Login
Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.
Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.
“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”
Orans are sacred lands in the Thar Desert that are are being developed for wind energy projects. Nisha Paliwal argues that while wind energy is considered sustainable, it is experienced as violent extractivism by nearby village communities.
The post The Problem with Wind Farming on Rajasthan’s Sacred Lands appeared first on Edge Effects.
In the Netherlands, central heating boilers will be banned by 2026 and its government has incentivized the installation of heat pumps. Meanwhile, the U.K. government estimates that heating buildings accounts for 25% of the U.K.’s greenhouse gas emissions. It passed the Energy Security Bill, and is aiming to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028. All of this opens up opportunities for companies advising on, fitting and maintaining heat pumps, which is what Netherlands-based HeatTransformers, does. It just a raised €15 million Series A to go heavy on the (proverbial) gas.
“Heat pumps have an unbeatable CO2 reduction ratio per invested dollars for households,” says Stijn Otten, co-founder and director of HeatTransformers, “This ratio is much higher than with solar for instance. This was already the case back in 2018 when we started, but even more today.”
While heat pumps might not be new technology, the tech isn’t evenly distributed. More than 60% of homes in Norway are heated using heat pumps, for example, while the U.S. sees fewer than 6% so equipped. HeatTransformers seeks to address the traditional challenges of heat pump adoption by connecting heat pump producers and installation specialists with consumers. The HeatTransformers platform takes consumers through the process from the beginning, when they might only be thinking about the benefits of a heat pump, through installation and beyond, with maintenance, online monitoring and the optimization of heat pumps.
This is a model that has attracted global energy companies, heat pump producers and installers as committed partners, including Engie, Bosch, BDR Thermea Group and dozens of local and national installers. Its €15 million Series A funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners (“EIP”), a global investment firm supporting the transition to a sustainable future, with participation from existing investors Fair Capital Partners and InnovationQuarter.
Interestingly, HeatTransformers told TechCrunch that it could have done without the investment but felt that it needed to scale faster in order to address the general state of the global energy market: war in Ukraine, energy poverty and carbon emissions’ climate impact.
“In this process we were looking for truly professional investors who could help us scaling up across multiple markets,” says Otten. “But at the same time, we also wanted investors who share the same impact fundamentals we have. This is what we found in Energy Impact Partners — a leading investment firm in this space with experience scaling companies like us across multiple markets.”
With heat pump sales having risen by almost 38% across Europe last year, which replaced roughly 4 billion cubic meters of natural gas and avoided 8 million tons of CO2 emissions, HeatTransformers has recognized that right now is the time to be expanding, to meet the growing need for heat pumps not just in the Netherlands, but across Europe.
“This investment will cement our market-leading position in the Netherlands, it will enable us to grow into other markets like Germany and the U.K.,” says Otten. “Fundamentally, it will help us grow and increase our impact.”
For Otten himself, the excitement lies in growing his company and, further into the future, having a lasting impact on global residential heating, as well as climate change.
“I am specifically looking forward to building the teams, further developing the tech-platform and building our partnerships with suppliers, energy companies and installation companies across Europe,” says Otten. “In 10 years’ time, heat pumps will be the common way of heating your home across the entire globe. HeatTransformers will have played a pivotal role in speeding up this transition and [will still be] playing a role in the installation of heat pumps and optimizing the energy systems of households across multiple countries.”
HeatTransformers turns up the dial on heat pumps with new funding by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Effy is at a crossroads. The energy renovation company based in France is doing well, but it is addressing a market that is much bigger than anticipated. That’s why it is making a bet. The company just closed a €20 million funding round (roughly $22 million at today’s exchange rate) from Felix Capital. This is the first external funding round for the company.
“Our story starts 15 years ago,” founder and CEO Frédéric Utzmann told me. “We tackled this market very early on because we really believed in it.”
At first, Effy wasn’t a tech-enabled startup. The company worked on energy renovation for public buildings, residential buildings and industrial facilities. “We started with heavy energy consuming projects with a business that was very much ‘brick and mortar,’ old school. But this allowed us to develop the company in a self-financed and profitable way,” Utzmann said.
Quickly after that, the company started acquiring websites and services that were useful for energy renovation projects. In 2011, the company acquired Calculeo, a tool that helps you calculate how much you can get in public subsidies for energy renovation work. In 2015, Effy acquired Quelle énergie, a VC-backed startup that could calculate how much money you would save by insulating your roof, changing your windows and more.
At the same time, Effy’s traffic started growing rapidly. Search engine optimizations led to more organic traffic. Effy started building a significant network of contractors and redirecting home owners to these partners.
