electric https://www.pure-electric.com.au/ en SA Libs' ‘Strangelove’ affair with hydrogen set to bomb https://www.pure-electric.com.au/news/sa-libs-strangelove-affair-hydrogen-set-bomb <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>SA Libs&#039; ‘Strangelove’ affair with hydrogen set to bomb</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 09/27/2019 - 12:25</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-09/SA%20LIBS-STRANGELOVE-AFFAIR%20WITH%20HYDROGEN%20SET%20TO%20BOMB.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="SA LIBS-STRANGELOVE-AFFAIR WITH HYDROGEN SET TO BOMB" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="MsoNormal"><p></p></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">South Australian Liberal MPs paranoid about the scale of <strong>renewable energy</strong> enabled by their Labor predecessors are recycling the fantasy that hydrogen is an economical fuel source that the state can produce at a scale large enough to earn export dollars.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Recycling is generally a good thing, but when it comes to repeating a myth that has been discredited by industry and science because producing hydrogen is complicated, expensive and downright dangerous once isolated, the notion becomes a bad idea.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">This week, the SA government </span></span><a href="http://www.renewablessa.sa.gov.au/content/uploads/2019/09/south-australias-hydrogen-action-plan-online.pdf" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">touted a plan</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%"> to introduce hydrogen energy into the fuel mix by piggy-backing it on top of renewables.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">In the same breath it pronounced that: “By 2025, it is predicted that 90 per cent of the state’s electricity could be generated from renewable sources based on Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) data.”</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Okay … so if solar and wind are going to help power virtually the entire state, what is the point of exploring the vapourware that is hydrogen energy?</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Well, according to the Premier Steven Marshall, it’s because: “Modelling for the Australian <strong>Renewable Energy</strong> Agency has forecast Australian hydrogen exports could contribute $1.7 billion and 2800 jobs to the national economy by 2030. Our aim is to position South Australia to attract a substantial share of that potential economic activity.”</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Sorry, Mr Marshall, there is no meaningful global market for hydrogen, and no other country is seriously considering developing one because exporting this highly explosive and corrosive fuel is not feasible.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">So, why is his infatuation with hydrogen so pronounced? Maybe Mr Marshall is being egged on by Liberal Party apparatchiks philosophically opposed to renewables.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Or perhaps the biggest bullies in the state’s corporate playground, Santos and BHP, want him to spend taxpayer money exploring any potential for their polluting resources to be part of the hydrogen hoax.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">The Premier needs to stop listening to the deluded and recognise that it would be far easier and more intelligent for SA to ramp up renewable electricity from its stated target of 90 per cent and export clean and safe power on the National Electricity Market (NEM) to the eastern states.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">This would help wean them off dirty coal power plants, many of which are  scheduled to be decommissioned anyway.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">And such an endeavour would be just a fraction as ambitious as the one </span></span><a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/cannon-brookes-confirms-investment-in-worlds-biggest-solar-project-34651/" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%"> has thrown his financial weight behind. The brilliant Aussie entrepreneur is spruiking a $25 billion, 3000km undersea cable to export solar energy to Singapore from the Northern Territory.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Here are only a few of many reasons why the SA government is on very shaky ground with its hydrogen fairy tale:</span></span></span></span></span></p> <ol><li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">The former Bush administration gifted multiple billions of dollars to national laboratories, car companies and fuel-cell firms to research the feasibility of hydrogen as a fuel. And they produced zero results, according to aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Even a secondary school chemical student can tell you that Earth’s hydrogen is not freely available, like sunlight and wind are. It is combined with other chemicals, such as oxygen in water or embedded in hydrocarbons.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Hydrogen can be extracted from water via electrolysis, but it is a hugely expensive endeavour that would make it totally uneconomic as a fuel.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">As Mr Zubrin said in his </span></span><a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">expose</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">: “Before hydrogen can be transported anywhere, it needs to be either compressed or liquefied. To liquefy it, it must be refrigerated down to a temperature of minus 253 degrees Celsius. At these temperatures, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics make refrigerators extremely inefficient. As a result, about 40 per cent of the energy in the hydrogen must be spent to liquefy it. This reduces the actual net energy content of the fuel. And because it is a cryogenic liquid, still more energy would be lost as the hydrogen boiled away during transport and storage.”</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Exporting hydrogen, through pipelines or tankers, is virtually impossible with the technology we have today. Hydrogen diffuses into metals leading to deterioration of pipelines, valves, fittings and storage tanks.</span></span> <span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Its molecules are so small, they can not only escape through the most minutely flawed seal, they also penetrate through solid steel, leading to wasteful leakage. Who is going to absorb that cost?