Starting around 1550 and lasting through the 1600s, England had an energy crisis. They were running out of wood, which was the main source of fuel for residential and commercial heating. England also needed a lot of wood for their massive navy – it took about 2,000 trees to build one of the larger warships. As a result they turned to coal, which has a high energy density and worked nicely for heating. It has the not-insignificant problem, however, of generating a lot of pollution, choking large cities like London in black smoke. This lasted into the 20th century, culminating with the great London smog of 1952.

The world still burns a lot of coal to generate heat, but generally not in homes. There are other options, especially where people live. We can generate heat by burning cleaner sources of fuel, like natural gas. We can also generate heat through electrical resistance, producing no pollution directly (only in the production of electricity, which is likely remote from the user). Heat can also be harvested from waste heat and pumped into buildings. Or heat can be moved from one source to another using a heat pump.

Moving to more efficient and environmentally friendly methods of producing heat is at least as important to minimizing global warming as generating clean electricity. About half of world energy is used simply to generate heat, more than any other use (generating electricity is 20% and transportation is 30%). Decarbonizing heat production is therefore arguably more important than decarbonizing either electricity production or transportation, although of course they are all important.

Two technologies are likely to make the most difference in decarbonizing heat production. The first is harvesting waste heat from energy production and other industrial processes. This requires producing energy somewhat close to where the heat is needed, which is another advantage of more distributed rather than centralized energy production. Harvesting waste heat needs to be designed up front for any installation that will generate a lot of heat. Data centers, for example, expend a lot of energy just cooling all those computers. That heat can be put to good use.

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When it comes to big problems it’s generally a good idea to remember some basic principles. One is that there is no free lunch. This is a cliche because it’s true. Another way to put this is – there are no solutions, only trade offs. Sometimes there is a genuine advance that does improve the calculus, and there are certainly more or less efficient ways to do things. But when making decisions that affect the technological infrastructure for a world-spanning civilization of billions of people, everything has consequences.

As I have been writing about frequently, perhaps the biggest such decisions we face involve where we get the energy to power our civilization. On the one hand we have the technology of what’s possible. On the other we have economics, which will tend to favor the cheapest option regardless of other concerns. But then we also have – other concerns. That is generally where governments and regulations come in, ways for the public to exert their common interests other than making individual purchasing decisions. Free market forces are powerful at generating information and homeostatic systems, but are generally blind to long term or strategic planning. In my opinion, we need to have an optimal blend of both.

But in the background, science and technology is slowly, incrementally, advancing. We no longer have the luxury of just waiting for technology to solve our problems, but we do want to keep pushing the ball forward and make sure we include scientific progress in our strategic planning, and efficiently incorporate new technology when it’s available. That is partly why I like to peek a little ahead at potential technologies that might be coming down the pike.

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I recently recorded a YouTube video on the notion of hydrogen fuel cell cars (it will be posted soon, and I will add the link when it’s up). One question I did not get into in the video, but which is an interesting thought experiment, is hydrogen – plug-in battery hybrid vehicles. I can find just one model coming online in Australia, the Hyundai N Vision 74. This approach could, theoretically, save hydrogen from losing the the competition to replace internal combustion engine cars. I still don’t think so, but it’s an interesting idea.

First let me state why I think battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are winning and will win this competition. BEV technology is already past the point where there is enough range for most users. While upfront costs are still higher than ICE vehicles, lifetime costs are lower. For those who own their own parking space, which will be the early adopters, there is an extreme convenience to charging at home. And – this is critical – battery technology is still improving, and quickly. There are already production batteries using silicone as the anode in lithium ion batteries with twice the energy density as existing BEV batteries (for now used in aircraft). They will likely go into production ground vehicles in a few years, and this same tech will likely double energy density again by the 2030s. BEVs have other advantages. They can be used for regenerative braking. There is already a reasonable infrastructure for recharging, and this is being built out fast. And, they are among the most efficient vehicles. The round-trip energy storage efficiency is >90%, and they are about twice as efficient in translating energy to the wheels as ICE vehicles.

