Author: Captain Obvious

Listening to politicians and industry zealots would make you believe we are about to see a radical shift in how our planet produces and consumes everything.  We read about plant based substitutes for animal protein and are lead to believe they will change the world in just a few years.  We hear about renewable energy replacing fossil fuels in just a few more years and certainly by the year 2050 we will see the full demise of the companies who drill for oil and natural gas.

When I asked everyone I knew how any of this was a reality if our government’s forecast for energy use to 1950 show virtually no change?  I was met by shrugged shoulders and crickets.  Public Utility Fortnightly’s recent article should shed some light here and offers a sobering perspective.

 We are moving in the right direction, but change is slow and incremental.  We all seem to be marching in unison about a gradual transition to electric vehicles, yet even now the realities of rare earth metals like lithium are showing how anything but a gradual transition is unrealistic.  There is a reason they are called rare earth metals and there is no easy answer here.

Sure, Tesla is working on new battery technology and who would argue with that noble goal.  Elon Musk is probably one of the most likely people to add to his list of doing things no one else seems to even think could be done … see SpaceX.  Truly remarkable … thank you Elon for believing in a future for space travel.

However, as you read the PUF article, please do note the time scales for change here.  Anyone who believes we can change the trajectory of energy use in the world by more than a few percentage points in any timescale as short as 10-20 years is simply a dreamer.  The world’s energy use is a staggeringly large number.

The population continues to grow and the “have nots” in the developing countries are pushing for the American dream.  This is not going to change.  While renewables are important, they simply will not “bend the curve” as we tried to do with behaviors and technology with COVID.

Archimedes thought you could move the world if you had a big enough lever arm.

Slow and steady wins the race.  Throwing money at this problem believing you are going to change history is delusional at best and dishonest at worst.

 

So, California is banning gasoline vehicles.  Well, not exactly … they are banning the sale of new ones in the state.

What is that going to do?  Well, as more and more electric vehicles are on the road, the price of gasoline will start to slide.  And, with all this push for electrics the price of them is likely to rise because of the rare earth elements that have increased in price by a factor of ten over the past year alone.

Do you remember the ban on use of natural gas in baseload power plants back in the early 1980s?  Utilities had only two choices for baseload generation: coal and nuclear.  Ten years later, the ban was eliminated.   Now we are essentially banning coal in new generation and working towards shutting down most if not all of it as the pressure to reduce carbon emissions increases.

Utilities do not like uncertainty.  They are in the business of planning and building and maintaining large energy systems.  All this talk of banning this and that makes them very nervous.  They remember history all too well, and face regulatory and political scrutiny by those who have no reverence or respect for the planning process … they want to second guess everyone, and especially if they can score some political points in the process.

So, the good news is that this ban in California should be good for the electric utilities there and increase their energy output.  Of course, nobody is looking at the reality of what that will really mean in real time as a rollout.  The devil in those details will emerge over time.  Nobody is talking about the loss in tax revenues as all these EVs replace those gas guzzling alternatives that have been paying taxes to keep the roads paved.  Nobody has thought through where the EV chargers should be, which a critical thinker would conclude should be where gas stations are.

Anyone who owns an EV and travels extensively as I do knows that the charging stations are generally in shopping malls where people can spend the hour it takes doing something.

Theatre … that is what you are watching … not planning.  It does make great theatre for sure.

Nothing happens as quickly as promised.  Gasoline cars do not wear out like they did when I was a kid, especially in the benign weather of California.

We saw the used car market explode because the new car supply chain was unable to meet demand.  Do I really have to say more?

 

Some portrait painters like Picasso stand out because they deliberately distort the human face.  It becomes their “brand of art expression” and we can accept that even though it may offend our sense of balance in the human form.  We prize symmetry and balance in all dimensions of our faces and bodies and celebrate the “perfections” in that all the time.  One of our neighbors came in No. 2 in the Miss World competition and she would even describe herself as having won “the human lottery” in that she was born with certain proportions.

