The Future is Electric (2024)

01/04/2022

I started analysing global shipping tonnage, fuel consumption and CO2e through 2100 in 2021. And now, the first full version is published.

The tonnage is v2 and now includes inland shipping, which was missing in my 2021 initial assessment. I also decided based on feedback and research that it would rebound further through 2030 before going into a steep decline due to loss of the 40% of oil, gas and coal shipping, and the reduction of iron ore shipping.

The analysis enabled me to do an initial breakdown of deep-sea, short-sea and inland shipping, and project fuel use and refueling for the categories. The intent is to determine the portion of the current marine fuel market which cannot be electrified and will required liquid fuel replacements. The next step is figuring out which liquid fuel replacement is likely to dominate, something I don't have a firm opinion on at present.

Of course, the end point is a projection of MT of CO2e through 2100 from this transportation segment prior to refueling the hardest portions.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/

With just the readily available solutions of electrification where viable and increased efficiencies across the board, in addition to the loss of demand from fossil fuels and raw iron ore, global shipping will see about 50% of the emissions in 2100 as it did at peak before COVID-19. Replacing bunker...

29/03/2022

Buzz Solutions delivers a full platform to owners of electricity grid transmission and distribution assets for managing, storing and analysing high-resolution inspection images taken by drones, helicopters and workers.

I spoke to the founders, Kaitlyn Albertoli and Vik Chaudhry a few weeks ago, and now the first half our discussion is live on CleanTechnica CleanTech talks, available on your favorite podcast platforms.

Kaitlyn and Vik come from very different backgrounds -- a southern California beach town with the San Onofre nuclear station in the background and New Delhi, India, where breathing the air was like smoking 60 ci******es a day -- but connected in a cleantech entrepreneurial course at Stanford University. After a couple of course corrections, they found their groove using machine learning to automate transmission and distribution line and tower inspections.

Their timing was good. Drones had become powerful sensor platforms by 2017 and computer vision had become an exploitable technology with the release by Google of ImageNet and ResNet, open source libraries and data sets that enabled anyone to train visual recognition models quickly and cheaply. But on the demand side, US grid infrastructure was aging, modernization was being demanded for renewables and climate change was hitting the grid hard. Regulators demanded much more frequent inspections and utilities were capturing 10x the images annually with 100x expected soon.

But having 200 skilled lines people and engineers looking at photos on their laptops all day long instead of fixing or improving the grid was a clear conflict and assessments were lagging imaging by longer and longer periods. Enter Buzz Solutions, who are already taking 50% out of assessment durations and trending toward 80%. That means a lot more staff in their customers are fixing and improving the grid instead of just figuring out what needs to be fixed or improved.

Listen in as Vik and Kaitlyn tell their story, correct my misunderstandings and serve up a fascinating story of the evolution and challenges of the grid. Of course, in a few days a summary article will be up, and at some point soon the second half of the conversation will be live as well, so watch this space.

https://soundcloud.com/zachary-shahan/buzz-solutions-high-res-drone-images-of-power-lines-machine-learning-help-deal-with-climate-change

Michael Barnard speaks with the two co-founders of Buzz Solutions, Kaitlyn Albertoli and Vik Chaudhry. They analyse terabytes of high-resolution images of power lines and towers captured by drones and

22/03/2022

While regional air mobility will dominate and disrupt in the coming decades, there are some inhibitors which smart first-movers are focusing on.

Kevin Antcliff, currently Head of Product at autonomous flight startup , started and led the electric regional air mobility study at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration as one of his last efforts with that illustrious organization. This is the written summary of the second half of our podcast discussion of the space.

The safety and perception of safety of passengers is going to be an interesting potential inhibitor. Smart first movers such as ELECTRON aviation have a strategy to address this point.

Pilots are an inhibitor for regional air mobility that will increase in concern as the space grows, so autonomy is necessary for the space to be truly disruptive of current aviation, so Xwing is well positioned. It's also free of military ties, something which is a serious strategic risk for many aviation startups in my opinion.

