I was watching an episode of Jeopardy not long ago (a guilty pleasure indeed) when they had a category on Viking mythology—all three contestants could have gotten them all right.
These are my people. I have lived in Scandinavia on two occasions. No one I know acts remotely like a Viking raider. So the question that has fascinated me for the last 48 years has been—how did the Vikings become Scandinavians? My Lutheran preacher father claimed that because the Viking Age mostly ended with the coming of Christianity to the north, this was the defining event. I always had a lot of problems with that explanation because goodness knows, there have been plenty of bloodthirsty Christians in history.
My pet explanation is those Viking boats. No longships, no Viking Age. These were amazing craft. Able to travel long distances over open and often stormy oceans at high speed, shallow enough to navigate narrow rivers, and light enough to be hauled over portages. At the height of the Viking Age, their influence stretched from North America to Constantinople because of those boats. The folks who went out in raiding parties could be violent thugs—the folks who built the boats had to be highly skilled, in love with precision, and supported by other skilled trades like steel making. It requires a sophisticated society to float a navy that can conduct overseas raids. The peaceable producing classes had to stay home and build boats. The young bucks went a-Viking—mostly to get a grubstake so they could buy a boat. None other than Thorstein Veblen thought Viking raiders were mostly young men out having fun with dad's boat.
A recent find in Ribe Denmark gives new evidence for what simply had to be true—that Viking settlements had to be communities of skilled people. Those boats did not emerge from thin air. A boat demands a boatbuilder. Anyone who has ever built or maintained a boat will emphatically explain just how difficult this is to do.
The only truly successful "revolutions" in human history have been brought to us by the Producer Classes. Think about it. A Leisure Class occupation like politics hasn't progressed much, if at all, for hundreds of years. George W. Bush was most certainly not an improvement over Abraham Lincoln even though both were Republican Presidents. In that same time, the Producing Classes completely changed transportation, communications, chemistry, manufacturing expertise, metallurgy, etc!
So when I insist that climate change is a Producer Class problem that can only be solved with Producer Class solutions, I am not wrong. The so-called climate activists didn't change anything when they marched or chained themselves to the White House fence. It's the guys who were beavering away at making solar cells affordable who have changed everything. And like the good Producers of the past, they have discovered they still have to drag the mindless idiots of politics and finance into accepting their new and improved tools. Somewhere the ghosts of the Non-Partisan League are smiling knowingly.
And while insisting that they are only asking for "market" solutions, today's renewable energy revolutionaries might do well to look at what those North Dakota farmers were demanding in 1916. They could demand a great deal more. After all, they hold the only answers for the very survival of human civilization.
Thorstein Veblen probably never used the term "technological diffusion" but he accurately portrays an early manifestation when he recounted how Germany raced past England in industrial expertise and power in the decades leading up to WW I. In his towering use of Institutional Analysis in Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1914), Veblen describes the many advantages of being second (or third, etc.)
What Veblen was describing is the industrial learning curve. The path from an idea to a "finished" product, to something people want to buy is long and treacherous. Of course, the more complex it is and the more ideas must be combined into the final product, the longer and more expensive the learning curve turns out to be. It can be argued that it required at least 80 years before cars really became reliable and comfortable. The road to the $.75 per watt solar panels took minimum of 70. These things are HARD to do. Because the learning curve is a fact of life, I have become fascinated by how it plays out.
When asked about solar, I have long advised to wait until panels could bought at a Home Depot / IKEA store. These people just want to sell goods—they don't need hassles from irate customers who want their money back because the product somehow failed. (If you are a serious DIYer, and trouble-shooting incomplete technology is one of the joys of your life, jump in with both feet. After all, early adopters are important too. If you are one of those people, you really don't need my advice.)
Another sign of technological sophistication and maturity is the adoption of new parts into old settings—in this case, Tesla (and other) parts into a 1949 Mercury. This is hot rodding 101. In this example, they made it look box stock to an untrained eye while grafting some serious EV parts underneath. When the hot rod crowd goes looking for your parts, this is a very clear sign that the EV revolution has matured.
