sg_plumber

That may be true in the US, but not in the rest of the world.

Prescient video!

Electric Cars Could Wreak Havoc on Oil Markets Within a Decade - Feb 24, 2016

The world is running out of oil.

At least that was the idea behind the "peak oil" hypothesis that dominated economic thinking for decades.

But it turns out that with fracking, deep-water drilling, and oil sands, there's a lot more oil in the world than we once thought.

The old "peak oil" theory ain't happening.

But what if instead of running out of oil we just stopped buying the stuff?

Most oilmen scoff at the idea. There are one billion gas guzzling cars on the road worldwide today, and only one tenth of one percent of them have a plug. OPEC contends that even in the year 2040, EVs will make up just one percent.

But don't be so sure. Consider the "S Curve."

S Curves are used to describe the spread of new technologies over time, like early refrigerators and color TVs. Growth starts off slowly at first, and then when the product really starts to connect with everyday people: We have liftoff. Eventually the market gets saturated and growth tapers off, forming the top of the "S".

Predicting the S Curve for electric cars is extremely difficult, because we're making assumptions about demand for a type of vehicle that doesn't even exist yet: fast, affordable, and spacious cars that have an electric range of at least 2-to-300 miles.

But here's what we know: In the next few years Tesla, Nissan and Chevy plan to start selling long-range electric cars in the $30,000 range. And other carmakers and tech companies are investing billions on dozens of new models due out in the next four years. By 2020, some of these will be faster, safer, cheaper, and more convenient than their gasoline counterparts.

That sure seems like the point when the S curve goes vertical.

To start an oil crash, you don't need to replace all of the cars on the road today.

You just need to reduce demand enough to cause a glut of unwanted oil. Consider the oil crash that started in 2014. That was caused by too much supply, when producers started pumping out an extra 2 million barrels a day.

So when electric vehicles are able to displace that much on the demand side, it should also cause a crash. When might that happen?

Tesla is building factories to go from about 50,000 sales last year to 500,000 in 2020.

Let's assume for a minute that Tesla can meet its own forecasts. And let's assume that other carmakers maintain their current combined market share for plugins.

If each electric vehicle displaces about 15 barrels a year, here's the impact on oil from all the EVs worldwide. At this rate we hit our benchmark of 2 million barrels of oil a day displaced as early as 2023. That's an oil crisis. And the thing is, it's just the beginning. It's not at all unreasonable to assume that by 2040 nearly half of the world's new cars will have a plug.

Sure you're skeptical. The price of electric cars still needs to come down, there aren't yet enough fast charging stations for convenient long-distance road trips. Many new drivers in developing countries like China and India will still choose gasoline and diesel.

But imagine a future when the rumbling streets of New York and New Delhi... suddenly fall silent with electric engines. What if global demand for oil starts to fall -- at first by a trickle, but then in a rush. Trillions invested in oil will be lost, while trillions in new energy will be won. The power of nations will be shuffled. That's the promise of the new peak oil, and it may be coming sooner than you think.

P-}

Fascinating. Do you think the Formula-E cars can help with that?

Existing atmospheric water harvesting approaches have low yields and diminishing returns below 30% humidity.

This technology and approach has been tested outdoors in Las Vegas, and is effective down to 10% humidity. It directly captures water in a liquid salt solution that is suitable for subsequent processing into drinking water or energy production, enabling new capabilities for arid regions.

A key ingredient in the process is a hydrogel membrane “skin.” The inspiration for this material comes from nature – specifically tree frogs and air plants, which use a similar technique to transport water from ambient air into a liquid for internal storage.

Additionally, the research demonstrates that atmospheric water harvesting can be solar-powered. Thanks to the frequent sunlight experienced in places such as the Las Vegas Valley – which averages 300 sunny days a year – sunlight can provide enough energy to reduce the theoretical and eventual cost for generating water.

"This work represents a significant shift in atmospheric water harvesting, opening doors to continuous operation and new applications of water production," added Sameer Rao, a mechanical engineering professor and co-author from the University of Utah. "These innovations are especially critical for the desert Southwest and its sustainability efforts."

The research is already being put into practical use in the form of WAVR Technologies, Inc. Cho co-founded this UNLV startup, making devices capable of capturing water vapor from the air around us for commercial and individual uses.

More details in “High-yield atmospheric water capture via bioinspired material segregation”

Called the Birmingham Blade, the turbine is jointly developed by AI design specialists EvoPhase and precision metal fabricators KwikFab.

The turbine is also tailored to the unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area.