</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">And as for hydrogen-powered vehicles, well that narrative is peppered with failures which have cost car makers and tax payers billions of wasted research dollars over the last several years. Chemical process experts, such as </span></span><a href="https://evannex.com/blogs/news/tesla-model-3-vs-toyota-mirai-fuel-cell-vehicle" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Paul Martin</span></span></a><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">, have relentlessly tried to explain that “hydrogen is a dead end for cars … for thermodynamic reasons that are hard to argue with”.</span></span></span></span></span></li> <li class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Even entrenched in fuel cells, hydrogen is a highly flammable substance that would put drivers and their passengers in a vehicle ready to explode on impact.</span></span></span></span></span></li> </ol><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-left:48px; margin-bottom:11px"> </p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:11px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:107%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Good luck to the SA government if it can convince motorists to take the </span></span><a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RidingTheBomb" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline"><i><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">Dr Strangelove</span></span></i></a><i> </i><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="line-height:107%">challenge and ride a H-bomb to oblivion.</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:107%"><p></p></span></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/renewable-energy" hreflang="en">Renewable Energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 27 Sep 2019 02:25:08 +0000 admin 5700 at https://www.pure-electric.com.au Why an electric bike is the best way to get to work https://www.pure-electric.com.au/news/why-electric-bike-best-way-get-work <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Why an electric bike is the best way to get to work</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>manager</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 08/23/2019 - 16:12</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-08/WHY%20AN%20ELECTRIC%20BIKE%20IS%20THE%20BEST%20WAY%20TO%20GET%20TO%20WORK.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="WHY AN ELECTRIC BIKE IS THE BEST WAY TO GET TO WORK" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><strong><span style="color:#3498db;">   Electric bikes</span> </strong>might currently be considered a fun novelty but I am going to explain why<strong> electric bikes </strong>are actually the best commuter option for those within a 10 ish km range of their place of work.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   So you have a job in the city and you live about 10 kms away.  You now have to choose what you are going to do for your daily commute.  Do you drive like most people in Australia?  If you do, you put up with traffic, parking, fuel costs and possibly rego and insurance if this is your second car, it can easily add up to $10,000 a year.   Or do you take public transport, it is a cheaper option yes but not always reliable in Australia and it will cost you around $2000 per year for the privilege of being jammed in a carriage/tram like a sardine.  The most common reasons people state for not using public transport are no service, no service at the right time, travel time too long and home being too far from the station.  Clearly none of these issues apply if you ride a bike (of any kind) to work.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   Ok, then do you ride a motorbike (a bit dangerous and expensive) or do you be a hero and ride to work on a push bike.   Riding a bike to work is an excellent choice, it is cheap and you get exercise but you have to ask yourself after the initial week of enthusiasm, when you roll out of bed on the next cold Monday morning are you really going to ride to work or just take the tram.  Some people will make the effort but most will decide that riding to too much effort and lapse back to public transport or driving,  also you are going to need to shower when you get to work (for the sake of your colleges) which adds to the hassle.  Remember this is not a fun weekend ride, this is riding to and from work every single day rain, heat or shine and after day 10 that hill on the way back will start to seem like a mountain.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   And this...is where the <strong>electric bike </strong>comes in.  A good <strong>electric bike</strong> will cost you about $2,500 and will give you at least 30 kms of all electric range.  What does that mean? It means you can glide for about 30 km in your office clothes, no effort and no sweat.  An <strong>electric bike</strong> will cover 10 kms in about 30 minutes and that means 30 minutes from your office to your front door, no waiting for trains that may or may not come, no traffic, no annoying delays you will be home on time pretty much every time. And if you want exercise, you can always switch off the electric motor and sweat it home.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   But what if (horror of horrors) it rains?  Again there is a solution with <strong>electric bikes</strong>.  Because you don't actually have to pedal you can wear a raincoat and light waterproof pants (that you might use for hiking) and you won't get sweaty you just glide to work completely waterproof with your office clothes underneath (I can personally attest to this working beautifully), strip the waterproofs off and hey presto you are ready to go.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:13pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">   Riding an<strong> electric bike</strong> to work is cheaper, more convenient, faster, more reliable and (most importantly) more fun than any other form of transport within about 10 km of your destination (and probably a bit further with the traffic in cities getting worse during peak hour).  If you ride one to work you should always pick a safe route (i.e. as much bike path as possible) even if it is a bit further out of your way (a few extra kms are no issue with an e-bike). Once you have a safe route established there is nothing stopping your glorious new<strong> electric bike</strong> carrying you to and from your work in comfort, past frustrated commuters in traffic jams and gasping sardines on public transport. After your first trip to and from work there is no doubt you will see E-bikes are the best way to commute available today. </span></span></span></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/e-bike" hreflang="en">E-Bike</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric-vehicles" hreflang="en">Electric Vehicles</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 23 Aug 2019 06:12:21 +0000 manager 5557 at https://www.pure-electric.com.au Everything you need to know about induction cook tops https://www.pure-electric.com.au/news/everything-you-need-know-about-induction-cook-tops <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Everything you need to know about induction cook tops</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>manager</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Thu, 08/15/2019 - 15:30</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-08/EVERYTHING%20YOU%20NEED%20TO%20KNOW%20ABOUT%20INDUCTION%20COOK%20TOPS.