new energy https://pure-electric.com.au/ en ACT achieves serious milestone - The 5 stages of transitioning to a 100% renewable energy nirvana https://pure-electric.com.au/news/act-achieves-serious-milestone-5-stages-transitioning-100-renewable-energy-nirvana <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>ACT achieves serious milestone - The 5 stages of transitioning to a 100% renewable energy nirvana</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 10/04/2019 - 10:35</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-10/ACT%20ACHIEVES%20SERIOUS%20MILESTONE%20-%20THE%205%20STAGES%20OF%20TRANSITIONING%20TO%20A%20100%20RENEWABLE%20ENERGY%20NIRVANA.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="Can we transition to 100 percent renewable energy - 5 stages" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   The ACT has just reached its target of 100 per cent (net) <strong>renewable electricity</strong>, to become only the eighth region in the world to achieve this milestone, according to a recent Australia Institute report. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">While the achievement is great news, there is still a long way to go before the territory can declare that it does not depend on fossil-fueled power itself. It is about 20% of the way to making that claim (see the five stages of <strong>renewable energy </strong>transition below).</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The ACT target will be met thanks to its recent purchase of renewable electricity generation from Stage 3 of the Hornsdale Wind Farm. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">That power generation project is <span style="background:white"><span style="font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;"><span style="color:#222222">in the south-west of the Narien Range in South Australia, thousands of kilometres from the Australian capital</span></span></span>. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">In fact, the vast majority of the target is made up of energy generated well outside the ACT, mostly procured through reverse auctions of utility-scale wind and solar. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">By contrast, the seven jurisdictions above the ACT on the 100 per cent renewables ladder produce most of their clean energy within their borders. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Jurisdictions that had historically relied on hydro and geothermal energy were not included in the report, which sought to capture regions that had purposefully set out to transition away from fossil fuels. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Additionally, only regions with a population greater than 100,000 were included in the report. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Germany’s Rhein-Hunsrück leads the league with concerted efforts from 1999 to become energy independent; in order to save €290 million (AUD470 million) on imported energy. It has a lofty aim of producing enough clean electricity to create a substantial export commodity. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">“There are ambitious plans to increase clean energy exports from the district, with a general target of 828 per cent of demand by 2050,” the institute said. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The district’s sources include rooftop solar PV, wind and biomass, and it has a huge focus on <strong>energy efficiency</strong>. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Surplus power above local demand is: converted and stored as “green” methane, used for heat pumps, powers electric vehicles and is exported.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Further north in Germany, the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, whose population is about 1.6 million, produced 120 per cent of its electricity needs in 2013. A coastal region, it harnesses 4000GWh of wind energy, as well as power from solar and biomass. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The northern-most German state, Schleswig-Holstein, is relying on wind, solar and biomass energy to reach its target of 300 per cent renewable power by 2025. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">About 16,000 of the 2.9 million people in this region work in the clean energy sector.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Extremadura in south-west Spain first met its 100 per cent renewables target in 2010 through wind and hydro power. It now leads the world in solar thermal technology, which includes the use of various storage technologies. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Burgenland in Austria has a longstanding strategy to develop a clean energy economy through the manufacture of solar PV and integrating agriculture with energy production. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">It also happens to have one of the windiest regions in Central Europe in which its wind farms produce 45 per cent of the country’s generation capacity. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Back in the ACT, the 100 per cent target is being met through new, large-scale<strong> renewable energy</strong> projects around Australia, $500 million of which have been developed within the territory. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Some 25 per cent of the target is met through measures including the national<strong> Renewable Energy Target</strong>, the ACT’s legislated small and medium-scale Feed-in Tariff schemes and solar support provided by retailers, according to the institute. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">As a leader in the field, there is no doubt the ACT is miles ahead of other Australian regions. </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">But it still has a ways to go before it becomes a genuine <strong>renewable energy</strong> powerhouse.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The way things are shaping up in the renewable energy revolution, regions are going through five stages to <strong>renewable energy</strong> greatness and they are as follows:</span></span></span></p> <ul><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom: 13px;"> <h2><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Stage one:  100% net renewable electricity.</b></span></span></span></h2> </li> </ul><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   At this stage a region buys in or produces 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.</span></span></span></p> <ul><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom: 13px;"> <h2><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Stage two:  100% net renewable electricity within borders</b></span></span></span></h2> </li> </ul><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">  As the name suggests at this stage a region produces 100% net renewable electricity from within its borders i.e. imports of non-renewable electricity are matched by exports of renewable electricity.</span></span></span></p> <ul><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom: 13px;"> <h2><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Stage three: 100% net renewable energy </b></span></span></span></h2> </li> </ul><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   A big leap! At this stage not just electricity but primary energy (which is about 3 - 4 times the energy from electricity) is either bought in or produced within territorial borders.  This stage occurs when there is a widespread effort to electrify end-use services and/or produce large amounts of bio-energy. </span></span></span></p> <ul><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom: 13px;"> <h2><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Stage four: 100% net renewable energy sourced within borders</b></span></span></span></h2> </li> </ul><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   At stage four a region is producing 100% of its energy needs within its borders but does require some imports as supply does not always match instantaneous demand (but does on an annual basis). </span></span></span></p> <ul><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom: 13px;"> <h2><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Stage five: Energy independence 100% + renewable energy sourced within borders. </b></span></span></span></h2> </li> </ul><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   At this stage a region is truly energy independent in the fullest sense of the word, it is a net contributor of energy and the<strong> renewable energy </strong>revolution is essentially complete.  