What surprises me the most these days is that we fail to recognize the asymmetry in our politics and news cycles.  Americans celebrate the freedom of speech yet some conservative speech is now deemed undeserving of freedoms.  The news media most often uses the term “alleged” when they describe a criminal even when the video footage shows them committing the crime.

On the other hand, when the political talking points do not agree with what seems to be patently true, we hear the news media declare these “deviants” as “deniers” rather than simply expressing an opposing point of view.  It seems we have really bad memories that the claims of Russian interference in the prior election cycle have now been proven false.  It is surprising to me that the election laws had to be changed if there were not problems in the past.

Picasso would be proud.  We now live with asymmetric news and media coverage on so many issues:  everything is a climate crisis.  Really, do you really think the Western water crisis is all about the climate and not about more uses than sources?  Do we really think the recent climate bill will change anything in the climate for the better in the near term?

Worse yet, the recent news media coverage seems to be amping up the rhetoric to “outlaw” opposing points of view.  Isn’t that a clear step towards Marxism?

As an engineer I do love symmetry … so I guess I am not loving where any of this is going.

How about you?  Tell me where I am missing something.

 

I am sure you have heard that Britain has agreed to pay any costs above a threshold for all households in their country and for businesses for six months.  Given Britain has no physical natural gas or fuel oil in storage to cover that contingency this is the equivalent of an uncovered call in energy trading … considered the most dangerously open-ended trading derivative in the game.  Almost all of these lead to disaster.

What is worse, by making this kind of a promise, the government has basically written and paid for an energy insurance policy for everyone doing retail energy business in England and thereby discouraging any of them to enter into their own price protections.  Why pay for insurance when someone else has promised to cover your losses?

One can only hope no one else in Europe will follow this bizarre and stupid promise, but I worry that other politicians will try to one up Britain by offering the same kind of price protection for their citizens as well.  As of the time this was written in the Wall Street Journal, “U.K. Government to Cap Household Energy Prices for Two Years,” they were alone.  If others show equal levels of this stunning stupidity we are doomed even here since it will throw energy markets further into constraints.

I thought I had seen everything, but I guess I now realize that you really can’t fix stupid.  This should wake up the energy zealots pushing for carbon legislation to realize this is not the right time to continue to imply we are going to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.  It is precisely this saber rattling that has lead us into a worldwide shortage of supply vs. demand.

When will we wake up and smell the coffee?  Water is really more important to fix … see the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado River issues.  We need to curb consumption and to ask critical questions about the correct value of something we all take for granted.

Why are we so afraid of asking the right questions?  Once again, Planet of the Humans indicates all the reasons why.  Please watch it.

I have coined another TLA in this title: Electric Muscle Cars.  If you didn’t get my play on words, a TLA is a Three Letter Acronym.

I was not surprised to hear that Dodge is going to introduce an electric version of its wildly successful internal combustion engine-driven Challenger, especially given that the Tesla Model S has repeatedly beaten it on the track in short distances.  The Tesla has also forced Porsche, Ferrari, and other high-performance car makers to take notice. So, this is not surprising at all.

I expect to see similar announcements from Chevy for the Corvette.  However, I am not so sure about the buyer’s appetite for these EMCs.  They can make it sound like there is a high performance engine in there, but they are not going to produce that sensual vibration of the big V8 that sooths the soul.  Go listen to an AC Cobra at idle and tell me you would accept a recording of a “real engine” to replace it.

Nope, I think car makers should be studying how some car owners have created concert-like boom boxes out of their cars that literally vibrate yours when they are near you on the road.

Perhaps they will have a software switch to change the sound of the exhaust to match the sound modern Corvettes have along with driving modes offering street and racing versions.  The video above does not have the kind of sound typical Challenger advocates like.

The good news is that the gas guzzling characteristics of the Challenger will reduce the chances buyers would worry about range anxiety.  Beating other cars trumps that concern.

We will see.  Tesla’s racecar Roadster should be out around the same time as the Challenger, but I doubt anyone is going to beat Tesla on the track.  Elon Musk simply will not let that happen.