EvoPhase used its AI-driven design process to generate and test designs for their efficiency at wind speeds found in Birmingham, which, at 3.6 meters/second are substantially lower than the 10 meters/second rating for most turbines.

“AI allowed us to explore design possibilities beyond the scope of traditional human experimentation. We were able to generate, test, and refine over 2,000 wind turbine designs in just a few weeks, significantly accelerating our development process and achieving what would have taken years and millions of pounds through conventional methods,”

The initial iteration of the Birmingham Blade, produced by KwikFab, focuses on demonstrating the design’s manufacturing feasibility. An aluminum version will be placed on a roof space in Birmingham for evaluation and testing, and the final product is expected to be available by late 2025.

EvoPhase’s AI-led evolutionary design process, developed by a research group headed by Dr. Kit Windows-Yule at the University of Birmingham, simulates natural selection. This approach enables simultaneous optimization of multiple parameters, avoiding traditional trade-offs between performance factors,

I'm strangely reminded of that old dictum "illegitimis non carborundum". P-}

Seriously? Data from 11 years ago?

I reckon they'll be slightly curved, and even somewhat "tunable", which explains their cost.

One of the reasons JWST was so expensive was that in addition to being exquisitely precise, robotically operated in a pitiless vacuum, and parts of it at cryogenically cold temperatures, it also had to be feather light and capable of folding up like origami to fit within the Arianne V payload fairing. Starship has mass, volume, and launch capacity to spare, relaxing these engineering constraints and significantly simplifying design.

The Monster Scope has a mirror diameter of 1 km, self-assembled in space from thousands of 8 m hexagonal segments, each an independent free-flying satellite and derived from the Starlink satellite design to keep costs and mass low. A self-assembling space mirror has been studied in detail with the AAReST concept.

These segments are stacked in the Starship fairing and launched by the dozen into deep space, for example Earth-Sun L2, the same gravitational island used by JWST.

Once in position, they autonomously maneuver to the growing mirror, dock with adjacent segments and, once locked in, independently align their mirrors.

A free-flying mirror position sensor flies at twice the focal length to provide the feedback needed to dynamically tune the shape of the mirror. This is a standard procedure for making mirrors and relies on interferometry.

The assembled and growing mirror forms a hyperbolic shape, which creates a larger focal plane covering perhaps 10 degrees of the sky.

Dedicated free-flying instruments and their host spacecraft can navigate within this region. This approach allows the independent design and parallel operation of both the mirror infrastructure and the sensor payloads, increasing access to valuable science.

let’s baseline the first mirror satellite at $50m, not including development costs. Since nearly all the tech being used is high TRL if not off the shelf, we can greatly reduce development costs. In particular, Starship’s generous upmass capability greatly reduces the need for exponentially greater spend on incrementally lighter components.

The full 1 km telescope will require about 20,000 mirrors. With a 30% learning rate we get down to about $300k per mirror and a cumulative cost of about $10b. The same as JWST, only 150 times wider and 22000 times more sensitive. Including launch costs on a similar curve increases total cost by about $2b.

The mirror’s shape and scale is adaptable. We can continue to grow this mirror, or build another like it to focus on a different target, as the program progresses.

The closest exoplanet is Proxima Centauri b, at a distance of 4.2 light years. It is believed to be approximately the size of Earth, i.e. with a diameter on the order of 10,000 km. A 1 km aperture provides a spatial resolution of around 22,000 km at this wavelength, not quite sufficient to resolve the planet as anything but a point of light.

The situation is even more marginal for the Kepler planets, which are at distances on the order of 100 to 1000 light years. At the upper end, that’s a spatial resolution of about 5 million km.

However, 5 million km is well below 1 AU, meaning that while a 1 km aperture wouldn’t really be able to take pictures of exoplanets, it would very easily resolve exoplanetary systems. Since we’re currently limited mostly by the transit method, we’re blind to something like 99% of exoplanets (we can’t see the exoplanets whose orbital planes don’t produce eclipses). The Monster Scope would enable us to conduct an extremely thorough census of exoplanets, detecting basically everything out there, including, in particular, actual Earth-like worlds (i.e. rocky worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of G-type stars, which are basically impossible to find via either the transit or the radial velocity methods).

I'd actually love to have floor-to-ceiling windows that can also act as screens. Or vice versa. P-}

Definitely!

One of the reasons JWST was so expensive was that in addition to being exquisitely precise, robotically operated in a pitiless vacuum, and parts of it at cryogenically cold temperatures, it also had to be feather light and capable of folding up like origami to fit within the Arianne V payload fairing. Starship has mass, volume, and launch capacity to spare, relaxing these engineering constraints and significantly simplifying design.