In 2019, Effy chose to focus exclusively on small residential projects. Engie acquired its B2B activities for an undisclosed amount. Effy chose to reinvest everything in product development and growth. In addition to organic traffic, the company spent some money on brand awareness ads (like TV spots), as well as Google and social media ads.
And it has paid off, as Effy attracted 18 million visitors to its websites in 2022. Some people just want to use Effy’s tools to see how much money they could save with energy renovation projects. Others go one step further and submit a request for some construction work.
Effy then contacts those potential customers to understand their needs. To give you a sense of Effy’s scale, last year, the company ended up contacting 500,000 individuals and completing 100,000 energy renovation projects. Effy handled €800 million in transactions on its platform.
Effy can still improve its service in several ways. In particular, its marketplace is still mostly a lead generation product for energy renovation contractors. When potential clients want to move forward with their home projects, they are connected with independent contractors.
These contractors supply quotes, which means that it creates some friction for the end customer. They have to compare quotes between multiple contractors and pick one.
Of course, Effy spends a lot of time curating its marketplace. There are currently 3,800 contractors working with Effy. The company gathered 16,000 reviews and the average rating is 4.8 stars.
Similarly, Effy can handle the paperwork to obtain subsidies for energy renovation work. The company takes a cut on this administrative process and charges contractors a small nominal fee for new potential clients.
Effy now wants to switch to a first-party marketplace model. Clients interact directly with Effy and negotiate the quote with Effy. “Historically, we had an almost 100% third-party business — it represents 90% of our business today,” Utzmann said.
It opens up some new possibilities on the product front. First, there are a lot of optimization possibilities when it comes to creating a quote, sourcing materials and everything that isn’t the construction work itself. This way, contractors can accept more jobs as Effy handles the rest.
Second, Effy could start offering some financing options with partners. For small amounts, Effy can use “buy now, pay later” products. For bigger sums, Effy has an internal team that can negotiate credit lines with Sofinco and Cetelem.
Sure, energy renovation projects can be expensive. But customers often end up paying smaller bills once these projects are done. Effy could even look at the impact on your bills thanks to smart meters.
“Let’s say you pay €2,000 per year and you will pay €1,000 per year starting tomorrow. You could set aside €800 to pay back your investments. You end up saving less because you have to pay something back, but your house is also worth more money,” Utzmann said.
In addition to this product roadmap, Effy’s business could end up growing rapidly thanks to favorable market conditions. The war in Ukraine has had a significant impact on energy bills.
At the same time, the European Union wants to finance projects that have a positive impact on climate change. Residential buildings indirectly generate a ton of carbon emissions as it requires a lot of energy to heat and cool them. Many EU countries are rolling out generous subsidies to foster energy renovation projects.
Finally, Effy is only available in France for now. The company could expand to other European countries in the future, starting with Germany and Spain.
After bootstrapping for 15 years, energy renovation company Effy raises $22 million by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
One fusion startup is betting that a 70-year-old idea can help it leapfrog the competition, so much so that it’s planning to skip the experimental phase and hook its prototype reactor up to the grid.
The decades-old concept, known as a stellarator, is deceptively simple: design a fusion reactor around the quirks of plasma, the superheated particles that fuse and generate power, rather than force the plasma into an artificial box. Easier said than done, of course. Plasma can be fickle, and designing “box” around the fourth state of matter is fiendishly complex.
That’s probably why stellarators spent years in the fusion-equivalent of the desert while the simpler doughnut-shaped tokamak ate everyone’s lunch, and nearly all of their research funding.
But not all of it. Type One Energy is the brainchild of a handful of physicists steeped in the stellarator world. One built the HSX stellarator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two more performed experiments on it, and a fourth worked on the Wendelstein 7-X reactor, the world’s largest stellarator.
Together, they founded Type One in 2019 and nudged forward their approach to fusion at a steady pace. The company wasn’t in stealth — TechCrunch+ identified it as a promising fusion startup last year — but it was operating on a slim budget.
Fusion startup Type One Energy gets $29M seed round to fast-track its reactor designs by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Yellowstone National Park is most famous for Old Faithful, a geyser with fairly predictable periodic eruptions that delight visiting tourists. But it's also home to many other geothermal features like Doublet Pool, a pair of hot springs connected by a small neck with the geothermic equivalent of a pulse. The pool "thumps" every 20-30 minutes, causing the water to vibrate and the ground to shake. Researchers at the University of Utah have measured those thumping cycles with seismometers to learn more about how they change over time. Among other findings, they discovered that the intervals of silence between thumps correlate with how much heat is flowing into the pool, according to a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“We knew Doublet Pool thumps every 20-30 minutes,” said co-author Fan-Chi Lin, a geophysicist at the University of Utah. “But there was not much previous knowledge on what controls the variation. In fact, I don’t think many people actually realize the thumping interval varies. People pay more attention to geysers.”
