Links for August
special not-super-long edition
1: Pathfinder podcast has a great interview with the CEO of Zeno Power, which recall is pursuing radioisotope power systems for space & remote terrestrial applications
2: Tesla making some moves in wireless charging. i am massively supportive of this technology. as EV penetration grows i hope to see wireless charging systems increasingly integrated into road & parking infrastructure
3: our favourite meme energy storage company Energy Vault is still alive somehow, and even seems to be still pursuing a version of its gravity system. i know they've branched out into safer waters with traditional lithium ion systems & project management. but i honestly didn't know the gravity thing still existed. this Chinese project is an absolute beast at 25MW. they call it ‘long-duration’ though the 100 MWh size implies a typical 4 hours, if discharging at maximum power capacity
4: amusing piece on the rise of electric golf carts as a general-purpose vehicle. i support
5: good post on far-UVC (using special lights to passively kill microbes to prevent airborne disease transmission, especially indoors). still highly speculative with lots of scientific & technical questions remaining. but the prize would be so amazing if it works
6: Climate Tech VC has a great post surveying the industry landscape for clean fuels. i still think drop-in electrofuels will probably win in aviation for the longer-haul market. but it's totally true that they’re currently super expensive with lots of hurdles that might prevent the cost reductions needed to make them sufficiently competitive (most obviously just a lack of cheap & abundant clean energy). it seems completely possible that electric aviation will gain a foothold in short-hop markets & gradually expand as tech/infrastructure improves, which would eat into the scale advantages of a 100%-electrofuel vision, & allow room for other clean fuels to thrive/survive. carbon capture becoming cheap enough such that airlines simply buy verifiable offsets & continue using fossil jet fuel is quite possible also. although electrofuels & direct air capture have lots of technological overlap (the latter being an input to the former), so if you have cost-effective DAC it seems likely you’d see cost-effective e-fuels too
7: update on Mainspring’s linear generator for commercial-scale solar backup. they use natural gas, yet claim to be fully hydrogen/cleanfuel-ready. perhaps. but regardless, i’m bullish on this technology. it seems like a real improvement over traditional combustion backup generators and a powerful enabler for more distributed solar. you can definitely imagine a relatively cost-effective clean energy system pairing distributed solar, energy storage & linear generators that leads to widespread grid defection at the residential & commercial scale
8: meandering but fun Palladium piece on the history & philosophy of space exploration
9: excellent Catalyst podcast on space solar. probably it will happen eventually, but this interview made me less optimistic. the technical & economic challenges of building & operating such huge structures in space seem really daunting. i bet not even a fully mature Starship system would unlock it; you'd need the next bigger post-Starship thing to really make it work. and also recall the argument that wireless power beaming (required for space solar) might undermine the case for space solar, since (presumably cheaper, easier) ground-based transmission-scale beaming would have huge benefits for remote renewables & regional grids etc
10: probably not the final word, but Biden announced that the Space Force hq will remain in Colorado Springs, cancelling the planned move to Huntsville AL. i won't rehash my previous takes (see this from March, #22) & will just say i think it's a good decision
11: and also in militaryland, see this interesting War on the Rocks post about US Army high-level strategy
12: a good article on helium
13: Terraform post walking through some cost economics for green hydrogen. i remain very skeptical about their prospects but certainly hope they succeed
14: and also ponder biomass-to-hydrogen. lol. i mean, who knows. i'm fine with it. but both biomass & hydrogen have very vocal opponents (on ecological & thermodynamic waste/inefficiency/harm grounds), and the idea of pairing them is hilarious in that context
15: notable and widely-shared piece on Richard Hanania being incredibly racist. not at all surprising, although some of the quotes are quite terrible (and also extremely stupid/wrong). see his response here. Michael Lind did a long piece on it, although it’s mediocre. Hanania has always been insane & cringe. but he does consistently post interesting/novel takes so i'll still keep reading that garbage i suppose
16: i’m amused by the boom in self-storage, apparently driven by covid-era spending on physical goods. USian consumption is so insatiable that we can't even fit all our stuff into our massive houses, it’s really quite beautiful 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸. i'm not crazy about the scammy behavioural economic component to this, where ppl sign up for the product but then find the switching costs too high and end up just leaving their shit in there for longer than is really rational. but as far as scams go it's not that bad; probaby better than a gym membership that goes unused. and anything that reduces the costs of moving locations is probably good, increasing the allocative efficiency & dynamism of labor market and so on (WSJ)
17: oil firm Occidental bought Carbon Engineering. the criticisms i’ve seen online from some leftwing environmentalists are completely misguided. fossil fuel firms adapting to the clean energy transition by getting into things like direct air capture & carbon storage/management is obviously good. it helps reduce job loss & general economic disturbance. we want people to make money doing useful things. the view that we should be, like, vindictive and punish oil companies for their sins regardless of their forward-looking actions is just bizarre. corporations aren't human. they are machines that respond to incentives (Bloomberg)
18: nice piece on Culdesac, that walkable planned development in Tempe AZ (Bloomberg). urbanists & yimbys have a heavy focus on cities' overall land-use policy environment, for obvious reasons. but the alternative pathway of carving out little private pockets of experimentation is still very appealing in many ways. OG Strong Towns poster Andrew Price's blog is mostly dead nowadays, but this piece from 2013 is really a classic if you've not read it, about the idea of buying up empty land (old airports, big parking lots etc) & building a patch of brand-new narrow-street traditional urbanism
19: fun long Quanta piece on the history & current state of computational complexity theory
20: notable Decouple podcast with Jigar Shah, about nuclear mostly
21: interesting piece on coffee production, which apparently is struggling to keep up with rising demand in the face of climate change and so on. i'm not too worried. note that not all the images were saved in the archive link (FT)
22: Proterra went bankrupt. this seems like a monumental fuckup that’s garnered surprisingly little mainstream coverage, especially if school districts end up with EV bus systems that can't be maintained properly. they say they’ll keep operating through bankruptcy, but who knows. EV buses seemed like such a slam-dunk business case, i’m honestly surprised this happened, and would like to hear more details about what really happened
23: Biden did another National Monument. i've posted my views on the Antiquities Act dozens of times. but to rehash, i think it's bad to have presidents abuse this authority. congress should authorize new federal land protection-level increases through normal lawmaking. monuments should be reserved for actual monuments: small patches of land no bigger than like a battlefield or whatever. fedgov should give some of its western land to state govts, or even just sell it off for private use. and certainly at the object-level in this case, i think the native american cultural objection is weak. the outdoor recreation thing is somewhat real. but i also don't like the govt favoring REI over other kinds of uses, like mineral extraction. i favor private orgs buying or leasing land if they want to preserve it, instead of the current state where environmental NGOs optimize for lobbying presidents (NYT)
books
no books in past two weeks, oh well