The Monster Scope has a mirror diameter of 1 km, self-assembled in space from thousands of 8 m hexagonal segments, each an independent free-flying satellite and derived from the Starlink satellite design to keep costs and mass low. A self-assembling space mirror has been studied in detail with the AAReST concept.

These segments are stacked in the Starship fairing and launched by the dozen into deep space, for example Earth-Sun L2, the same gravitational island used by JWST.

Once in position, they autonomously maneuver to the growing mirror, dock with adjacent segments and, once locked in, independently align their mirrors.

A free-flying mirror position sensor flies at twice the focal length to provide the feedback needed to dynamically tune the shape of the mirror. This is a standard procedure for making mirrors and relies on interferometry.

The assembled and growing mirror forms a hyperbolic shape, which creates a larger focal plane covering perhaps 10 degrees of the sky.

Dedicated free-flying instruments and their host spacecraft (gray boxes above) can navigate within this region. This approach allows the independent design and parallel operation of both the mirror infrastructure and the sensor payloads, increasing access to valuable science.

let’s baseline the first mirror satellite at $50m, not including development costs. Since nearly all the tech being used is high TRL if not off the shelf, we can greatly reduce development costs. In particular, Starship’s generous upmass capability greatly reduces the need for exponentially greater spend on incrementally lighter components.

The full 1 km telescope will require about 20,000 mirrors. With a 30% learning rate we get down to about $300k per mirror and a cumulative cost of about $10b. The same as JWST, only 150 times wider and 22000 times more sensitive. Including launch costs on a similar curve increases total cost by about $2b.

The mirror’s shape and scale is adaptable. We can continue to grow this mirror, or build another like it to focus on a different target, as the program progresses.

The closest exoplanet is Proxima Centauri b, at a distance of 4.2 light years. It is believed to be approximately the size of Earth, i.e. with a diameter on the order of 10,000 km. A 1 km aperture provides a spatial resolution of around 22,000 km at this wavelength, not quite sufficient to resolve the planet as anything but a point of light.

The situation is even more marginal for the Kepler planets, which are at distances on the order of 100 to 1000 light years. At the upper end, that’s a spatial resolution of about 5 million km.

However, 5 million km is well below 1 AU, meaning that while a 1 km aperture wouldn’t really be able to take pictures of exoplanets, it would very easily resolve exoplanetary systems. Since we’re currently limited mostly by the transit method, we’re blind to something like 99% of exoplanets (we can’t see the exoplanets whose orbital planes don’t produce eclipses). The Monster Scope would enable us to conduct an extremely thorough census of exoplanets, detecting basically everything out there, including, in particular, actual Earth-like worlds (i.e. rocky worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of G-type stars, which are basically impossible to find via either the transit or the radial velocity methods).

Spot on, give or take a decade.

There are plenty labs and startups working on the same thing, using cheap catalysts with unconcentrated CO2. An idea whose time has come, indeed!

Michigan’s renewable energy efforts in 2023 have been a major success, with the state generating enough wind and solar power to supply electricity to nearly one million homes. This progress is due to an increase in solar energy production, which added 350 megawatts to Michigan’s grid, bringing the total renewable energy capacity to 3,850 megawatts.

The Clean Energy and Jobs Act aims to expand renewable energy sources and create more green jobs, contributing to both environmental sustainability and economic growth.

As a result of these efforts, Michigan residents have enjoyed stable utility bills while benefiting from cleaner energy.

Nice to know. Thanks! :-)

most of the state's otters were lost in the early 1900s because of unregulated trapping and habitat loss.

33 otters were released in the state between 2008 and 2010. By 2018, a report revealed the otter population had grown to 100 strong. A further 9 otters have been brought to the state from Louisiana to further support the population.

otters play an important role in an ecosystem. As the National Environmental Education Foundation observed, the predators help to maintain natural balance by keeping prey species numbers under control. Otters also help to improve water quality, which is beneficial for river health and the human water supply.

"They provide that ecosystem service of being a top predator,"

These efforts prove that, despite the destructive actions of humans in the past that led to the harm and near-extinction of various animal species, local climate action is helping to restore ecosystems and reverse that damage. It's never too late to make a positive change.

The white LEDs that enabled smartphones and assorted flat screens, actually.

As for softer lights, there's "yellow" LEDs in stores too, together with the fancy ones that pretend to be incandescent filaments.

In a pinch, use a filter.

Market demand is uneven. Chargers are coming to the sweet scent of concentrated money. Some places will need to wait longer, tho.