This stage will only be met once most end-use services are all electric such as heating and transport and storage technologies are widely deployed.  The existing grid interconnections are used for exports and to add additional security of supply.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The ACT should be lauded for its clean energy actions so far, but its renewable energy revolution as a long way to run yet.  The ACT has the renewable resources and the know how to reach stage 5, true energy independence, so  its current achievements should not blind people to the longer journey that it needs to  make.  The territory is a leader in Australia, however, it is a laggard on the international stage where best-practice in <strong>renewable energy</strong> independence is miles ahead.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-top:16px; margin-bottom:11px"> </p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/energy-efficiency" hreflang="en">Energy Efficiency</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/renewable-energy" hreflang="en">Renewable Energy</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:35:53 +0000 admin 5718 at https://pure-electric.com.au SA Libs' ‘Strangelove’ affair with hydrogen set to bomb https://pure-electric.com.au/news/sa-libs-strangelove-affair-hydrogen-set-bomb <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>SA Libs&#039; ‘Strangelove’ affair with hydrogen set to bomb</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 09/27/2019 - 12:25</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-09/SA%20LIBS-STRANGELOVE-AFFAIR%20WITH%20HYDROGEN%20SET%20TO%20BOMB.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="SA LIBS-STRANGELOVE-AFFAIR WITH HYDROGEN SET TO BOMB" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="MsoNormal"><p></p></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">South Australian Liberal MPs paranoid about the scale of <strong>renewable energy</strong> enabled by their Labor predecessors are recycling the fantasy that hydrogen is an economical fuel source that the state can produce at a scale large enough to earn export dollars.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Recycling is generally a good thing, but when it comes to repeating a myth that has been discredited by industry and science because producing hydrogen is complicated, expensive and downright dangerous once isolated, the notion becomes a bad idea.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">This week, the SA government </span></span><a href="http://www.renewablessa.sa.gov.au/content/uploads/2019/09/south-australias-hydrogen-action-plan-online.pdf" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">touted a plan</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%"> to introduce hydrogen energy into the fuel mix by piggy-backing it on top of renewables.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">In the same breath it pronounced that: “By 2025, it is predicted that 90 per cent of the state’s electricity could be generated from renewable sources based on Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) data.”</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Okay … so if solar and wind are going to help power virtually the entire state, what is the point of exploring the vapourware that is hydrogen energy?</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Well, according to the Premier Steven Marshall, it’s because: “Modelling for the Australian <strong>Renewable Energy</strong> Agency has forecast Australian hydrogen exports could contribute $1.7 billion and 2800 jobs to the national economy by 2030. Our aim is to position South Australia to attract a substantial share of that potential economic activity.”</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Sorry, Mr Marshall, there is no meaningful global market for hydrogen, and no other country is seriously considering developing one because exporting this highly explosive and corrosive fuel is not feasible.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">So, why is his infatuation with hydrogen so pronounced? Maybe Mr Marshall is being egged on by Liberal Party apparatchiks philosophically opposed to renewables.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Or perhaps the biggest bullies in the state’s corporate playground, Santos and BHP, want him to spend taxpayer money exploring any potential for their polluting resources to be part of the hydrogen hoax.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">The Premier needs to stop listening to the deluded and recognise that it would be far easier and more intelligent for SA to ramp up renewable electricity from its stated target of 90 per cent and export clean and safe power on the National Electricity Market (NEM) to the eastern states.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">This would help wean them off dirty coal power plants, many of which are  scheduled to be decommissioned anyway.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">And such an endeavour would be just a fraction as ambitious as the one </span></span><a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/cannon-brookes-confirms-investment-in-worlds-biggest-solar-project-34651/" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%"> has thrown his financial weight behind. The brilliant Aussie entrepreneur is spruiking a $25 billion, 3000km undersea cable to export solar energy to Singapore from the Northern Territory.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Here are only a few of many reasons why the SA government is on very shaky ground with its hydrogen fairy tale:</span></span></span></span></span></p> <ol><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">The former Bush administration gifted multiple billions of dollars to national laboratories, car companies and fuel-cell firms to research the feasibility of hydrogen as a fuel. And they produced zero results, according to aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Even a secondary school chemical student can tell you that Earth’s hydrogen is not freely available, like sunlight and wind are. It is combined with other chemicals, such as oxygen in water or embedded in hydrocarbons.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Hydrogen can be extracted from water via electrolysis, but it is a hugely expensive endeavour that would make it totally uneconomic as a fuel.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">As Mr Zubrin said in his </span></span><a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">expose</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">: “Before hydrogen can be transported anywhere, it needs to be either compressed or liquefied. To liquefy it, it must be refrigerated down to a temperature of minus 253 degrees Celsius. At these temperatures, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics make refrigerators extremely inefficient. As a result, about 40 per cent of the energy in the hydrogen must be spent to liquefy it. This reduces the actual net energy content of the fuel. And because it is a cryogenic liquid, still more energy would be lost as the hydrogen boiled away during transport and storage.”</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Exporting hydrogen, through pipelines or tankers, is virtually impossible with the technology we have today. Hydrogen diffuses into metals leading to deterioration of pipelines, valves, fittings and storage tanks.</span></span> <span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Its molecules are so small, they can not only escape through the most minutely flawed seal, they also penetrate through solid steel, leading to wasteful leakage. Who is going to absorb that cost?</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">And as for hydrogen-powered vehicles, well that narrative is peppered with failures which have cost car makers and tax payers billions of wasted research dollars over the last several years. Chemical process experts, such as </span></span><a href="https://evannex.com/blogs/news/tesla-model-3-vs-toyota-mirai-fuel-cell-vehicle" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Paul Martin</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">, have relentlessly tried to explain that “hydrogen is a dead end for cars … for thermodynamic reasons that are hard to argue with”.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Even entrenched in fuel cells, hydrogen is a highly flammable substance that would put drivers and their passengers in a vehicle ready to explode on impact.