Yellowstone's elaborate hydrothermal system is the result of shallow groundwater interacting with heat from a hot magma chamber. The system boasts some 10,000 geothermal features, including steam vents (fumaroles), mud pots, and travertine terraces (chalky white rock), as well as geysers and hot springs.
After more than half a century of dependence on Russian oil and gas, the war in Ukraine has forced German officials to reconsider their reliance on fossil fuels entirely.
Enlarge / The tattered shell of the first recorded supernova (SN185) was captured by the Dark Energy Camera. This image covers an impressive 45 arcminutes in the sky—a rare view of the entirety of this supernova remnant. (credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF)
In early December 185 CE, Chinese astronomers recorded a bright "guest star" in the night sky that shone for eight months in the direction of Alpha Centauri before fading away—most likely the earliest recorded supernova in the historical record. The image above gives us a rare glimpse of the entire tattered remnant of that long-ago explosion, as captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes in Chile. DECam has been operating since 2012, and while it was originally designed to be part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey, it's also available for other astronomers to use in their research. This new wide-view perspective of the remains of SN185 should help astronomers learn even more about stellar evolution.
As we've written previously, there are two types of known supernovas, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than 10 solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star's core fuses. This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.
Then there is a Type Ia supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur. These are the brightest supernovae, and they also shine with a remarkably consistent peak luminosity, making them invaluable "standard candles" for astronomers to determine cosmic distances.
For all the focus on carbon pollution produced by shipping and aviation, some of the most challenging to abate will probably be residential buildings. In the U.S., housing units stand an average of 130 years before they’re torn down, according to a recent study.
Homes and apartment buildings built 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago, are woefully underprepared for the energy transition. More often than not, their major mechanical systems rely on fossil fuels, their electrical systems are undersized, and their walls and windows are leaky and poorly insulated.
All that can make for housing that’s less comfortable and less efficient than it needs to be.
Nearly a decade ago, Donnel Baird realized that in many cases, paying for retrofits like this can be cost-prohibitive, requiring a lump sum payment upfront. Even though the benefits might accrue over the years, it was a hurdle many owners couldn’t or didn’t want to cross.
So he founded BlocPower, which has been chipping away at the problem for nearly a decade, developing a roster of projects to prove its retrofit-as-a-service business model that’s focused on low-income communities. This week, it announced that it had raised nearly $25 million in equity and $130 million in debt financing.
The Series B round was led by VoLo Earth Ventures and joined by Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Credit Suisse, Builders Vision, New York State Ventures, Unreasonable Collective, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Gaingels, Van Jones, Kapor Capital, My Climate Journey, Tale Venture Partners and NBA star Russell Westbrook. Debt financing was led by Goldman Sachs.
BlocPower hits its stride, landing $25M Series B to expand its residential energy retrofit platform by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Climate change is a problem important and pressing enough that investors have begun to grasp the opportunities that arise when trying to solve it. Now, they’ve started to cast their nets wider for other, adjacent opportunities.
Tech that serves to conserve the oceans while using it to replace older, more harmful means of generating energy and food seems to be one such opportunity. In fact, when we asked 10 investors in the sector to share their thoughts on the space, we quickly learned that ocean conservation tech startups are seeing more and more interest from generalist investors now that climate change is hot and people are seeking more ways to mitigate its effects.
“Climate change used to be more focused on terrestrial operations. It is now ‘warming’ up to ocean conservation,” Daniela Fernandez, managing partner of Seabird Ventures, told TechCrunch.
The world’s oceans and its climate have always been tightly coupled. Winds generate ocean currents, which in turn influence weather patterns both over the open water and deep into the continents.
“Our planet is 70% ocean, so the urgency of facing and solving climate change can only be properly addressed if we include the ocean in the equation,” said Rita Sousa, partner at Faber Ventures.
The open ocean also contains tremendous amounts of energy. Previously, accessing it meant drilling into the ocean floor to tap hard-to-reach deposits of oil and gas. But today, it increasingly means tapping the enormous energy represented by the ocean’s winds and waves. Just offshore wind alone has the potential to meet global electricity demand by 2040, according to the IEA, which is well in excess of all offshore oil and gas production today.
Stephan Feilhauer, managing director of clean energy at S2G Ventures stressed the viability of technologies like offshore wind as commercial alternatives to fossil fuels: “Offshore wind has established supply chains across the globe. It is possible today to manufacture, install and operate gigawatts of offshore wind energy using technology and equipment that is well established and has years of operational data to help us understand its performance. Offshore wind is the only ocean-based renewable technology that meets these criteria today.”