In 1972, I talked my dad into buying a Saab 99. Saab was mainly an aircraft company financed by the Wallenberg Bank in the late 1930s to build fighters for the defense of Swedish neutrality. After the War, they decided to take their skills into automobile manufacture. They hired the rising star of Swedish industrial design, Sixten Sason, who would go on to design the Hasselblad camera that NASA sent to the moon on Apollo 11. So a company full of aircraft expertise built a car they believed would be better with a little airplane built in. The 99 was brimming with innovation. For example:
The structural integrity of the passenger compartment was superb. Monocoque, stressed-skin design combined light weight with a crazy-strong roof. Saab's early promotion included winter rallying. Their driver rolled his car so often while continuing the race he got the nickname Carlsson på taket (Carlsson on the roof).
The cockpit was the first real manifestation of sound ergonomics. The seating and driving position was excellent. The instruments were clear and easy to understand.
Four-wheel disc brakes had multiple backup systems.
It was versatile with a fold-down rear seat.
And it was the only sorted-out front-wheel drive car sold in USA. (In snowy Minnesota, that was a big deal.)
Saab is no more. by 1990, every car-maker on earth had a version of the Saab 99. Some, like the Toyota Camry, had taken all those good ideas and refined them significantly. Cheaper and more reliable is a winning combination.
Right now, Tesla is at least as far out in front of the EV pack as was the Saab 99. Below is an excellent description of the institutional problems facing the established car companies. They have BIG bucks invested in a way of producing a product that is rendered obsolete by fun, comfortable, exciting, electric cars. Yes, they are dragging their feet. But giving what they face, you would too.
The cautionary tale of Saab is a reasonable outcome for Tesla. Yes, its competition will lag. The Germans, Americans, and Japanese may well be hindered by the Institutional inertia. But that leaves the Koreans and the Chinese. Either one has the potential to swamp Tesla.
The Germans have the largest amount of Institutional inertia. But this may be changing. According to DW, they are finally realizing that the future of transport will be electric and are beginning to make serious investments in batteries, etc.
I have recently shifted my living arrangements. I now live in a very small Minnesota town that borders on the Mississippi. There is not of energy left at 69 and the move used up what I have. I am regaining my footing but these things take time.
I have also decided that I want to take this blog in a slightly new direction. My core beliefs have not changed but I want to attempt to be more uplifting. Goodness knows, the problems are scary enough without retelling the horrors. But as I sincerely believe that only the Producers have ANY chance whatsoever of providing a path out of the catastrophe that is climate change, I intend to focus on what they can accomplish and how they will do it. I also intend to rely more heavily on video production. One side effect of my move is that I now have a fiber optic connection to the internet so video does not mean crazy-long waits any longer.
To demonstrate where I am going, I have included three examples of Producer Class, well-executed sustainable development. The first is from Dubai where a small city has incorporated a veritable wish list of green technologies to make living possible in a climate where 40°C (104°F) is routine in summer months.
The various schemes to make societies less carbon intensive fall into two categories—conservation of resources, and capture of alternative energy sources. When I wrote Elegant Technology, I was quite enchanted by Sweden's waste disposal system that provided most of the heat necessary to warm their homes during those long dark winters. So it is interesting to see how things have turned out—as seen through the eyes of an Australian documentarian. I am not so enchanted by this waste-to-heat solution as I was 30 years ago—I am pretty much down on fire these days. OTOH, I have not seen a better scheme anywhere else.
Aug 20, 2018
This documentary was done during the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. The most interesting part of this doc is probably the claim that Denmark did not decide to reduce their need for fossil fuels as a reaction to climate change, but as a response to the 1973 oil embargo. This means they have a 45-year head start on most countries—esp.USA.