</span></span></span></span></span></li> </ol><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-left:48px; margin-bottom:11px"> </p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Good luck to the SA government if it can convince motorists to take the </span></span><a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RidingTheBomb" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><i><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Dr Strangelove</span></span></i></a><i> </i><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">challenge and ride a H-bomb to oblivion.</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:107%"><p></p></span></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/renewable-energy" hreflang="en">Renewable Energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 27 Sep 2019 02:25:08 +0000 admin 5700 at https://pure-electric.com.au How fast is the world moving to renewable energy? https://pure-electric.com.au/news/how-fast-world-moving-renewable-energy <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>How fast is the world moving to renewable energy?</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>manager</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Tue, 09/24/2019 - 11:18</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-09/HOW%20FAST%20IS%20THE%20WORLD%20MOVING%20TO%20RENEWABLE%20ENERGY.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="HOW FAST IS THE WORLD MOVING TO RENEWABLE ENERGY?" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Warning: Contains statics.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The <a href="/media/newswire/how-fast-world-moving-renewable-energy-190926"><strong>renewable energy</strong></a> revolution is getting quite a lot of media attention at the moment as people look for good news stories to balance out the dire news about global warming and the world having about a decade to make serious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. But what is actually happening on the <a href="/media/newswire/how-fast-world-moving-renewable-energy-190926"><strong>renewable energy </strong></a>front? How fast is the world moving to renewable energy? Will renewables cut emissions in time to make a difference to global warming?</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The short answer to these questions is we are moving very quickly to 100% <a href="https://pure-electric.com.au/media/newswire/how-fast-world-moving-renewable-energy-190926"><strong>renewable energy</strong></a> and we will get there before 2040 if we can maintain current growth rates.  So, while we might not make it to 100% renewable energy in one decade (there is a bit of uncertainty on the timeline) but after we do it is possible that any excess renewable energy could be used to power 'negative emissions technology', that is, the 'Hail Mary' technology being developed to suck CO<sub>2</sub> from the atmosphere in the future.  The long answer to these questions is as follows.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The fact that global warming and <a href="https://pure-electric.com.au/media/newswire/how-fast-world-moving-renewable-energy-190926"><strong>renewable energy</strong></a> has become so politicised really doesn't help getting a clear picture of where we are at and, it is fair to say, even the best reports on <strong>renewable energy </strong>don't give a very clear picture either; they provide mountains of good data but often forget to give the overall picture of where renewable energy is headed.  This article aims to clarify that picture.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Before we go any further a point needs to be clarified here; when we talk about energy we are talking about primary energy which is different to electricity (26% of electricity is powered by renewables), which makes up just 20% of primary energy.  To truly tackle emissions we need 100% <strong>renewable energy</strong> not just 100% renewable electricity.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Ok so first things first exactly how much <strong>renewable energy</strong> do we have now?    Well the 2019 REN21 global renewable status report (which is perhaps the best source for this data) puts <strong>renewable energy</strong> at 18.1% (of a global yearly energy consumption of 160 Peta Watt hours or PWh) which sounds great until you realise that <strong>"renewable energy"</strong> in this definition is made up of 10.6% "modern renewables" and 7.5 % "traditional biomass" aka burning wood.  "Modern renewables" includes: wind, solar, hydro, solar thermal, bio-fuel etc where wind and solar PV make up 1% each of primary energy.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Right so how fast is "modern <strong>renewable energy</strong>" growing... 4.5%; the burning wood part of primary energy (7.5%) is fortunately not growing at all.  The background to this 4.5% growth is that overall energy consumption growing 1.5% and fossil fuel energy growing 1.4%.  So from this we can see that fossil fuel energy is slowly but surely losing primary energy share (despite it having double the subsidy funding that <strong>renewable energy</strong> has).  But is that the whole picture?</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Well no, and the whole picture seems to be very well buried in most reports (for some reason) because the wind and solar PV parts of "modern renewables" (currently at 1% of primary energy each) are growing at 12.6 and 28.9% respectively.  These growth rates are incredibly rapid. To put it in perspective, if the growth rate in solar PV was maintained for 19 years 100%+ of primary energy would be provided by solar PV.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Whether these rates of growth can be maintain is unknown, but due to the distributed nature of solar PV and wind, and the fact that wind turbines and solar PV modules can be made in any country, high rates of growth are possible with the right policy settings by the various national governments. Perhaps the rate of growth in wind could be even faster than it is now, which would mean 100% <strong>renewable energy</strong> within a 15-20 year time frame.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">There is another factor that is inexplicably missing (or buried) in these reports and that is the fact that as primary energy moves to electricity, that is, as electricity supplies a greater and greater portion of primary energy going from 20% today to near 100% in the future, opportunities exist for massive efficiency gains.  Primary energy is currently used in the following three broad categories: 50% heating and cooling (which includes industrial processes where heat is required), 30% transport (planes, trains and automobiles) and 20% electricity (gizmos, gadgets, appliances, machinery).</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The thing to realise here is that as these three categories are more and more dominated by electricity, that is, all transport, heating and cooling are electrified, opportunities exist for at least a factor 4 reduction in energy used.  Which means the 160 PWh we currently use each year shrinks to more like 40 PWh. Now of course it might never reach that level of efficiency (or it might exceed it) but what that means is we can attack the problem from both ends and speed up the transition to 100% <strong>renewable energy</strong> even faster.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The take away message from looking at the data is that the<strong> renewable energy</strong> supply roll-out is happening fast and electrification of all energy services can give it a turbo boost, if we put the pedal to the metal we could get to 100% <strong>renewable energy</strong> worldwide by 2040 if not sooner. If we keep a rapid<strong> renewable energy </strong>roll-out and electrification of services as our clear goal there is every reason to believe the future will be bright and the worst of climate change will be avoided.  </span></span></span></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/renewable-energy" hreflang="en">Renewable Energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/energy-efficiency" hreflang="en">Energy Efficiency</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Tue, 24 Sep 2019 01:18:47 +0000 manager 5685 at https://pure-electric.com.au Tesla disruption - three years to go happening before your very eyes https://pure-electric.com.au/news/tesla-disruption-three-years-go-happening-your-very-eyes <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Tesla disruption - three years to go happening before your very eyes</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 04/26/2019 - 12:04</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-04/TESLA%20DISRUPTION.