The oceans are constantly exchanging gases with the atmosphere, too; most importantly withdrawing and storing about 30% of all carbon dioxide pollution. The ocean’s capacity as a carbon sink has created problems for myriad marine life, which have depended on historically stable acidity levels that are now creeping higher. However, this very capacity also creates opportunities to put key nutrient cycles to work and capture humanity’s excess emissions.
“A healthy ocean will continue to provide crucial opportunities for carbon sequestration,” said Peter Bryant, program director (oceans) at Builders Initiative. “There are a number of opportunities for increasing the ocean’s ability to store carbon. We have biological approaches that include ecosystem restoration, seaweed cultivation and iron fertilization; chemical solutions where you use minerals to lock dissolved carbon dioxide into bicarbonates; and electromagnetic approaches that store carbon by running electric currents through seawater.”
Founders and investors have a growing appreciation for the ocean’s potential as a resource for renewable energy and its capacity to buffer and even solve some of the climate problem. “We’re confident in the ocean’s resilience here. It’s simply one of the best resources we have in the fight against climate, and that means opportunity,” said Reece Pacheco, partner at Propeller. “We won’t achieve our climate goals without the ocean. Full stop.”
Christian Lim, managing director at SWEN Capital Partners, agreed: “It took too much time, but finally the ocean is being recognized as a critical piece of our fight against climate change.”
We spoke with:
Climate change is the elephant in the room. Has the issue’s rising profile sucked the air out of the room or is it bringing attention to ocean conservation that otherwise wouldn’t be there? How have things changed in the past five years?
Climate change has been a topic for decades. It used to be a “nice to have” about a decade ago: “If you have the extra funds to perform climate risk assessment, then we will dedicate it to climate change.”
Now, it’s more of a “must have.” If we don’t address climate change, we’ll see more extreme weather events. Over the past five years, we’ve seen more focus on ocean conservation, but there is still a $149 billion annual ocean funding gap. Climate change used to be more focused on terrestrial operations. It is now “warming” up to ocean conservation.
We are just now beginning to see a distinct shift in tone. The thinking used to be that “the ocean is a victim of climate change,” but now the thought is more “the ocean can become a climate hero” and plays a huge role in reducing our carbon footprint. Yet, this shift is still very much in its infancy. In particular, the philanthropic community is just starting to recognize that there is an urgent need to support efforts to develop ocean-based climate solutions.
Until now, most climate funders focused on terrestrial or atmospheric issues, and ocean funders focused on important, but only tangentially climate-related ocean issues such as ending unsustainable fishing practices and establishing marine protected areas. The ocean is already the biggest carbon sink on the planet, and we need to better understand both what absorption of all that carbon is doing to ocean ecosystems, and how much more it can potentially contribute without disrupting its other critical ecosystem functions.
It’s also been encouraging to see governments taking action to truly prioritize and create financial incentives for investing in climate/ocean innovations, such as the bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in the U.S. in 2022. There is also an upswell of talent realizing that working a “typical” job is no longer an option if we won’t have a livable planet in the next seven years. We are seeing society reset its priorities and climate is one of the highest ones at the moment.
Climate change has been called “recession-proof” because governments and investors have come to recognize the scope, scale and urgency of the issue. Do you think that’s true of ocean conservation tech as well?
Yes. Climate change and ocean restoration are inherently linked. The ocean is humanity’s biggest protection against climate change, as it produces more than half the air we breathe and absorbs 93% of excess heat from global warming.
Ocean tech and climate change companies and investors all have the same goal. The urgency of the climate crisis has kept passionate funders and entrepreneurs engaged in the development of solutions regardless of the state of the economy.
Climate change has affected the oceans greatly, causing everything from rising water temperatures to more acidification. How are you approaching the question of climate change in your investments?
Seabird Ventures is internally tracking impact and reporting on social and/or environmental factors in our investments. We have externally reported on the following key ocean impact areas:
To fix the climate, these 10 investors are betting the house on the ocean by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Tesla's production capacities are in store for a significant growth spurt, CEO Elon Musk told the crowd assembled at the company's Austin, Texas Gigafactory for Investor Day 2023 — and AI will apparently be the magic bullet that gets them there. It's all part of what Musk is calling Master Plan part 3.
This is indeed Musk's third such Master Plan, the first two coming in 2006 and 2016, respectively. These have served as a roadmap for the company's growth and development over the past 17 years as Tesla has grown from neophyte startup to the world's leading EV automaker. "There is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth by 2050 and it does not require destroying natural habitats," Musk said during the keynote address.
"You could support a civilization much bigger than Earth [currently does]. Much more than the 8 billion humans could actually be supported sustainably on Earth and I'm just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this," he continued. He promised that the company would release a "detailed whitepaper with calculations & assumptions," via Twitter during the event.
Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2022
But I will also Include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.
The Master Plan aims to establish a sustainable energy economy by developing 240 terraWatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable power generation, which would require an estimated $10 trillion investment, roughly 10 percent of the global GDP. Musk notes, however, that figure is less than half of what we spend currently on internal combustion economy. In all, he anticipates we'd need less than 0.2 percent of the world's land area to create the necessary solar and wind generation capacity.
"All cars will go to fully electric and autonomous," Musk declared, arguing once again that ICE vehicles will soon be viewed in the same disdain as the horse and buggy. He also teased potential plans to electrify aircraft and ships. "As we improve the energy density of batteries, you’ll see all transportation go fully electric, with the exception of rockets,” he said. No further details as to when or how that might be accomplished were shared.
“A sustainable energy economy is within reach and we should accelerate it,” Drew Baglino, Tesla's SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, added.
Following Musk's opening statement, Tesla executives Lars Moravy and Franz von Holzhausen took the stage to discuss the company's "production hell" and the challenges of building the Cybertruck out of stainless steel. However, the lessons learned from that, Moravy argued will help Tesla build its Gen 3 vehicles more efficiently, and do so within a far smaller factory footprint. von Holzhausen announced to a rousing round of applause that the Cybertruck will arrive later this year, a significantly closer date than Musk's previous public estimate that production wouldn't begin until next year.
Unfortunately, there will be no new vehicle reveal at this event, von Holzhausen said. That announce will happen "at a later date."
The company did tease a new video featuring the Tesla Robot walking independently and without the aide of a support frame though there was no live demonstration of the same. Despite difficulties finding suitable off-the-shelf actuators and motors for the humanoid robot platform, "we should bring and actual produce to market at scale that is useful far faster than anyone else," Musk said.
He further expects the company's robots to become so successful that we may soon see a day where they outnumber humans. "I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of robots to humans," he added. "It's not even clear what an economy means at that point."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-lays-out-his-vision-for-teslas-future-at-the-companys-investor-day-2023-215737642.html?src=rss2022 China International Fair For Trade In Services (CIFTIS) - Previews
BEIJING, CHINA - AUGUST 29: A Tesla logo is displayed at Tesla booth ahead of the 2022 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) at China National Convention Center on August 29, 2022 in Beijing, China. The 2022 CIFTIS is slated to be held in Beijing from August 31 to September 5 to provide platforms for exchanges in service trade. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The current battery boom might feel familiar to those who lived through the clean tech bubble that burst a decade ago, with an awful lot of money being invested in what are still nascent markets.
But certainly they’re bigger this time around: The number of electric vehicles on the road has more than doubled in the last seven years, for example, and demand doesn’t seem to be slowing. Market share for EVs has been growing even as the overall automotive market has softened in recent years.
It’s been enough to convince automakers and battery companies to commit nearly $300 billion to building a raft of gigafactories around the world, including more than $38 billion here in the U.S. alone. That confidence has cascaded through the market, driving waves of investment that have resulted in over $42 billion in venture and private equity capital committed to battery research, development, commercialization and manufacturing.
For battery startups like Michigan-based Our Next Energy, betting it all on the automotive market, which is notoriously fickle, can be a risky proposition. Demand for cars and trucks often craters when the economy tumbles. EV sales have been historically tied to an even more volatile indicator: gas prices. As COVID showed, just a few ripples in the automotive supply chain can send shockwaves through the market. The automotive market has a lot of volume, sure, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that margins are typically thin.
As investments go, the automotive sector doesn’t seem like a great place to make massive, long-term bets like the kind required for gigafactories.
And yet the money keeps flowing, and companies like ONE and its investors are increasingly confident that this round of climate tech investments will turn out very differently from the last. What’s behind that bravado?
Why so many gigafactories? It’s not just EVs driving demand by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Engine knock, wherein fuel ignites unevenly along the cylinder wall resulting in damaging percussive shockwaves, is an issue that automakers have struggled to mitigate since the days of the Model T. The industry's initial attempts to solve the problem — namely tetraethyl lead — were, in hindsight, a huge mistake, having endumbened and stupefied an entire generation of Americans with their neurotoxic byproducts.
Dr. Vaclav Smil, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, examines the short-sighted economic reasoning that lead to leaded gas rather than a nationwide network of ethanol stations in his new book Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. Lead gas is far from the only presumed advance to go over like a lead balloon. Invention and Innovation is packed with tales of humanity's best-intentioned, most ill-conceived and generally half-cocked ideas — from airships and hyperloops to DDT and CFCs.
Excerpted from Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure by Professor Vaclav Smil. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.