The negatives for BEVs is the recharging time. Fast charging can take 15-20 minutes, although the newer batteries coming out in a few years claim 0-80% recharge in 10 minutes. In practice, I have not personally found this to be a problem. The only time I fast charge on the road is on long trips, and even a 15 or 20 minute recharge is basically a rest stop. Go to the bathroom, get some snacks or drinks for the ride, and your done. It does take a little planning, but software can do most of this for you. But sure, faster charging would be nice. The real negative for BEVs, in my opinion, is the raw material necessary to make them: lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite (although the graphite will be replaced by silicone which is more abundant). Again, research is working on replacing the cobalt and nickel with more abundant elements, but for now this is a potential choke point.

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Germany has been thrown around a lot as an example of both what to do and what not to do in terms of addressing global warming by embracing green energy technology. It’s possible to look back now and review the numbers, to see what the effect was of its decision to embrace renewable technology and actively shut down their nuclear power plants. The numbers, I think, tell a pretty clear story.

First, some history. Germany has long had an environmentalist anti-nuclear bent, going back to the 1980s. In 2000 the coalition Green Party and Democratic decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany by 2022, making it an even higher priority than phasing out fossil fuels. This policy was reversed by the Christian Democratic Union, extending the timeline until 2034. After the Fukushima accident, however, public opinion shifted and the 2022 timeline was reinstated. This was delayed by a year because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but now the last German nuclear power plants have been shuttered. At the same time, Germany invested heavily in wind and solar.

What did this mean for Germany’s energy production and carbon footprint? Did it makes sense to phase out nuclear while building lots of wind and solar? I would argue an emphatic, no. It demonstrates, quite nicely, (I know, I need to be careful of confirmation bias, but hear me out) what I have been saying for years. For now the choice is not really between nuclear and renewables, but nuclear and fossil fuel. A Washington Post article summarizes the relevant numbers. In 2010 Germany’s energy mix was 60% fossil fuel, 23% nuclear, and 17% renewables. In 2022 (before the final shutdowns) it was 51%, 6%, 43% respectively. If in 2000 Germany had decided to prioritize shutting down coal-fired plants and other fossil fuel sources and just kept their existing nuclear power plants open for as long as possible, their mix today would be 32% fossil fuel, 24% nuclear, and 43% renewable.

Either way, they would have 43% renewable. They were building it as fast as they could. The only difference is that today (now that the last nuclear plants have closed) we have something like 57% fossil fuel instead of 32%. It really was the choice between nuclear and fossil fuel. As a result of this policy Germany, despite investing heavily in renewables, has one of the dirtiest energy mixes in Europe, only behind Poland and the Czech Republic. Germany produces 385 gCO2 / kWh. Heavily nuclear France, by comparison, produces 85. This will also delay Germany’s ability to phase out coal, and it will be one of the last European countries to do so.

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Elon Musk has a complicated legacy. Most people I encounter who bother to express an opinion tend to be either a fan or hater. I am neither. He’s a complicated and flawed person who has accomplished some interesting things, but also has had some epic failures. People like a clean narrative, however, so it’s tempting to portray him as either all good or all bad, or at least minimize the parts that don’t align with your narrative. I find it interesting, for example, that many people who don’t like Musk feel compelled to take away his genuine accomplishments, like SpaceX. The common criticisms I hear are that Musk did not engineer the rockets (of course he didn’t), or that he didn’t build SpaceX, he bought it. The first claim is irrelevant and the second is simply wrong. SpaceX exists because of Musk, because of his dedication to building that company and his willingness to sink lots of his own money into a string of failures until it worked. You have to give the devil his due. Similarly, his successes do not excuse his personal failures, unsavory business practices, unfortunate politics, or epic failures like Twitter.