Air traffic control is another inhibiting factor that will emerge as a concern. Right now, Xwing uses the plane as a local airspace to air traffic link to enable conversations from their ground station for guidance. But that won't necessarily scale effectively, so digital air traffic control will emerge as well.

Airports are becoming clean energy hubs. There are hundreds of airports around the world building solar already, and this will just increase. The intersection of this with regional air mobility for cheap, locally produced electricity for fuel is a big opportunity. It's also a big opportunity for behind-the-meter storage, so developers like Convergent Energy + Power in North American and Intelligent land Investments Ltd in the UK will be looking at this opportunity.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/22/electric-regional-air-mobility-discussion-with-nasa-report-lead-author-kevin-antcliff/

Imagine you're a family of 4 heading to a ski resort in the region. You take an electric Uber to your local small airport. You're in the air in 15 minutes. You land near the resort and another electric Uber takes you to the hill. You fly quietly over the often dangerous mountain roads, enjoying the....

21/03/2022

Grid-scale electricity storage is a multi-trillion dollar growth market over the next 40 years as we break the back of transforming to renewables and electrifying everything.

But which technologies will dominate? In the attached article, I project growth of storage technology market share in GW of capacity decade by decade through 2060. The full storage requirements are an end game requirement for decarbonization, not a precursor, so most of the growth is in the final couple of decades.

While most people don't realize it, pumped hydro storage is both the grid storage leader today by an absurd margin, but also the storage technology with the most capacity in construction today as well. A recent Australia National University global GIS study indicates we have 100x the capacity of that technology alone compared to requirements, and I project it will dominate.

But it's not perfect, and other solutions have attributes that will give them big market shares. Redox-flow batteries come in second, with their advantages of separating energy and power. In that space, Agora Energy Technologies' CO2-based chemistries are leading a new set of innovations that promise to take huge market share over initial metals-based chemistries.

Finally, lithium-ion and similar form-factor batteries have an early lead in battery storage, but they'll flatten out as energy and power are tightly coupled. They'll be a relatively distant third place, but still provide excellent business today for firms such as Convergent Energy + Power in North America and Intelligent land Investments Ltd in Scotland (which also has three pumped hydro facilities in development).

After that, there's 100 GW of also-rans, which is still a big niche worth a lot of money.

https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/a248729b-5af9-409e-89b3-f28dd2abbbf2

There are multiple races under way in grid storage. The big one right now is securing seed funding for potential battery technologies. Billions are being invested in often faint hopes. Within technology groupings such as redox flow, a variety of chemistries are in competition to see which ones are m...

21/03/2022

Recently I spent close to two hours walking and talking with Wilma W Suen, whose most recent role was as the vice president responsible for global forecasting for General Electric's air craft leasing business, then the largest in the world. A key subject of discussion was my projection of aviation demand through 2100, a fundamental underpinning of my projection of aviation refueling.

I have a heterodox opinion from Boeing, Airbus and IATA, in that while industry consensus is around 4% annual growth, I consider it more likely that 2019 was the industry peak and that it is unlikely to return to that level with relatively flat demand for much of the coming decades.

Suen found it interesting and a useful challenge to her thinking, and of course she's a professional aviation demand forecaster, so had a deep and nuanced perspective. After the discussion, she felt it likely that the industry consensus of 4% was unlikely, and was more likely to be lower, although she didn't agree with my flat projection either.

Factors we discussed included post-COVID security theater making flying less convention, ongoing economic impacts from COVID on the just-affluent-enough-to-fly category, regions with higher and lower demand growth, the coming end of population growth, impending costing of climate change negative externalities, the increase of global affluence and more.

When I publish an updated version of my projection, I'll adjust it in a few ways, with some added growth, especially after 2060 when long-haul electrified transportation will be increasingly cheaper.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/21/aviation-demand-forecasting-expert-challenges-2100-aviation-refueling-scenario/

COVID-19 was a discontinuity that fundamentally shifted aviation passenger demand, but the forces are nuanced and geographically distinct.