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT INDUCTION COOK TOPS" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Induction cook tops are the 3rd piece of equipment the average house needs to go all electric, once hot water and space heating has taken care of via heat pumps.  But to many people induction cooking is a bit of a mystery, this article aims to demystify induction cook tops and show why this decades-old technology is the best option for cooking on your range.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">First things first, induction stoves work by heating your pan using an alternating magnetic field (or magnetic induction for the geeks) rather than by a hot flame or a hot metal element (in the case of older electric stoves).  The great benefit to this is that if the stove is left on it won't heat up anything that is not affected by magnetism (i.e. your hand); in fact it won't even turn on unless there is a pot on the stove. This means induction cook tops are inherently safer for curious children (for example) who like to switch things on and off while you are not watching, induction cook tops greatly reduce the risk of kitchen burns.  Electric cooking is inherently safer than gas cooking as there is no chance of a gas leak or setting fire to a plastic pot handle if the flame is up too high.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Induction cook-tops are also more energy efficient as they heat up your saucepan/pot etc directly rather than via a flame or hot element (you can think of this as you pot becoming part of the stove).  They use about 40% less energy to heat food than a regular stove which also means your kitchen will be less hot in summer, which is a nice bonus.  More efficient also means that you can cook or boil water faster.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Yes, yes, yes you might say they save energy and are safer, but are they easy to cook with?  Would a Master chef use one?</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">The answer to that is yes, they are easy to cook with and the reason is you have instant control over the temperature you are cooking at, unlike traditional electric stoves which take a while to change the heat you are providing to your pot/food. This lag in temperature control is why professional chefs tended to prefer cooking with gas (which has instant adjustment but low precision) but now prefer induction cook tops as induction cooking provides even faster (and more precise) temperature adjustment than gas.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Ok this is sounding too good to be true, so what are the drawbacks? These stove must cost a fortune.  Well there is one slight drawback to induction cooking and that is that not all pans work on an induction stove. Basically if a magnet will stick to the bottom of your pan (this is the case for most pans) it will work on an induction stove if it doesn't it won't, so you may need some new pans.  But induction stoves are not very expensive IKEA sell an induction cook top for around $600, Westinghouse sell one for $1,375 and at the very high end Miele have one for around $2,000.</span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">With regards to electrical requirements for installing an induction cook top, many people run their induction cook top and electric oven of the same 32 amp circuit (and have done for years without an issue).  A (typical) electric oven has a max draw of 4kW and a four hob induction cook top will have a max draw of 7kW but it is worth noting that it is extremely unlikely that both the electric oven and induction cook top will be on full blast at the same time.  It is much more likely that, even at Christmas time, both operate at 50% capacity as operating both at full clip is likely to carbonise your food rather rapidly.  In the highly unlikely even you run into problems you can always install another 15 amp circuit for your oven.  </span></span></span></p> <p class="text-align-justify" style="margin-bottom:13px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Induction cook tops are safer, more energy efficient and better to cook with. But best of all they will help you get off gas, saving you a fortune in gas connection fees over the long run.  They are quite simply a must have for the all electric home.</span></span></span></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/induction-cook-top" hreflang="en">induction cook top</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/get-gas" hreflang="en">Get Off Gas</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Thu, 15 Aug 2019 05:30:02 +0000 manager 5420 at https://www.pure-electric.com.au Tesla disruption - three years to go happening before your very eyes https://www.pure-electric.com.au/news/tesla-disruption-three-years-go-happening-your-very-eyes <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--news.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Tesla disruption - three years to go happening before your very eyes</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--news.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--news.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Fri, 04/26/2019 - 12:04</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-news-image--news.html.twig * field--node--field-news-image.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-news-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-news-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/2019-04/TESLA%20DISRUPTION.png" width="2728" height="583" alt="TESLA DISRUPTION" class="img-fluid" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--news.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><header id="yui_3_17_2_1_1556243468561_326"><p class="text-align-justify" data-content-field="title" id="yui_3_17_2_1_1556243468561_325" itemprop="headline">“They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan</p> <p class="text-align-justify" data-content-field="title" itemprop="headline">“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.” - Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, 2006, on rumours of an Apple phone</p> <header><h2 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Kodak Lessons From a Tragic Business Failure</span></h2> </header><section><p class="text-align-justify">    In 1975, Steve Sasson a Kodak engineer invented the world's first digital camera, a prototype the size of a toaster that captured black-and-white images at a unbelievably low resolution of just .01 megapixels (by comparison, there’s now smartphone with in excess of 50-megapixel resolution available).