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="TESLA DISRUPTION" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><header id="yui_3_17_2_1_1556243468561_326"><p class="text-align-justify" data-content-field="title" id="yui_3_17_2_1_1556243468561_325" itemprop="headline">“They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan</p> <p class="text-align-justify" data-content-field="title" itemprop="headline">“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.” - Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, 2006, on rumours of an Apple phone</p> <header><h2 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Kodak Lessons From a Tragic Business Failure</span></h2> </header><section><p class="text-align-justify">    In 1975, Steve Sasson a Kodak engineer invented the world's first digital camera, a prototype the size of a toaster that captured black-and-white images at a unbelievably low resolution of just .01 megapixels (by comparison, there’s now smartphone with in excess of 50-megapixel resolution available).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Because the first digital camera was filmless, Kodak management wanted Sasson to keep quiet about his invention rather than embrace it as the future of photography.</p> <h1 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">And then there was Nokia</span></h1> </section></header><p class="text-align-justify">    When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!” </p> <p class="text-align-justify">When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a pretty average featured car with average finish and some cool features that they’re planning to build too, coming off the production lines at smaller volumes than they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent! (one of Tesla's new production lines is in a tent)” They say. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The Nokia people were absolutely mistaken and wrong. Could the car people be wrong too? Tesla is ‘the new iPhone’ if that's true what does it really mean? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is partly a question about Tesla, but it’s more interesting as a way to think about what happens when ‘software eats the world’ or software type innovation eats the world; that's when tech moves into new industries and that tech has the ability to make many iterative changes at the micro or nano scale.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">How do we decide or reckon with something being disruptive? If it is disruptive, who or what is getting disrupted? Does that disruption mean that one company is the winner in this brave new world? Which company will win?  Will the disrupter actually get disrupted itself by a new commodity priced version of its technology by the older players, killing off the disruptor shortly after it introduces its revolutionary new technology. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry. At the beginning, either the new thing itself or the companies bringing it (or both) tend to be bad at the things the incumbents value (older metrics of success), and get laughed at, but if they learn those things as well the laughter soon stops.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, the incumbents either dismiss the new thing as pointless or presume they’ll easily be able to add it (or both), but they’re  often wrong. Apple brought software and learnt phones, whereas Nokia had great phones but could not learn software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, not every new technology or idea is disruptive. Some things do not change the basis of competition enough, and for some things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead (these are not quite the same thing). Clay Christensen calls this ‘sustaining innovation’ as opposed to ‘disruptive innovation’ as is sustains the status quo. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However any new technology is probably disruptive to <em>someone,</em> at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Online flight booking didn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents (as Clay Christensen would define it). </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Meanwhile, the people who are first to bring the disruption to market may not be the people who end up benefiting from it, and indeed the people who win from the disruption may actually be doing something tangential - that is they may be in a different part of the value chain.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Apple pioneered PCs but lost the PC market, and the big winners were not even other PC makers. Rather, most of the profits went to Microsoft and Intel.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">PCs themselves became a low-margin commodity with fierce competition, but PC CPUs and operating systems (and productivity software) turned out to have a very strong winner-takes-all effects.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Being first is not the same as having a sustainable competitive advantage, no matter how disruptive you are, and the advantage might be somewhere else anyway. </p> <p class="text-align-justify"><strong>This gives us four things to think about when looking at Tesla:</strong> </p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ First, it does have to learn the ‘old’ things - it has to learn how to make cars at scale with the efficiency and quality that the existing car industry takes for granted, preferably not in a tent, and preferably without running out of cash on the way. But, solving ‘production hell’ is just a condition of entry - it’s not victory. If it can <em>only</em> do this, it’s just another car company, and that’s not what has anyone excited. It’s what the cars <em>are</em> that matters.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Second, Tesla also has to be doing new things that the incumbent car original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will struggle to learn. This is not quite the same as doing things that the OEMs’ suppliers will struggle to learn.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Third, those disruptive things need to be fundamentally important - they need to be enough to change the basis of competition, and to change what it is to be a car and a car company, so that it <em>matters</em> if they can’t be copied.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Fourth, in addition to all of these there needs to be some fundamental competitive advantage, not just over the existing car industry but also over other new entrants. Apple did things Nokia could not do, but it also does things that Google cannot do.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Now, let’s talk about what’s happening in cars. This is complex, because there are several somewhat separate changes happening at the same time. </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">First, batteries and motors </span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">Tesla has catalysed the realization that lithium batteries let us make electric cars that are as good as internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, and that if we can get the battery volumes high enough, these cars can eventually be as cheap as ICE cars.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The chart below shows the result. Batteries need to get to perhaps 100 $/kWh on this scale to be cost-competitive with gasoline - we're almost there. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 10.30.01 AM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="1308x956" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Many car industry insiders would say that Tesla has a lead of several years in the engineering and implementation of this.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, lithium batteries and electric motors are not an exotic new technology with lots of primary IP. Nor are there any network effects or ‘winner takes all’ effects.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Deterministically, it seems pretty likely that in the medium term (that is, by the time batteries are cheap enough for wholesale conversion of the industry from ICE to electric) both the batteries themselves and the motors and control systems will be mostly commodities.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">That does not mean there will not still be plenty of science and engineering to them, but rather that, just as happened to components for smartphones, the entire global electronics industry will be competing to make the best parts, and will sell them to whoever wants to buy. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In such an environment, creating great components in-house does not necessarily give you any particular advantage any further up the stack.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Sony’s image sensor unit is doing very well in the smartphone business, but Sony’s smartphone unit is not doing well at all.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, Apple rigorously manages close to 200 suppliers (including Sony) and designs only a small number of critically differentiated parts itself (for example, the FaceID sensor).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, industry insiders have opinions about who makes the best power amp or GPU, but this is mostly invisible to consumers, except in the aggregate of the choices made by the OEM. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">So, Tesla will have its battery factories (in partnership with Panasonic), and be one of the biggest suppliers, but in a decade that will be (on one estimate) perhaps 15% of global EV battery production.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">On one hand, that’s impressive for a new entrant, but on the other, it illustrates the fact that batteries will probably give only a limited competitive advantage. Everyone will have batteries. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="In this chart, grey is 2017, orange is 2023 and yellow is 2028" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="2334x1312" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">In this chart, grey is 2017, orange is 2023 and yellow is 2028</p> <p class="text-align-justify">It’s probably useful here to compare batteries in particular with the capacitive multi-touch screens in a smartphone.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Apple was the first to popularise these screens, and arguably still implements them best, and these screens fundamentally changed how you made a phone, but the whole industry adopted them.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are better and worse versions, but everyone can buy these screens now, and making a multitouch phone by itself is not a competitive advantage.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Meanwhile, electric is not just about replacing the fuel tank with a battery.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Electric disrupts the internal combustion engine and everything associated with it - you remove the whole drive train and replace it with something with 5 to 10 times fewer moving or breakable parts. You rip the spine out of the car.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is very disruptive to anyone in the <em>engine</em> business - it disrupts machine tools, and many of the suppliers of these components to the OEMs. A lot of the supplier base will change. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 10.41.02 AM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="1446x996" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is not the same as disrupting the OEMs themselves.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">If the OEMs can buy the components of an electric car as easily as anyone else, then the advantage in efficient scale manufacturing goes to the people who already have a lead in efficient scale manufacturing, since they’re doing essentially the same thing.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">In other words, it’s the same business, with some different suppliers, and electric <em>per se</em> looks a lot more like sustaining innovation.   </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Second, software, modularity and integration</span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">If the components will be a commodity, integrating them may not be - at least, not necessarily. </p> <p class="text-align-justify"><strong>First, </strong>the integration of the electric drive train components themselves is not trivial, and doing it better can get you more efficiencies.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is one of the places where Tesla probably has an engineering lead, today.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">What’s not clear is how big that lead will be in (say) five years, and quite what competitive advantage it gives. If, for the sake of argument, Tesla has a <strong>10% or 20%</strong> advantage on range at a given price, this matters for a touring sedan, but does it also matter for a minivan doing the school run, that drives 10 miles a day and parks in a garage with a charging point every night?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">How much of a competitive advantage will that be in 10 years, compared to all the other factors that people use to choose a car? Is this a margin advantage, a competitive advantage, or just a checkbox to be compared with other features? We’ll see. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This integration question is actually much broader than just the drive train. There’s an old car industry joke that you can see the organization chart of a car company in the dashboard, and also see that the steering wheel team hates the gear stick team.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">A modern car has dozens of different electrical and electronic systems, and these are mostly separate and independent. The ABS has nothing to do with the blind spot detection.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">All of these systems are bought by different teams at the OEM from different suppliers, and the only point of integration is the switches on the dashboard.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Each of these components has what the car industry calls ’software’ (“millions of lines of code!”), but this is really what Silicon Valley would call firmware, or at most 'device drivers' also, unlike Silicon Valley products,  these systems are expected to last for ten years and 150k miles). </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Much of this is probably going to change. We will go from complex cars with simple software to simple cars with complex software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Instead of many stand-alone embedded systems each doing one thing, we’ll have cheap dumb sensors and actuators controlled by software on a single central control board, running some <a href="http://www.ros.org/">sort of operating system</a>, with many different threads (there are a few candidates). This is partly driven by electric, but becomes essential for autonomy. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is clearly a challenge to the suppliers who make those separate systems, and there are also plenty of reasons why this might be hard for an incumbent car company to adapt to (most obviously, that org chart).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is also exactly the sort of thing that non-tech companies tend to think will be easy (‘we’ll just hire some developers!’), and instead make into a horrible mess, and they may have to go through a cycle of learning that they don’t do it well themselves before buying it from someone who does it better.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">That is, this looks a lot more like disruption than electric itself does. Tesla is of course already here, which is why it could fix a brake problem in the Model 3 over the air - the code it needed to change wasn’t in the brakes.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The question again, though, is quite what this means in the market for cars as opposed to the market for car <em>components</em>.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There’s a useful parallel here with PCs and laptops. Apple is very specific in what components it uses and how they are optimized to work together and fit into the available space, and this produces small, light, power-efficient laptops.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, a laptop from Dell, or a desktop PC, has much more flexibility and interchangeability of parts, which also means less integration and more empty space inside the case.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Each approach has its benefits, and the modular PC model had perfect product-market fit in the 1990s. So, how far does this translate into reasons to buy? </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Third, Tesla’s ‘experience’ disruption</span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">The obvious place to answer this question comes when you turn on the car, and this also takes us to the other parts of what makes owning a Tesla better, today.