One Musk venture, The Boring Company, is itself complicated to assess. I’m still not sure if this is going to turn out to be another SpaceX or an expensive dead end of false hype. It’s not looking good so far, but neither did SpaceX during its string of crashed rockets. l

The stripped-down idea is not a bad one – develop the technology for digging underground tunnels to make the process faster and cheaper. If you can make tunnel-digging fast and cheap enough, it changes the calculus and could open up new applications. Faster and cheaper is always nice. At the very least this would be good for existing applications for underground reinforced tunnels. But Musk wants this technology to become “disruptive”. He certainly has not achieved that. But let’s step back and just think about potential applications for underground tunnels in general.

The big advantage of tunnels is that they can bypass obstacles. In a city, for example, you can dig a tunnel under the streets and buildings to bypass traffic and physical obstacles to zip from one end of the city to the other. This is the idea of a subway system, and it works. You can also build tunnels for auto traffic, either to go under a river (instead of a bridge), or again under a congested city. Boston’s Big Dig is an example of using tunneling to redesign a city’s flow of traffic.

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This is one of those technologies that most people probably never think about, but could potentially have a significant impact on our lives – timed drug release. The concept is nothing new, but there is a lot of room for improvement on current technologies. We already have time-release capsules, patches, and some drugs that can have long term effects with one dose, like Depo Provera. But for most drugs, you have to dose them every day at least.

Only about  50% of people take their medication correctly, without missing doses. This has huge consequences, resulting in, “100,000 deaths, as much as 25% of hospitalizations, and a healthcare cost exceeding $100 billion” in the US alone. Right now we primarily deal with this problem through patient education and using drugs, when possible, that have longer dosing times. Sometimes we also monitor patient compliance with blood tests. There is also occasionally talk of developing a medicine bottle that monitors compliance (going back to at least 1989), but such technologies are not in widespread use.

There is therefore a lot of benefit that could potentially result from developing a drug delivery platform that can deliver a consistent dose of medication over weeks or even months. Imagine getting a shot every three months (perhaps even self-administered at home) rather than taking a pill every day. Researchers have recently published one potential such technology, they are calling PULSED – Particles Uniformly Liquified and Sealed to Encapsulate Drugs. Continue Reading »

I’m really excited about the recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and their potential as powerful tools. I am also concerned about unintended consequences. As with any really powerful tool, there is the potential for abuse and also disruption. But I also think that the recent calls to pause or shutdown AI development, or concerns that AI may become conscious, are misguided and verging on panic.

I don’t think we should pause AI development. In fact, I think further research and development is exactly what we need. Recent AI developments, such as the generative pretrained transformers (GPT) have created a jump in AI capability. They are yet another demonstration of how powerful narrow AI can be, without the need for general AI or anything approaching consciousness. What I think is freaking many people out is how well GPT-based AIs, trained on billions of examples, can mimic human behavior. I think this has as much to do with how much we underestimate how derivative our own behavior is as how powerful these AI are.

Most of our behavior and speech is simply mimicking the culture in which we are embedded. Most of us can get through our day without an original thought, relying entirely on prepackaged phrases and interactions. Perhaps mimicking human  speech is a much lower bar than we would like to imagine. But still, these large language models are impressive. They represent a jump in technology, able to produce natural-language interactions with humans that are coherent and grammatically correct. But they remain a little brittle. Spend any significant time chatting with one of these large language models and you will detect how generic and soulless the responses are. It’s like playing a video game – even with really good AI driving the behavior of the NPCs in the game, they are ultimately predictable and not at all like interacting with an actual sentient being.

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When it comes to technology (and also probably many things) there is a pyramid of ideas. At the very bottom of the pyramid is pure speculation, just throwing out “what if” ideas to feed the conceptual pipeline. A subset of these ideas will pass the sniff test enough to justify some kind of proof-of-concept evaluation. This could be just crunching numbers, or even an experiment to see if the idea can work in theory. A subset of those ideas that seem promising will feed a pipeline of research and development, translating these basic concepts into a pragmatic technology. And a subset of those will make it through the pipeline to produce some working technology. A still smaller subset will have all the features necessary to be a successful technology product – economically feasible and competitive, with some marketable practical utility.