2009
This is from PBS. It concentrates on Samsø island in Denmark—which has nearly reached the target of complete sustainable energy generation. You will notice there are tractors in use so they are still importing some petroleum.
Below is a pretty good description of what the author calls "climate grief"—the crushing realization that everything at all lovely about this world of ours is dying. I can certainly empathize with his feelings although for myself, grief would be a vast improvement over the the feelings that wash over me whenever I allow myself to think deeply about our rapidly changing climate. In no particular order they are:
Naked Terror. When a person grows up on the high prairie, the idea that mother nature is this incredibly beautiful, benevolent, life-sustaining force is tempered by the reality that mom can easily kill you with tornadoes, howling blizzards, sleet, brutal heatwaves, or tennis-ball-sized hail. When I was 16, I nearly froze to death changing a flat tire less than a half mile from our house in North Dakota. Add a few experiences like this together, and the idea that this will all get a lot worse very soon because humanity conducted an arrogant chemistry experiment in the atmosphere is enough to make me very, very afraid.
The wrath of natural laws. Science teaches a bunch of natural laws that work every time, all the time. Raise the temperature of water to 100°C and it will turn to steam. Step off a cliff, and you will fall to the bottom. This is a world where there is no appeal. This is the world of climate science. Pump excessive CO2 into the atmosphere and the planet will get hotter—of this there is no rational debate.
Head-pounding frustration. I have been writing about environmental matters since the 1980s. Almost all of it can still stand close scrutiny. When I think about the vast possibilities of the sustainable society, I can have feelings close to elation. When I consider that very little has been accomplished compared to the problems, the frustration can be overwhelming.
Disgust at useless symbolism. Nothing upsets me quite like a climate change enthusiast who outlines the sordid tales of woe followed by some lame suggestions of raising consciousness and political organizing, or more conferences followed by targets and carbon taxes. This is the biggest calamity ever faced by humans. Most of us in the "developed" world live in societies powered by fossil fuels at every turn. Without them, we have no drinking water, weather-sheltered housing, food, medicine, or mostly anything else. This infrastructure must be redesigned and rebuilt. Since it required hundreds of years to build what we have—building the new world will take a least a few decades. And that's if we immediately embark on an organized crash program.
The builder's perspective. I have been building things since I can remember. Some of my favorite memories are of industrial tours. I can hardly look at at anything without speculating how it was constructed. And what this has taught me is that everything, and I mean everything, is more difficult to build than anyone can possibly imagine without actually doing it. And even if one has carefully planned out all the relevant operations, it always goes much more quickly in one's head than in the real world where real-world problems show up on a daily basis. Of all the reasons for my despair over not accomplishing anything meaningful about climate change, the saddest fact for me that even those with the necessary credentials to build the new sustainable world will take more time than their worst guesses.
Amid the soap opera of Tesla, Musk, and whether the stock market is "properly" valuing the EV car market, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that what Tesla is attempting to accomplish is nothing short of miraculous. Because an electric car can be built by a hard-working shade-tree mechanic, the idea that any established car company should be able to build an EV if they just put their mind to it tends to become a sort of conventional wisdom. Tesla shorts repeat this mantra until big money is involved.
It turns out that an EV is a dramatically different sort of animal because many of the skills required to make an ICE car are simply not relevant. Literally millions of hours have been spent over the years to make a smooth-shifting, reliable, transmission. An EV usually doesn't even need a transmission—or a fuel pump, or a bunch of other things that make cars so complex. But what they do need are reliable batteries—LOTS of them. And the problem of buying enough batteries for a backyard EV conversion do not scale up to the problem of producing thousands of battery packs for long-range vehicles every week.
So all the issues surrounding Tesla's driven, grumpy, charismatic leader are way less important than whether the company can produce enough batteries. And that makes Tesla's boring Nevada gigafactory important enough to (almost) justify its market capitalization—which is higher than GM which makes and sells more than 2.6 million vehicles per year compared to Tesla's goal of 250,000.