20/03/2022

A few weeks ago, the gloss on the second half of my CleanTech Talks discussion of hydrogen with Paul Martin was published, but behind the CleanTechnica Pro paywall. Now it's in open for all to see.

In the first half, Paul and I had spoken about the formation and goals of the new Hydrogen Science Coalition, of which he's a charter member, and the additional people they need to round out their ability to bring reality to EU hydrogen goals.
In this part, we spoke more about hydrogen losses. When shipped by boat, the best case minimum boil off will be 0.2% per day, the figure I used in my calculation of the cost of hydrogen shipping per unit of energy delivered. When shipped by truck, it's going to be in the range of 1% per day. When piped through modern polyethylene in the distribution network and in homes, it diffuses through them because it's so tiny.

And there are no effective odorants like those used with natural gas going to homes to make it clear there's a leak so people can get to safety. The ones that exist foul fuel cells, degrading their life rapidly.

And it's much more explosive than natural gas, with a range of 4% to 75% in a mixture with air being explosive, compared to natural gas' range of 5% to 15%, and requires a third the energy to ignite of natural gas to boot.

An odorless gas that's going to leak much more than smelly natural gas that explodes much more easily, and with potentially a lot more devastating effects is not a great combination. Especially when there are no hydrogen appliances to use it in, and every municipality's building codes and approvals process would have to be updated to deal with it.

It's going to electricity and electrical appliances for the win, of course.

Our conversation wanders through engineers being seduced into doing interesting but meaningless work, public money going to bad ends with hydrogen, and the end of absurd, multi-leg global supply chains due to increasing shipping fuel costs.
Have a read, or listen to the embedded podcast. And if you are a journo or policy type, especially one dealing with the EU, reach out to the Hydrogen Science Coalition for a reality check.

Hydrogen diffuses through pipes, explodes more easily and under more conditions, and takes 3 times the energy to ship or pipe.

10/03/2022

While regional air mobility will dominate and disrupt in the coming decades, there are some inhibitors which smart first-movers are focusing on.

This is the second half of my conversation with Kevin Antcliff, now of Xwing and formerly of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration. While with NASA, he led the regional air mobility report that provides key understandings about the aviation disruption that's coming.

Antcliff is Head of Product at Xwing, an autonomous aviation startup, and talks about why that's much easier than automobiles. There's not much up in the air, and on the ground they are running much slower with far fewer moving vehicles. They are heading to FAA approval with on-the-ground observers ready to take over soon.

The safety and perception of safety of passengers is going to be an interesting potential inhibitor. Smart first movers such as ELECTRON aviation have a strategy to address this point.

Pilots are an inhibitor for regional air mobility that will increase in concern as the space grows, so autonomy is necessary for the space to be truly disruptive of current aviation, so Xwing is well positioned. It's also free of military ties, something which is a serious strategic risk for many aviation startups in my opinion.

Air traffic control is another inhibiting factor that will emerge as a concern. Right now, Xwing uses the plane as a local airspace to air traffic link to enable conversations from their ground station for guidance. But that won't necessarily scale effectively, so digital air traffic control will emerge as well.

By the way, based on this conversation I drafted a regional air mobility model and projection through 2040 of increasing maturity levels.

Airports are becoming clean energy hubs. There are hundreds of airports around the world building solar already, and this will just increase. The intersection of this with regional air mobility for cheap, locally produced electricity for fuel is a big opportunity. It's also a big opportunity for behind-the-meter storage, so developers like Convergent Energy + Power in North American and Intelligent land Investments Ltd in the UK will be looking at this opportunity.