When discussing any technology news it’s important to give this context – where in the pyramid are we and how likely is it to make it all the way to the peak? Unfortunately a lot of popular technology reporting treats ideas that are in the pure speculation phase, or perhaps just cracking into the proof of concept level, as if a working product is right around the corner. This leads to confusion and disillusionment. It can also bury news of true breakthroughs in a sea of pseudo-breakthroughs.

With that in mind, I would place this news item about superconducting highways into the pure speculation phase, with a small touch of proof-of-concept. The authors write:

“We envision combining the transport of people and goods and energy transmission and storage in a single system. Such a system, built on existing highway infrastructure, incorporates a superconductor guideway, allowing for simultaneous levitation of vehicles with magnetized undercarriages for rapid transport without schedule limitations and lossless transmission and storage of electricity. Incorporating liquefied hydrogen additionally allows for simultaneous cooling of the superconductor guideway and sustainable energy transport and storage.”

Starting with “we envision” is a good give-away. But here is the proof-of-concept:

Here, we report the successful demonstration of the primary technical prerequisite, levitating a magnet above a superconductor guideway.

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A common joke in the medical world is, “The operation was a success, but the patient died.” The irony comes from how we might define “success”. On April 20th SpaceX conducted the maiden launch of the fully assembled Starship, including a Starship rocket on top of a super heavy lifter. The initial launch seemed success and the rocket flew well for several minutes. However, it then started to become erratic, and at 3:59 into the flight the onboard computers triggered the Flight Termination System (ie it’s self-destruct) and blew up the rocket as a safety precaution.

This was an uncrewed test flight, so it can be said that as a test it fulfilled its primary mission, to provide data about how the fully assembled Starship and associated launch pad will perform. Pre-launch SpaceX indicated that as long as the ship clears the tower, that would be considered a successful test. The goal is data, and they got lots of data. SpaceX says:

With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship.

However, the rocket did also fail, and they need to figure out exactly why that happened. The proximate cause is likely the failure of several of the 33 raptor engines. I was at the Air and Space museum over the weekend, and had a chance to look at a rocket engine of the Saturn V rocket –  which had five giant engines. SpaceX decided to go in a different direction with lots of smaller engines. With 5 or more of these engines out the rocket could still lift off the pad, but they were unable to compensate for the imbalance this produced, which is likely what resulted in the loss of control of the rocket. But then, why did the engines fail?

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I have been following battery technology pretty closely, as this is a key technology for the transition to green energy. The most obvious application is in battery electric vehicles (BEVs). The second most obvious application is in grid storage. But also there are all the electronic devices that we increasingly depend on day-to-day. That same battery technology that powers your Tesla also powers your laptop and your smartphone.

As I have discussed before, a useful battery technology needs to simultaneously have a suite of features (with different priorities depending on application) – good energy density (energy storage per volume) specific energy (energy per mass, also called gravimetric density), stability, fast charge and discharge, many rechargeable life-cycles, useful over a large range of temperatures, and made from material that is ideally non-toxic, recyclable, cheap and abundant. The current lithium-ion batteries are actually very good. They have been incrementally improving over the last two decades, allowing for the BEV revolution to really get under way.

But they have some downsides. They are just at the edge of energy density for aviation applications. They use some difficult to source raw material, like nickel and cobalt. They can occasionally catch fire (although are getting safer). And they are still pretty expensive. Further, we are really stretching the lithium supply chain if we want to build millions of cars and lots of grid storage. Fortunately, the key role that battery technology is playing in the green revolution is widely appreciated in the industry, and there has been a tremendous investment in accelerating battery development. Here are a few potential advances I have been keeping an eye on.

The first is actually not potential, but already in production. I interviewed for the SGU this week (the episode will come out Saturyday) the COO of Amprius, who have started production (actual production) of a lithium ion battery with twice the energy density and specific energy of the current batteries being used in BEVs –  500 Wh/kg, 1300 Wh/L vs about 240/650 for a current Tesla battery. So yeah – double. That is not an incremental advance, that’s a pretty big leap. These numbers have been independently verified, so they seem legit.

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