Month: December 2019

The brutal math begins

Posted on by — Leave a reply

At $60 million a mile, the Keys may abandon some roads to sea rise rather than raise them

Miami Herald 12/5/2019

Elevating less than three miles of Old State Road 4A on Sugarloaf Key to withstand sea rise and king tide by 2025 could cost $75 million, Monroe’s head of resilience revealed at a sea level rise conference in Key West on Wednesday. Elevating for 2045 could cost $128 million. And by 2060, that price tag could soar to $181 million.

The county has 314 miles of road to care for — or choose to abandon. Half of them are susceptible to sea rise in the next 20 years. The cost to keep them dry has county government officials openly questioning whether the math is worth it.

“Are we really going to spend $128 million to elevate three miles of road where 30 people live? It’s not up to me, but I don’t think so,” said Rhonda Haag, Monroe County’s head of resilience.

That’s $4.2 million per resident displaced, just to raise the road. Would it not be far cheaper to simply buy the property, condemn it, and deal with reality? These decisions are going to keep arising in the years to come, and will not get less expensive.

Actually, this is a good idea

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Our friend Nikki over at Transport Evolved has a great suggestion about a smaller, more versatile pickup for folks with no bullets to deflect, or Mad Max marauders to intimidate. I used to drive a Mitsubishi Might Max, and have fond memories of the El Camino.

I didn’t realize the El Camino went back this far. Talk about “retro”.
A nice pickup for folks who wanted good MPG and to haul things occasionally.

MIT sacrifices its reputation at the behest of Oil and Legacy Auto companies

Posted on by — Leave a reply
You get what you pay for

In a recent story in MIT Technology Review, we were surprised to read that we should not expect EVs to compete with gasoline cars on price any time before 2030.

The findings sharply contradict those of other research groups, which have concluded that electric vehicles could achieve price parity with gas-powered ones in the next five years. The lingering price difference predicted by the MIT report could stunt the transition to lower-emission vehicles, requiring governments to extend subsides or enact stricter mandates to achieve the same adoption of EVs and cuts in climate pollution.

The most quoted number for lithium-ion battery packs to reach price parity with ICE is $100/kWh, a price that has been predicted to happen by 2022 for the industry based on prices declines over the last decade (the price was about $1200/kWh in 2009).

MIT researchers contested the 2022 price was accurate, claiming they couldn’t be sustained.

The problem is that the steady decline in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and account for about a third of their total cost, is likely to slow in the next few years as they approach limits set by the cost of raw materials.

“If you follow some of these other projections, you basically end up with the cost of batteries being less than the ingredients required to make it,” says Randall Field, executive director of the Mobility of the Future group at MIT. “We see that as a flaw.”

Well, that would be a flaw, but it flies in the face of decades of actual real world experience with high tech commodities. Computer memory for example, went through numerous boom/bust price cycles over the last 50 years, then has become so cheap that you can almost get a flash drive in your corn flakes. Hell, even oil prices have defied this thinking (in the U.S.), with gasoline currently costing about the same as it did in the 70s (adjusted for inflation).

The article then goes on to state that the adoption of EVs is going to be much slower than economists and advocates have predicted, so we are going to have gasoline cars around for at least another decade.

I started to go dig into the logic and research behind these conclusions, but decided to skip all that work, and instead go straight to the report, Insights Into Future Mobility, skipping to page 8 of the 220 page report where researchers thanked the groups who “sponsored” the “research”.

The MIT Energy Initiative gratefully acknowledges the 10 consortium members whose generous sponsorship made this research possible: Alfa, Aramco, BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Ferrovial, General Motors, Shell, and the Toyota Mobility Foundation.

Representatives from all of these companies engaged with the MITEI team in extensive discussions, providing valuable critique and perspective that helped us sharpen our analysis and improve this report.

Yeah, I bet they did help “sharpen” your analysis. A study paper that basically says, “Never mind EVs, they won’t really be a thing for another 11 years, so keep burning that gasoline in the cars automakers are currently selling”, sponsored by the largest oil companies and the biggest car maker in the world.

No conflict of interest here.

Now adding MIT to my list of unreliable sources.

CNBC reports Model Y will ship almost a year early

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Tesla is poised to deliver Model Y crossover in first quarter of 2020, says Deutsche Bank
CNBC 12/3/2019

Red Model Y in the wild

Tesla is poised to start deliveries of its crossover SUV, the Model Y, in the first quarter of 2020, according to research out Tuesday from Deutsche Bank.

If Tesla could begin Model Y deliveries in the first-quarter of 2020, that would be a full season ahead of CEO Elon Musk’s promised schedule. Early production and deliveries would be a symbolic win for the company, which has often failed to meet self-imposed delivery deadlines.

This would be a major coup for Tesla and one that was predicted a week ago by Gali on his Hyperchange channe.

Given that 75% of the Model 3 components will be in the Model Y, the ramp up should be much quicker than the M3s. This would catch most of Wall Street and the auto industry sleeping deeper than usual, and would be a particularly nasty surprise for legacy automakers who are years behind Tesla in engineering and design.