Just seven years later Henry Ford began to sell his Model T, the first mass-produced affordable and durable passenger car, and in 1911 Charles Kettering, who later played a key role in developing leaded gasoline, designed the first practical electric starter, which obviated dangerous hand cranking. And although hard-topped roads were still in short supply even in the eastern part of the US, their construction began to accelerate, with the country’s paved highway length more than doubling between 1905 and 1920. No less important, decades of crude oil discoveries accompanied by advances in refining provided the liquid fuels needed for the expansion of the new transportation, and in 1913 Standard Oil of Indiana introduced William Burton’s thermal cracking of crude oil, the process that increased gasoline yield while reducing the share of volatile compounds that make up the bulk of natural gasolines.
But having more affordable and more reliable cars, more paved roads, and a dependable supply of appropriate fuel still left a problem inherent in the combustion cycle used by car engines: the propensity to violent knocking (pinging). In a perfectly operating gasoline engine, gas combustion is initiated solely by a timed spark at the top of the combustion chamber and the resulting flame front moves uniformly across the cylinder volume. Knocking is caused by spontaneous ignitions (small explosions, mini-detonations) taking place in the remaining gases before they are reached by the flame front initiated by sparking. Knocking creates high pressures (up to 18 MPa, or nearly up to 180 times the normal atmospheric level), and the resulting shock waves, traveling at speeds greater than sound, vibrate the combustion chamber walls and produce the telling sounds of a knocking, malfunctioning engine.
Knocking sounds alarming at any speed, but when an engine operates at a high load it can be very destructive. Severe knocking can cause brutal irreparable engine damage, including cylinder head erosion, broken piston rings, and melted pistons; and any knocking reduces an engine’s efficiency and releases more pollutants; in particular, it results in higher nitrogen oxide emissions. The capacity to resist knocking— that is, fuel’s stability— is based on the pressure at which fuel will spontaneously ignite and has been universally measured in octane numbers, which are usually displayed by filling stations in bold black numbers on a yellow background.
Octane (C8H18) is one of the alkanes (hydrocarbons with the general formula CnH2n + 2) that form anywhere between 10 to 40 percent of light crude oils, and one of its isomers (compounds with the same number of carbon and hydrogen atoms but with a different molecular structure), 2,2,4-trimethypentane (iso-octane), was taken as the maximum (100 percent) on the octane rating scale because the compound completely prevents any knocking. The higher the octane rating of gasoline, the more resistant the fuel is to knocking, and engines can operate more efficiently with higher compression ratios. North American refiners now offer three octane grades, regular gasoline (87), midgrade fuel (89), and premium fuel mixes (91– 93).
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the earliest phase of automotive expansion, there were three options to minimize or eliminate destructive knocking. The first one was to keep the compression ratios of internal combustion engines relatively low, below 4.3:1: Ford’s best-selling Model T, rolled out in 1908, had a compression ratio of 3.98:1. The second one was to develop smaller but more efficient engines running on better fuel, and the third one was to use additives that would prevent the uncontrolled ignition. Keeping compression ratios low meant wasting fuel, and the reduced engine efficiency was of a particular concern during the years of rapid post–World War I economic expansion as rising car ownership of more powerful and more spacious cars led to concerns about the long-term adequacy of domestic crude oil supplies and the growing dependence on imports. Consequently, additives offered the easiest way out: they would allow using lower-quality fuel in more powerful engines operating more efficiently with higher compression ratios.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive. Numerous tests proved that engines using pure ethanol would never knock, and ethanol blends with kerosene and gasoline were tried in Europe and in the US. Ethanol’s well-known proponents included Alexander Graham Bell, Elihu Thomson, and Henry Ford (although Ford did not, as many sources erroneously claim, design the Model T to run on ethanol or to be a dual-fuel vehicle; it was to be fueled by gasoline); Charles Kettering considered it to be the fuel of the future.
But three disadvantages complicated ethanol’s large-scale adoption: it was more expensive than gasoline, it was not available in volumes sufficient to meet the rising demand for automotive fuel, and increasing its supply, even only if it were used as the dominant additive, would have claimed significant shares of crop production. At that time there were no affordable, direct ways to produce the fuel on a large scale from abundant cellulosic waste such as wood or straw: cellulose had first to be hydrolyzed by sulfuric acid and the resulting sugars were then fermented. That is why the fuel ethanol was made mostly from the same food crops that were used to make (in much smaller volumes) alcohol for drinking and medicinal and industrial uses.