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">So far, we have been talking about the electric drivetrain itself - the ‘skateboard’. It seems more likely that this disrupts the OEMs’ supply chain than the OEMs themselves.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, there is a whole other class of aspects of a Tesla that are different, both inside the car and in things like the dealer experience. How do we think about these? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The easiest place to see disruption from Tesla is in the dashboard of the Model 3.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are reasons discussed above why it will be organizationally difficult for a car company to put absolutely everything onto one screen. But the deeper reasons might just be how much they want to do it.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The Model 3 dashboard is partly about cost saving (fewer widgets to install), but this is also a rejection of a huge number of deeply embedded beliefs about what a car should be. This is not how car people think. Car UIs today feel little like feature phones in 2006, <a href="https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/01/10/cars-as-featurephones">as I wrote here last year</a>.</p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-21 at 1.17.23 PM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png" data-image-dimensions="2286x1420" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are other cool things that come from the <em>de novo</em> model. Outside the car itself, Tesla can sell direct on a fixed price instead of going through dealers.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">OEM dealers often have contracts around who can install new software (so no remote updates allowed) and those dealers make most of their profits from repairs.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Around half of repair spending is on things directly linked to the ICE - no ICE means no oil leaks or broken fan belts. Dealers also play an important role in setting pricing and incentives, and driving demand to specific models.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">These are all more things that are hard for the incumbent industry to adapt to.  </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, again, it’s unclear to me how <em>central</em> these things are. The counter-argument, perhaps, is that that this is comparable to things like the Apple Stores, or the on-device activation of your phone account when you buy an iPhone.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">These are nice, and a selling point, and hard for Samsung to match, but do we think Apple’s market share would collapse without them? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is of course very subjective (“how much does this cool thing matter?”), so here’s a thought experiment: if these factors were the <em>only</em> difference between a Tesla and a BMW or Mercedes, and the drive train, acceleration etc were all identical, would they be enough?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">If BMW suddenly started selling direct and doing seamless OTA firmware updates, would Tesla’s share price collapse? Probably not. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Less subjectively, it’s not clear there will be winner takes all effects here. There <em>might</em> be a developer ecosystem on the car itself, but it’s just as likely that the proper place for apps in your car is on your phone, <a href="https://smartcar.com/">or in the cloud</a>. Certainly, it’s too early to be sure. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Finally, as really should be obvious, there will be chargers everywhere. Once the actual motivation is there, all sorts of companies will build charging stations everywhere they can. The only barrier is capital - there’s no competitive moat here.</p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Fourth, autonomy </span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (<a href="https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences">I wrote about this here</a>), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In most of the previous conversation, I talked about how Tesla as a technology company would or would not disrupt non-tech companies. However, in autonomy, Tesla is not just competing with car companies - it’s competing with other software companies. It doesn’t have to beat Detroit at software - it has to beat all the rest of Silicon Valley at software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In this competition, Tesla’s thesis is that the data it can collect from its cars will give it a crucial advantage.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The only reason that anyone is interested in autonomy today is that the emergence of machine learning (ML) in the last 5 years probably gives us a way to make it work.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Machine learning, in turn, is about extracting patterns from large amounts of data, and then matching things against those patterns. So how much data do you have?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, Tesla’s approach to autonomy has been to put as many sensors as possible into the cars it’s already selling, and collect as much data as possible from those sensors. It can do this because its cars are already built on a software platform (as discussed above) - it can ‘just’ add the sensors, in ways that the existing OEMs cannot yet do.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Then, as it gets more and more levels of autonomy working, it can push that out over the air (OTA) to the cars as software updates. Since it already has so many cars with these sensors on the road, this will have a self-reinforcing ‘winner takes all’ effect: it will have more data, and so its autonomy will be better, and so it will sell more cars, get more self-driven miles and so have more data. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">If this pays off, it would indeed be a profound and compelling competitive advantage for Tesla, even without thinking about all the other possibilities, such as renting your Tesla out as an autonomous taxi. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, this is just a thesis, and there are two basic questions underlying it: can we do autonomy with vision, and what winner takes all effects apply?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">First, vision. The really obvious problem with Tesla’s autonomy plan is that today ‘as many sensors as possible’ means that Tesla is using cameras placed around the car to give a 360 degree view, plus radar that is only forward-facing (and some short-range ultrasonics). This means it must rely on vision alone to get a full 360 degree 3D model of the world around the car. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Unfortunately, computer vision is not yet able to do this well enough.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Most people in the field would agree that this will be possible at some point (after all, humans don’t have LIDAR), but it’s not possible yet.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Moreover, this isn’t a question of just adding more data and getting vision to work by brute force (or at least, we don’t know that it is). This is why pretty much everyone else is using vision combined with multiple LIDAR sensors and often multiple radar units as well.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Today, that adds tens of thousands of dollars of cost to each vehicle. If you’re only running an engineering testing and development fleet of at most a few dozen or hundred vehicles, this is bearable, but it’s clearly not possible to add this to every new Tesla Model 3 - the sensors would cost more than the car. (There’s also the issue that you have to add bulky, fragile and impractical lumps all over the car.)</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The cost and size of these sensors is falling fast (for example, there is a race to get the first solid-state LIDAR working), but we are still some years away from their being cheap enough to put on a production car. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">But meanwhile, even if you do have a sensor suite and ‘sensor fusion’ that can create an accurate 3D model of the world around the car, the rest of the autonomous puzzle isn’t working yet for anyone, nor does anyone in the field think that this is close. Bits of it work quite well - cruise control on highways, say - but the whole does not. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, Tesla’s first bet is that it will solve the problem of building a model of your surroundings using only vision before the other sensors get small and cheap, <em>and</em> that it will solve all the rest of the autonomy problems by then as well. This is strongly counter-consensus.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">It hopes to succeed taking the harder way before anyone else does it the easier way. That is, it’s entirely possible that Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project), or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1,000 or $2,000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The second bet is that Tesla will be able to get autonomy working with enough of a lead to benefit from a strong winner-takes-all effect - ‘more cars means more data means better autonomy means more cars’. After all, even if Tesla did get the vision-only approach working, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no-one else would. Hence, the bet is that autonomous capability will not be a commodity. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This takes us back to the data. Tesla clearly has an asset in the data it can collect from the 200k+ Autopilot 2 cars it’s already sold. On the other hand, Waymo’s cars have driven 8m miles, doubling in the last year or so. Tesla’s have driven more (without LIDAR, but set that aside), but how much do you need? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is really a question about all machine learning projects: at what point are there diminishing returns as you add more data, and how many people can get that amount of data? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">It does seem as though there should be a ceiling for autonomy - if a car can drive in Naples for a year without ever getting confused, how much more is there to improve?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">At some point you’re effectively finished. So, how many cars gathering data do you need before your autonomy is as good as the best on the market? How many companies might be able to reach that? I</p> <p class="text-align-justify">s this 100 or a thousand cars driving for a year, or 1 million cars? And meanwhile, machine learning itself is changing quickly - one cannot rule out the possibility that the amount of data you need might shrink dramatically. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">So: it’s possible that Tesla gets the vision-only approach to work, and gets the rest of autonomy working as well, and its data and its fleet makes it hard for anyone else to catch up for years.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">But it’s also possible that Waymo gets this working and decides to sell it to everyone. It’s possible that by the time this starts to go mainstream, 5 or 10 companies get it working, and autonomy looks more like ABS than it looks like x86 or Windows. It’s possible that Elon Musk’s assertion that it should work with vision alone is correct, and 10 other companies then get it working. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">All of these are possible, but, to repeat, this answer is not a question of disruption, and this is not a matter of whether software people will beat non-software people - these are all software people. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This post began as a much shorter piece about Tesla and Netflix, comparing two companies that are using software to change other industries. But the fascinating thing about Tesla is that there are so many different things going on, and so many different kinds of innovation. I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of things. One of the issues that recurs in thinking about Tesla is that tech people don’t really know enough about cars, and car people don’t really know enough about software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">But the history of the tech industry is full of companies where having a lovely product, or being the first to see or build the future, were not enough. Indeed, the car industry is the same - a great, innovative car and a great car company are not the same thing. Tesla owners love their cars.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">I loved my Palm V, and my Nokia Lumia, and my father loved his Saab 9000. But being first isn’t enough and having a great product isn’t enough - you have to try to think about how this fits into all the broader systems. </p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/clean-energy" hreflang="en">Clean energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 26 Apr 2019 02:04:24 +0000 admin 5211 at https://pure-electric.com.au Nine myths about new energy https://pure-electric.com.au/node/673 <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--blog.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Nine myths about new energy</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--blog.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--blog.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Mon, 10/15/2018 - 13:22</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-blog-image--blog.html.twig * field--node--field-blog-image.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--field-blog-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2018-10/new-energy.png" width="1009" height="476" alt="" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--blog.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="text-align-justify">Nine myths about new energy</p> <p class="text-align-justify"> </p> <p class="text-align-justify">I will begin this list with my first introduction to a myth about renewable energy, put forward by the 'pro-nuclear, pro-coal, anti-renewable' advocates circa 2005:</p> <p class="text-align-justify"> </p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>1) ‘We could never integrate more than 5% intermittent renewables (they meant wind and solar) into an electricity grid.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Fast-forward to 2015, South Australia is going to be 35% renewable powered next year with a plan to reach 50% in the not-too-distant future. And there’s no reason why this contribution can’t double. Denmark gets 40% of its electricity from wind and is aiming for 100% renewables (that’s <em>all </em>energy including heating and transportation). And after a very slow start compared to neighbouring Germany, the Danes are now going gangbusters installing solar on their rooftops.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>2) ‘Wind turbines will never pay back the energy to produce them.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">This one’s a real doozy – wind power has some of the quickest energy payback of any technology. Even out of date 'life cycle' assessments put wind power’s energy payback time at five to six months; compare this to a wind farm’s 30-year lifespan (onshore windfarms can last even longer, especially in drier areas) and the truth is that wind farms produce at least 60 times the energy that was required to make them. A new generation of turbines in development by the world’s biggest energy industry technology player, General Electric, will dramatically reduce material inputs for wind turbines and reduce payback time to around two months, thus giving an EROI factor (energy returned on energy invested) in excess of 100.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>3) ‘The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine; therefore wind and <a href="https://pure-electric.com.au/products/rooftop-solar">solar </a>are unreliable sources of energy and need more back-up.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Much as it pains me to have to debunk this well-worn myth (without simply saying ‘go look up a company called Tesla’) it just got mouthed by none other than Tony ‘I’m not a tech-head’ Abbott. Perhaps the Prime Minister should seek some technical advice from the Germans and Danes – with higher penetrations of renewable energy than Australia they suffer far far fewer hours of grid reliability issues when compared to the Australian grid. Existing coal, gas and hydro plant in Northern Europe balances wind and solar right up to a future of 60% of total annual energy from those renewable sources, according to studies commissioned by grid operators National Grid in the UK and Energinet of Denmark. But of course, along the way the power storage industry is gearing up to deploy batteries behind the meter and on the grid (by innovating and slashing prices) well before we get anything like 60% penetration of renewable energy on the Australian grid or even before the aforementioned Danes or Germans manage it.