Of course, this being CNBC, they had to end on a dig at Tesla:

Musk has promised or is taking pre-orders and deposits for more products than Tesla is able to produce at scale currently, including the Model Y, Semi, the recently unveiled Cybertruck, Solarglass rooftops, an all-electric ATV, and full-self driving software.

I don’t believe that pre-orders for the Y were anywhere near the M3s number (400K), and I don’t know if we will find out what they are anytime soon. I would guess somewhere in the 100K range, but I think there will be a spike in orders as this news filters out. Tesla has no incentive to share the number since, unless it is on par with the M3, the financial press would report it it as a massive failure, and Wall Street shorts would hammer the stock.

This scenario works more in Tesla’s favor since as initial production starts, each model will be snapped up, and the revenue booked. Thus, Tesla is looking at a Q1-2020 with new revenue from the MY in the US and China.

With MY starting at two factories in 2020, Musk’s prediction of 1 million cars sold suddenly looks on the mark.

Again?

Posted on by — Leave a reply

German Prosecutors Raid Volkswagen Offices in Diesel Probe
Bloomberg News, 12/3/2019

Volkswagen AG offices were raided by German prosecutors as part of a probe into diesel engines, marking a fresh setback for the manufacturer’s efforts to draw a line under an emission-tests cheating scandal that erupted four years ago.

The search was “directed against individual defendants” and related to diesel vehicles with EA288 engines, VW said Tuesday in a statement. VW “proactively disclosed the technical facts underlying the allegations to the responsible investigation authorities and registration authorities at an early stage” and “considers the public prosecutor’s legal opinion and the resulting investigations to be unfounded.”

If true, why have you paid $33 billion in fines over the issue?

Insurance companies refusing to insure new coal plants

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Coal power becoming ‘uninsurable’ as firms refuse cover (sic)
The Guardian, 12/2/2020

The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report.

The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.

The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two US insurers – Chubb and Axis Capital – and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects.

At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6tn in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.

This is definitely the end game for coal. Governments could step in to create insurance pools for coal companies, but 1) these pools would likely cost more and cover less, and 2) the public will not be happy with tax funds being used to prop up coal plants.

The next, more catastrophic insurance industry move will be when these companies and their re-insurers (like SwissRe) refuse to write polices for coastal areas because of escalating flood and hurricane threats. When that happens, governments will either have to underwrite the risk at tax payer expense, or see the entire housing market for those areas collapse.

Jerk climate denier admits climate in peril, still acts like jerk

Posted on by — Leave a reply
James May, Jeremy Clarkson, and Richard Hammond

In a BBC story running today, former Top Gear host, Jeremy Clarkson, finally admitted things were awry with the climate during a recent visit to Vietnam.

“Climate change was very definitely rammed down our throats in Cambodia,” Clarkson says of filming this special, which sees the rivers considerably shallower than they should be.

“You can say that the Chinese have dammed the rivers and caused the problem, but it also wasn’t raining, and it should’ve been bucketing down all the time. And all the fishermen say ‘the climate is changing’. So you can’t sit there and say, ‘there’s no such thing as climate change’.

Yay, I guess. The BBC is a bit more charitable about his “change of heart”, than me. But, Clarkson, being Clarkson, must ever be a boorish ass.

“Now, if I wanted to, I could run around the world on carbon fibre yachts, shouting and yelling and wailing,” he adds – a clear reference to the actions of the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

“Or, you can just acknowledge it, and then behind the scenes start working on how we address this problem. But we don’t offer any solutions, we’re not scientists, only scientists can come up with solutions. Politicians can’t. Weird Swedes can’t. Only scientists can.

Always nice to see sneering and insulting condescension by a grown man leveled at a teenage girl who had the audacity to be right. For the record, the “weird Swede’s” message has been constant: “Listen to the scientists!”

While we are happy to see Clarkson admit his error, we think he should leave any further commentary to expert teenage Swedish girls, and stick to what he is best at, being a first class lout, and beating his underlings when they displease him.

Another ominous rumble in the news

Posted on by — Leave a reply

German car industry faces ‘day of reckoning’
Financial Times, 11/25/2020

Days later, Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler and Volkswagen’s Audi brand announced more than 20,000 job losses, in the first real signs of the huge human cost of the sector’s transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles.

“The auto industry is in the midst of a far-reaching upheaval,” said Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess, whose company is seeking to reinvent itself as a world leader in battery-powered cars.

“No one will survive in the form they exist today,” predicted Ralf Kalmbach at consultancy Bain & Co, who has spent 32 years advising German carmakers.

It is estimated that the German car industry, which directly employs 830,000 people and supports a further 2m in the wider economy, will be forced to plough some €40bn into battery-powered technologies over the next three years.

“In this industry you can only cut jobs in a crisis,” he added. “Deep down, they all know that. They all know they’re going to have to, they are just trying to postpone the day of reckoning.”

When staid, and pro-auto publications like the FT start talking about massive job cuts in Germany’s auto industry, things are looking dire indeed.

Here is the key point of this article, in my opinion:

The market for petrol and diesel engine components will decline at 7 per cent a year, according to a recent McKinsey study.

If the market for ICE is going to decline by “7% a year”, it follows that gasoline/diesel would likewise decline in the EU market. This is an existential crisis for the oil industry in that market. A crisis I expect they will not take lying down.