Electric vehicles are great for utilities: EV batteries can serve as distributed storage - a major problem in integrating more renewables in the grid for grid energy. But, for the first time in the more than 100-year existence of electric utilities, batteries are public infrastructure that is owned, operated and maintained by consumers. Gretchen Bakke’s The Grid explains this well.
Batteries and Fuel Cells don’t solve renewable storage (yet): The electrodes for EV batteries use one or more of Cobalt, Nickel, Manganese. The electrodes of Fuel cells (use for generating electricity from hydrogen) use platinum and iridium. Marco Alvera writes in The Hydrogen Revolution:
Currently, hydrogen cars need about 30gms of platinum to use as a catalyst in their PEM fuel cells, which is five to ten times as much as traditional vehicles use in their catalytic convertors.
The procurement, processing and handling of rare minerals is environmentally damaging and now we’re looking to extract them from seabeds. While recycling materials from used batteries helps, we need other solutions to prevent the environmental damage from deploying a billion electric and fuel cell vehicles.
In the age of renewables, tropical countries have political clout: The capacity of new Solar installations far exceeds Wind power installations in recent years and will continue to do as projected by IRENA until 2030.
Temperate zones must store solar energy not just for the temporal shift from day to night, but also from summer to winter to provide energy for heating. In tropical countries, peak production for solar coincides with seasonal peak consumption for air-conditioning. And the tropics also have higher solar generation potential. The tropics will be net energy exporters and have a better seat at the table.
Excerpts from what I’ve been reading
On the polymath, polyglot (fluent in 15 languages including Telugu, Marathi, English, Hindi, Spanish) former Indian Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao:
Some months after the elections, Narasimha Rao was present in the room when Rajiv Gandhi told a friend that he intended to open up electronic and computer imports to India. ‘But the old guard in my party will not understand’, Rajiv complained within earshot of his defence minister. Narasimha Rao said little.
That evening, he called up his son, the engineer Prabhakara. The home computer revolution had only begun in the late 1970s, and computers were a novelty even in the United States. ‘You keep talking about this computer thing. What is it? Send me one’, Rao said. The next day, Prabhakara sent a prototype to Delhi. Prabhakara also hired a computer specialist to teach his father. Ever the technophile, Rao bought manuals to read on his own, and within fifteen days, told the specialist he was redundant. Rao would master two computer languages, COBOL and BASIC, and would also go on to write code in the mainframe operating system UNIX. Narasimha Rao’s love for learning had merged with his instinct for political survival.
Michael Nielsen on creative contexts:
But my focus here is on something I've seen much less discussed, what I shall call narrow creative contexts (mostly omitting "narrow"). This is the tiny little nub of a thing – maybe just an image or a phrase – that you hold onto, that gradually comes into focus, and then blossoms, the animating force driving the project. It's the emotional and intellectual force driving the work, the thing you return to over and over. People will sometimes describe it as "the idea", but it's often both considerably more and less than an idea. And if you get disconnected from it, don't nurture and stew in it enough, don't believe in it enough, you start to lose contact with your project
…solo creative work is about a combination of maintaining a strong emotional commitment and a strong intellectual context. You do those other things and the emotional commitment erodes, and the intellectual context fades. Your work somehow just isn't as good as you want; then you lose confidence. Almost everyone I know who is good at this kind of thing seems to be aspirationally (if not in practice) something of a monomaniac.
I built a side project over the weekend to answer queries on the 2023 Formula 1 season. Try F1omo.
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