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>4) 'Additional renewable generation has not replaced conventional generation in the usual sense; just adding capacity to the energy mix without forcing the retirement of conventional plant.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Wrong again. We only have to travel to South Australia to see that wind and solar – which produce about 35% of the state’s electricity with the recent commissioning of TrustPower’s Snowtown II wind farm– have displaced fossil fuel generation. An example of this is the announcement by Alinta Energy that it will will shutter and decommission all its coal-fired power generation capacity at the Playford and Northern coal power stations. Along with these two power plants, the Leigh Creek coal mine and connecting railway will also be shuttered.  This has occurred due to the introduction of renewables and it is only the beginning ... as it becomes clear that renewables are the cheapest source of energy, the decline of the fossil fuel sector will accelerate in Australia and around the world.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>5) ‘People in the developing world will need to consume energy equivalent to current per capita consumption in the West (about 40GJ per person per year) if their standard of living is to be raised up to be equal to the West.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is another mistaken bit of analysis which looks at the gross energy required to deliver services (that make up a First World lifestyle) rather than the services themselves. With improved technology, I have shown that a household in a typical ‘Western’ city such as Melbourne can go from using 114GJ of energy per year to just 13GJ per year (and exporting 72 GJ). This was achieved by switching from gas to electricity for heating, cooking and hot water and installing solar, all of which has an economic payback for the householder above the government bond rate. Further improvements are possible that would more than halve the 13GJ per year that is used, which means a cleverly designed house (and an electric car) along with an upgrade to industry can support a Western lifestyle and consume the same amount of energy as people in Vietnam (which uses ~30GJ per capita per year) or Cambodia (15GJ per capita per year).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">(By the way, the Melbourne volume built house in the case study was a whopping 288sqm.)</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>6) ‘The rebound effect, or Jevons paradox or Kazoom Brooks, means that energy saved in efficiency will be wasted in other ways.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Oil companies and gas and electricity utilities don’t like to see customers using less of their products so they’re always out to try and give the idea that any effort put into energy efficiency will be wasted. Economies like Denmark, Germany and the parts of the US have shown how decoupling energy from growth is quite simple when you move away from traditional energy development paths. My previous example, of the house which reduced energy consumption by 90%, occurred with a minimum of rebound (indeed it would be hard to see where the house could waste the 90% of energy saved even if it wanted to). If energy drops for someone’s house and transportation by 85-90% it doesn’t really matter if they have a 5% or 10% rebound the change is still disruptive and should refocus society’s thinking on what is possible.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>7) ‘Past solar installations in Spain, Italy, Germany and Australia cost a bomb and were a waste of money.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Wrong; they were an excellent investment for all of the world’s peoples, including the citizens in each of those pioneering countries. Every panel that has been installed has made the next solar panel cheaper. The heavy lifting that Germany, Spain, Italy, China and Australia have done has given the world power that is, on average, cheaper than what is available on the world’s grids and what will in the future be cheaper than power generated from any other source anywhere on earth.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>8) ‘The merit-order effect will make solar power generated in the middle of the day worthless causing the technology to cannibalise its own market.’</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">The answer to this one isn’t just storage but electric vehicle charging. People, on the whole, use their cars in the morning from 6am-9am and in the evening from 3:30pm-7pm. In between is the middle of the day, and that’s when the contribution from the sun is at its greatest.  Whether it’s from charge points at your workplace or from your home solar array, it’s obvious that in the future the low cost of solar during the day will give us cheap travel. Solar won’t be wasted – it will be turned into forward motion for our cars with the rest stored for cooking and space conditioning in the evening.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em>9) ‘Solar will never be cheap enough to complete with fossil fuels.’ </em></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hmmm, gee, well it’s really cheap in developing countries. And that’s because labour is now dwarfing the cost of the hardware in the developed world. But solar costs are coming down in countries like Australia as well. It used to be 10  times the price of what the technology is today (but that goes for almost all technology – think computers or mobile phones). People who said solar would never be cheap enough seriously jumped the gun and lacked the imagination and foresight to see the trend that indicated this technology would become very cheap and, therefore, the energy source demanded by all. One way that solar will get cheaper is where the labour used to roof our houses will instead roof them in solar panels. That means the incremental labour costs for solar on new houses will be almost eliminated.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are many many more myths about renewables to be debunked (some honourable mentions include ‘solar panels can’t face south’ and ‘batteries will always be expensive’), indeed there are about as many as there are entrenched interests who desperately want solar to not disrupt their nice, cosy and lucrative world of energy supply.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">But if you’re sharp then you’ll be getting familiar with <a href="https://pure-electric.com.au/products/rooftop-solar">solar</a>, whether it’s as an investor on your roof, investor in a listed solar company or an angel investor in some new innovation that just may be the next thing that makes solar even cheaper again.</p> <p class="text-align-justify"><em><a href="https://pure-electric.com.au/staff/matthew-wright"><strong>Matthew Wright</strong></a> holds a graduate diploma in engineering and is executive director of Zero Emissions Australia, technical director at Efficiency Matrix and resident columnist at </em>Climate Spectator<em>.</em></p> <p class="text-align-justify"><a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/news-story/nine-myths-about-new-energy/149edf16cfe5d1dab6288451ee0f3f0a"><em>The Australian</em></a></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-blog-category--blog.html.twig * field--node--field-blog-category.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--field-blog-category.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-category field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field--item"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1" hreflang="en">Uncategoried</a></div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--blog.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--blog.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/pure-electric-1" hreflang="en">pure electric</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/australian" hreflang="en">the australian</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/solar-roof" hreflang="en">solar roof</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/solargain" hreflang="en">Solargain</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/matthew-wright" hreflang="en">Matthew Wright</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Mon, 15 Oct 2018 02:22:38 +0000 admin 673 at https://pure-electric.com.au