The search for a new, effective additive began in 1916 in Charles Kettering’s Dayton Research Laboratories with Thomas Midgley, a young (born in 1889) mechanical engineer, in charge of this effort. In July 1918 a report prepared in collaboration with the US Army and the US Bureau of Mines listed ethyl alcohol, benzene, and a cyclohexane as the compounds that did not produce any knocking in high-compression engines. In 1919, when Kettering was hired by GM to head its new research division, he defined the challenge as one of averting a looming fuel shortage: the US domestic crude oil supply was expected to be gone in fifteen years, and “if we could successfully raise the compression of our motors . . . we could double the mileage and thereby lengthen this period to 30 years.” Kettering saw two routes toward that goal, by using a high-volume additive (ethanol or, as tests showed, fuel with 40 percent benzene that eliminated any knocking) or a low-percentage alternative, akin to but better than the 1 percent iodine solution that was accidentally discovered in 1919 to have the same effect.
In early 1921 Kettering learned about Victor Lehner’s synthesis of selenium oxychloride at the University of Wisconsin. Tests showed it to be a highly effective but, as expected, also a highly corrosive anti-knocking compound, but they led directly to considering compounds of other elements in group 16 of the periodic table: both diethyl selenide and diethyl telluride showed even better anti-knocking properties, but the latter compound was poisonous when inhaled or absorbed through skin and had a powerful garlicky smell. Tetraethyl tin was the next compound found to be modestly effective, and on December 9, 1921, a solution of 1 percent tetraethyl lead (TEL) — (C2H5)4 Pb — produced no knock in the test engine, and soon was found to be effective even when added in concentrations as low as 0.04 percent by volume.
TEL was originally synthesized in Germany by Karl Jacob Löwig in 1853 and had no previous commercial use. In January 1922, DuPont and Standard Oil of New Jersey were contracted to produce TEL, and by February 1923 the new fuel (with the additive mixed into the gasoline at pumps by means of simple devices called ethylizers) became available to the public in a small number of filling stations. Even as the commitment to TEL was going ahead, Midgley and Kettering conceded that “unquestionably alcohol is the fuel of the future,” and estimates showed that a 20 percent blend of ethanol and gasoline needed in 1920 could be supplied by using only about 9 percent of the country’s grain and sugar crops while providing an additional market for US farmers. And during the interwar period many European and some tropical countries used blends of 10– 25 percent ethanol (made from surplus food crops and paper mill wastes) and gasoline, admittedly for relatively small markets as the pre–World War II ownership of family cars in Europe was only a fraction of the US mean.
Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood), rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical. In fact, the large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol by new enzymatic conversions, promised to be of epoch-making importance in the twenty-first century, has failed its expectations, and by 2020 high-volume US production of ethanol (used as an anti-knocking additive) continued to be based on fermenting corn: in 2020 it claimed almost exactly one-third of the country’s corn harvest.
USA-OIL/BIDEN
Gasoline prices are displayed at a gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 19, 2022. REUTERS/Aimee Dilger
Enlarge / Each of those white structures contains lots of batteries that were built for cars. (credit: B2U)
Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced that it had started operations at a 25 Megawatt-hour battery facility in California. On its own, that isn't really news, as California is adding a lot of battery power. But in this case, the source of the batteries was unusual: Many of them had spent an earlier life powering electric vehicles.
The idea of repurposing electric vehicle batteries has been around for a while. To work in a car, the batteries need to be able to meet certain standards in terms of capacity and rate of discharge, but that performance declines with use. Even after a battery no longer meets the needs of a car, however, it can still store enough energy to be useful on the electric grid. So it was suggested that grid storage might be an intermediate destination between vehicles and recycling.
But there are some significant technical and economic challenges to implementing the idea. So we talked with B2U's CEO, Freeman Hall, to find out why the company decided it was the right time to put the concept into action.
Researchers have uncovered the first evidence of “cosmological coupling”—a newly predicted phenomenon in Einstein’s theory of gravity, possible only when black holes are placed inside an evolving universe.
The researchers studied supermassive black holes at the heart of ancient and dormant galaxies to develop a description of them that agrees with observations from the past decade.
Their findings are published in two articles, one in The Astrophysical Journal and the other in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The first study found that these black holes gain mass over billions of years in a way that can’t easily be explained by standard galaxy and black hole processes, such as mergers or accretion of gas.
According to the second paper, the growth in mass of these black holes matches predictions for black holes that not only cosmologically couple, but also enclose vacuum energy—material that results from squeezing matter as much as possible without breaking Einstein’s equations, thus avoiding a singularity.
With singularities removed, the paper then shows that the combined vacuum energy of black holes produced in the deaths of the universe’s first stars agrees with the measured quantity of dark energy in our universe.
“We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy,” says Duncan Farrah, University of Hawaii astronomer and lead author on both papers.
“What that means, though, is not that other people haven’t proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we’re not adding anything new to the universe as a source for dark energy: Black holes in Einstein’s theory of gravity are the dark energy.”