Urban air mobility, by contrast, depends on multiple very difficult things to occur before it's initially viable, and has a much smaller market potential. That's sinking in for investors and why they lost $21 billion, 75% of peak market value, in the past year.

https://soundcloud.com/zachary-shahan/ex-nasa-regional-air-mobility-expert-kevin-antcliff-is-now-at-xwing-automating-aviation-part-2

Michael Barnard has another fascinating future-of-aviation conversation with an industry leader, this time Kevin Antcliff of Xwing. Kevin had followed his father’s footsteps into NASA after his aerosp

09/03/2022

Electric regional air mobility is where the smart money is, not Jetsons fantasies of tilt-rotor air taxis, and Kevin Antcliff knows that better than most.

A few weeks ago I spent 90 minutes with Antcliff, now of Xwing, the autonomous aviation startup, and formerly of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, recording a CleanTechnica CleanTech Talk.

While at NASA, one of the last things Antcliff did, and something he's rightly proud of, is lead a study and publish a report on regional air mobility. Unlike the Jetson's fantasies urban air mobility, regional air mobility actually has a business case, is pragmatic, uses conventional take off and landing electric airplanes, will work with today's batteries and reuses the thousands of existing and underutilized public airfields in the USA and Europe.

When I originally looked at the market capitalization in the urban air mobility space in November of last year, by the way, they'd lost over $16 billion market capitalization, 55% off peak. Now, a few months later, they've lost $21 billion, 75%. The original S**C investors mostly pulled their money out, leaving the companies in many cases with far from enough money to build and certify their electric tilt-rotorcraft, even if there was a market for them.
But regional air mobility has a lot of entrants that are actually building new business models and technologies that are based in reality, and will be disruptive of the aviation industry. That's the place for smart money.

Listen in as Antcliff and I discuss his report and its underpinnings in this first half of the discussion.

https://soundcloud.com/zachary-shahan/cheap-safe-regional-electric-flying-is-coming-and-kevin-antcliff-of-xwing-is-automating-it

Michael Barnard has another fascinating future-of-aviation conversation with an industry leader, this time Kevin Antcliff of Xwing. Kevin had followed his father’s footsteps into NASA after his aerosp

01/03/2022

Paul Martin and I spoke about the Hydrogen Science Coalition in a CleanTech Talk podcast that went live a few weeks ago. Now I've finally had writing a summary of the first half of our conversation get to the top of my to-do list, as both the anti-vaxx occupation of Ottawa and then the invasion of the Ukraine have been distracting.

But the latest IPCC report dropping on February 28th triggered me to get back to normal levels of productivity again, and hence this summary.

Paul and talk about the foundation of the Coalition, it's members -- Paul obviously, but also Tom Baxter, Bernard Dijk van, Jochen Bard and David Cebon. They share attributes of independence, expertise and a willingness to point at unclothed emperors.

As always when Paul and I talk, things get nerdy, and we explored what hydrogen embrittlement in transmission pipes really means, along with other serious limiters to hydrogen as a fuel of any sort.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/01/paul-martin-talks-h2-science-coalition-more-problems-with-hydrogen/

The H2 Science Coalition is only months old, formed in November 2021 as an independent advocacy and PR group for hydrogen sanity. It's intended to counter the bags of money going into hydrogen PR that is contrary to elementary physics and economics.

14/02/2022

A piece I wrote for the Leonardo DiCaprio foundation summarizing my findings on Carbon Engineering Ltd. has been made featured content on the One Earth climate action philanthropy site.

One Earth's mission is to work to accelerate collective action to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5°C. So far they've granted $5.2 million USD to global grassroots initiatives, science efforts and media organizations working on solving the challenges of climate change.

Consider assisting One Earth with their efforts.

As for Carbon Engineering, the only natural market for their direct air capture solution using natural-gas powered massive walls of fans is enhanced oil recovery. That's what they are doing in the Permian Basin with Oxy (née Occidental Petroleum Corporation). Apparently they are getting $250 USD per ton of CO2 that they inject into the ground in order to get more crude out of tapped out wells, resulting in more CO2 out than in of course.

I'm impressed with One Earth. I'm deeply unimpressed with Carbon Engineering.

https://www.oneearth.org/air-carbon-capture-a-false-climate-solution-promoted-by-the-fossil-fuel-industry/

A study shows that the most successful air carbon capture project to date ended up releasing 25 times more carbon than it captured.

07/02/2022

I've been communicating with Bill Nussey of The Freeing Energy Project for about a year. He reached out to me ago because he'd been reading my analyses of energy, and unlike me, he's a reflexive networker and asker of opinions and input. (I'm an accidental nerd decarbonization networker, and answerer of questions that I find interesting or meaningful.)

When Bill had his new book, also Freeing Energy, close to ready to go, he reached out and asked me to provide some insight. It was a great read, and I provided a bit of input, which apparently affected the hydrogen aspects of the book the most.

And so, we've done reciprocal podcasts, me on his ... wait for it ... Freeing Energy podcast, and him on CleanTechnica's CleanTech Talks, which Zachary Shahan and I ping-ping host. If you're seeing a certain rigor to branding, well, Bill is a serious digital market expert and professional, who sold his digital marketing company to IBM before taking a role running global corporate strategy for them until his golden handcuffs magically dissolved, as time will do.

And so, my summary of the second half of our CleanTechnica conversation. Bill's relatively new startup, Solar Inventions, gets a lot of attention, as it's providing a 1% gain in efficiency for solar panels with a reduction of silver coating material costs in the form of only a process change. Zero capital costs, $500 million annual industry uptick.

Then we shift to the challenges of US' variance among jurisdictions, talking examples from Georgia, Texas, California and Hawaii.

Finally, we end with a couple of Bill's 50 ideas for new businesses in local energy, the focus of the last two chapters of the book.

There's a reason Freeing Energy is #1 on Amazon in the categories of energy, solar power, and energy policy. You should pick it up. Or at least read this summary, or listen to the embedded podcast with Bill.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/07/bill-nussey-of-freeing-energy-talks-about-his-chart-topping-new-book-on-local-energy/

Local energy is an express lane for climate change. The world is obsessed with gigabets on offshore wind and nuclear and there's a traffic jam of political systems. COP26 was a disappointment. People can pull into the express lane, contribute in a personal way, and get great business value as well.

07/02/2022

Another day, another podcast. Paul Martin, chemical process engineer, 30-years of experience working with and co-founder of the new Hydrogen Science Coalition sits down with me to talk about the Coalition and H2.

https://soundcloud.com/zachary-shahan/new-hydrogen-science-coalition-busts-hopium-with-paul-martin-part-1

There’s a new hydrogen-reality sheriff organization in town, the Hydrogen Science Coalition. Founded by several engineers and scientists with deep experience in hydrogen, its focus is on ensuring that

07/02/2022

A few months ago, Josef Mouris of ELECTRON aviation blew my mind with the observation that in a lot of the EU, Jet A and other kerosene aviation turbine fuels weren't taxed, but electricity for electric airplanes was.

I dug into that further, and looked across aviation fuel taxation and carbon pricing in the EU, USA and Canada to get a sense of the shifts. Remarkably, the USA is temporarily better than Canada or the EU in how it taxes aviation fuel, but that's changing rapidly.

Carbon pricing in Canada will add $2.20 USD per US gallon of Jet A, Jet A-1 and Jet by in 2030, and apparently won't give it back for international flights. The EU is planning to eliminate the massive carbon pricing ETS allowances it currently gives aviation by 2027, and also to institute a single taxation level for all aviation fuel rising to a peak in 2033. The combination will add $2.96 USD per US gallon to aviation fuel prices, but only for intra-EU and passenger flying. Cargo and international get a pass.