These new measurements, if supported by further evidence, redefine our understanding of what a black hole is.
In the first study, the team determined how to use existing measurements of black holes to search for cosmological coupling.
“My interest in this project was really born from a general interest in trying to determine observational evidence that supports a model for black holes that works regardless of how long you look at them,” Farrah says. “That’s a very, very difficult thing to do in general, because black holes are incredibly small, they’re incredibly difficult to observe directly, and they are a long, long way away.”
Black holes are also hard to observe over long timescales. Observations can be made over a few seconds, or tens of years at most—not enough time to detect how a black hole might change over the lifetime of the universe. To see how black holes change over a scale of billions of years is a bigger task.
“You would have to identify a population of black holes and determine their distribution of mass billions of years ago. Then you would have to see the same population, or an ancestrally connected population, at present day and again be able to measure their mass,” says Gregory Tarlé, professor of physics at the University of Michigan. “That’s a really difficult thing to do.”
Because galaxies can have life spans of billions of years, and most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, the team realized that galaxies held the key, but choosing the right types of galaxies was essential.
“There were many different behaviors for black holes in galaxies measured in the literature, and there wasn’t really any consensus,” says coauthor Sara Petty, a galaxy expert at NorthWest Research Associates. “We decided that by focusing only on black holes in passively evolving elliptical galaxies, we could help to sort this thing out.”
Elliptical galaxies are enormous and formed early. They are like fossils of galaxy assembly. Astronomers believe them to be the final result of galaxy collisions, behemoths with upwards of trillions of old stars.
“These galaxies are ancient, don’t form many new stars, and there is very little gas left between those stars. No food for black holes,” Tarlé says.
By looking at only elliptical galaxies with no recent activity, the team could argue that any changes in the galaxies’ black hole masses couldn’t easily be caused by other known processes. Using these populations, the team then examined how the mass of their central black holes changed over the past 9 billion years.
If mass growth of black holes only occurred through accretion or merger, then the masses of these black holes would not be expected to change much at all. But if black holes gain mass by coupling to the expanding universe, then these passively evolving elliptical galaxies might reveal this phenomenon.
The researchers found that the further back in time they looked, the smaller the black holes were in mass, relative to their masses today. These changes were big: The black holes were anywhere from 7 to 20 times larger today than they were 9 billion years ago—big enough that the researchers suspected cosmological coupling could be the culprit.
In the second study, the team investigated whether the growth in black holes measured in the first study could be explained by cosmological coupling alone.
“Here’s a toy analogy. You can think of a coupled black hole like a rubber band, being stretched along with the universe as it expands,” says coauthor and University of Hawaii theoretical astrophysicist Kevin Croker. “As it stretches, its energy increases. Einstein’s E = mc2 tells you that mass and energy are proportional, so the black hole mass increases, too.”
How much the mass increases depends on the coupling strength, a variable the researchers call k.
“The stiffer the rubber band, the harder it is to stretch, so the more energy when stretched. In a nutshell, that’s k,” Croker says.
Because mass growth of black holes from cosmological coupling depends on the size of the universe, and the universe was smaller in the past, the black holes in the first study must be less massive by the correct amount in order for the cosmological coupling explanation to work.
The team examined five different black hole populations in three different collections of elliptical galaxies, taken from when the universe was roughly one half and one third of its present size. In each comparison, they measured that k was nearly positive 3.
This value was predicted for black holes that contain vacuum energy, instead of a singularity, four years earlier by Croker, then a graduate student, and University of Hawaii professor of mathematics Joel Weiner.
The conclusion is profound: Croker and Weiner had already shown that if k is 3, then all black holes in the universe collectively contribute a nearly constant dark energy density, just like measurements of dark energy suggest.
“Is it enough?” Tarlé says. “Are the black holes made over time enough to account for 70% of the energy in the universe today?”
Black holes come from dead large stars, so if you know how many large stars you are making, you can estimate how many black holes you are making and how much they grow as a result of cosmological coupling. Using the very latest measurements of the rate of earliest star formation provided by the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found that the numbers line up.
The researchers say their studies provide a framework for theoretical physicists and astronomers to further test—and for the current generation of dark energy experiments such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the Dark Energy Survey—to shed light on the idea.
“If cosmological coupling is confirmed, it would mean that black holes never entirely disconnect from our universe, that they continue to exert a major influence on the evolution of the universe into the distant future,” Tarlé says.
“The question of the nature of dark energy is perhaps the most important unanswered question in contemporary physics. It’s the majority, 70% of the energy of the universe. And now we finally have observational evidence of where it comes from, why 70%, and why it’s here now. It’s very exciting!”
Source: University of Michigan
The post Team finds link between black holes and dark energy appeared first on Futurity.
FreshRSS 