Meanwhile, the US' Build Back Better bill includes a temporary tax code tax credit of $1.75-$2.00 USD per US gallon for SAF biofuels, with predictable scrambling to ensure corn gets in there. The USA continues to make transportation fuels cheap instead of adding their negative externalities, a weird refusal to be fiscally as conservative as the EU and Canada. ;)

The combination means that a lot of aviation will become, reasonably, more expensive. Even the USA will get on board with pricing carbon eventually. That's part of why my projection of aviation growth through 2100 is flat. And why electric aviation is so compelling.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/07/the-wacky-untaxed-world-of-jet-fuel-is-coming-to-an-end/

The emissions of aviation will be priced, the cost of aviation will go up, and that's part of why my projection of aviation growth is flat through 2100.

04/02/2022

After my conversation with Kevin Antcliff, now of Xwing and formerly of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration this week about regional air mobility, a former colleague of Kevin's at NASA reached out, Nathanael Miller, a strategist at NASA focused on helping guide their efforts into future. Nathanael wanted to pick my brain as part of his efforts to assist NASA's focus on the future.

Naturally, the combination made my brain start thinking of how to best articulate growth curves over the coming decades. And so, a projection of both a multi-factor regional air mobility maturity model and its maturation over time. This is, of course, an early draft, and I'm inviting everyone in aerospace focused on the actual areas of innovation -- electrification, autonomy, digital air traffic control and regional air mobility -- to let me know what I got wrong, what I was close on, and how they would improve it.
Let's improve this maturity model and its projection through time to enable aerospace executives, investors and researchers such as NASA to focus their resources appropriately.

Among other things, this will enable dollars to flow more rapidly to to the right parts of aviation for rapid decarbonization, not the aerial inanity of evtols and urban air mobility.
In addition to Xwing, naturally Heart Aerospace and ELECTRON aviation get shout outs, among other startups and innovators focused on delivering electric aviation value this decade.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/04/electrified-regional-air-mobility-will-be-disruptive-mature-rapidly-in-coming-years/

Investors and aerospace executives, focus on regional air mobility. There are a lot of great places to invest that will start returning profits this decades, and profits for the decades to come.

02/02/2022

Bill Nussey of the The Freeing Energy Project and the book of the same name recently had me on their eponymous podcast. Apparently they like 35 minute episodes, but got me and chose to let me keep rambling for an additional 50 minutes. ;)

It was a great chat. I don't normally tell personal stories, but Freeing Energy likes to get some anecdotes, so my history with Texas Hold'em, Vegas, Juliet Roberts, drive through wedding chapels is not recorded for posterity, as well as a 1990s 4,000 km recumbent bike trip with solar panels which included talking to Quebec separatists.

Of course, the meat was in other areas. Bill asked me to allocate a billion USD among a set of energy technologies in front of and behind the grid, and I was happy to do so. I'd be happier still if someone wanted to actually fund my betting, but it was still an interesting thought exercise. Solar and wind scored big, mostly in front of the meter, but solar edged out wind due to its behind the meter potential. Electricity storage with pumped hydro and redox flow batteries picked up most of the rest.

Nuclear, big and small, and hydrogen received virtually no money from me. Hydrogen is very important as we have to replace the 90 million tons or so used as industrial feedstocks, but is a terrible medium for energy storage. I'm nuanced on nuclear, but outside of China, building more of it just doesn't address climate change effectively.

The lightning round of quick questions that Freeing Energy likes to have at the end of its podcasts was fun too, and I'll leave you with the one biggest thing most people can do to advance climate action, something I shared with Bill: vote climate action up and down the ticket for parties that have a solid chance of taking power.

Paul Martin of the Hydrogen Science Coalition and Mark Jacobson of course get shout outs for all the things I have learned from both of them, as well as minor points of nuanced disagreement.

https://freeingenergy.libsyn.com/michael-barnard-nuclear-solar-wind-hydrogen-batteries-this-expert-predicts-the-winners-and-the-losers

Join in as host Bill Nussey catches up with the global energy thought leader, strategist, business advisor, and founder of The Future Is Electric, Michael Barnard. Barnard shares his positive, pragmatic, and colorful views on a range of clean energy technologies and which ones he would place his bet...

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The Future is Electric and we are optimistic about it