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Because the first digital camera was filmless, Kodak management wanted Sasson to keep quiet about his invention rather than embrace it as the future of photography.</p> <h1 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">And then there was Nokia</span></h1> </section></header><p class="text-align-justify">    When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!” </p> <p class="text-align-justify">When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a pretty average featured car with average finish and some cool features that they’re planning to build too, coming off the production lines at smaller volumes than they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent! (one of Tesla's new production lines is in a tent)” They say. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The Nokia people were absolutely mistaken and wrong. Could the car people be wrong too? Tesla is ‘the new iPhone’ if that's true what does it really mean? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is partly a question about Tesla, but it’s more interesting as a way to think about what happens when ‘software eats the world’ or software type innovation eats the world; that's when tech moves into new industries and that tech has the ability to make many iterative changes at the micro or nano scale.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">How do we decide or reckon with something being disruptive? If it is disruptive, who or what is getting disrupted? Does that disruption mean that one company is the winner in this brave new world? Which company will win?  Will the disrupter actually get disrupted itself by a new commodity priced version of its technology by the older players, killing off the disruptor shortly after it introduces its revolutionary new technology. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry. At the beginning, either the new thing itself or the companies bringing it (or both) tend to be bad at the things the incumbents value (older metrics of success), and get laughed at, but if they learn those things as well the laughter soon stops.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, the incumbents either dismiss the new thing as pointless or presume they’ll easily be able to add it (or both), but they’re  often wrong. Apple brought software and learnt phones, whereas Nokia had great phones but could not learn software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, not every new technology or idea is disruptive. Some things do not change the basis of competition enough, and for some things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead (these are not quite the same thing). Clay Christensen calls this ‘sustaining innovation’ as opposed to ‘disruptive innovation’ as is sustains the status quo. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However any new technology is probably disruptive to <em>someone,</em> at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Online flight booking didn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents (as Clay Christensen would define it). </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Meanwhile, the people who are first to bring the disruption to market may not be the people who end up benefiting from it, and indeed the people who win from the disruption may actually be doing something tangential - that is they may be in a different part of the value chain.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Apple pioneered PCs but lost the PC market, and the big winners were not even other PC makers. Rather, most of the profits went to Microsoft and Intel.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">PCs themselves became a low-margin commodity with fierce competition, but PC CPUs and operating systems (and productivity software) turned out to have a very strong winner-takes-all effects.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Being first is not the same as having a sustainable competitive advantage, no matter how disruptive you are, and the advantage might be somewhere else anyway. </p> <p class="text-align-justify"><strong>This gives us four things to think about when looking at Tesla:</strong> </p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ First, it does have to learn the ‘old’ things - it has to learn how to make cars at scale with the efficiency and quality that the existing car industry takes for granted, preferably not in a tent, and preferably without running out of cash on the way. But, solving ‘production hell’ is just a condition of entry - it’s not victory. If it can <em>only</em> do this, it’s just another car company, and that’s not what has anyone excited. It’s what the cars <em>are</em> that matters.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Second, Tesla also has to be doing new things that the incumbent car original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will struggle to learn. This is not quite the same as doing things that the OEMs’ suppliers will struggle to learn.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Third, those disruptive things need to be fundamentally important - they need to be enough to change the basis of competition, and to change what it is to be a car and a car company, so that it <em>matters</em> if they can’t be copied.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">✅ Fourth, in addition to all of these there needs to be some fundamental competitive advantage, not just over the existing car industry but also over other new entrants. Apple did things Nokia could not do, but it also does things that Google cannot do.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Now, let’s talk about what’s happening in cars. This is complex, because there are several somewhat separate changes happening at the same time. </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">First, batteries and motors </span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">Tesla has catalysed the realization that lithium batteries let us make electric cars that are as good as internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, and that if we can get the battery volumes high enough, these cars can eventually be as cheap as ICE cars.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The chart below shows the result. Batteries need to get to perhaps 100 $/kWh on this scale to be cost-competitive with gasoline - we're almost there. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 10.30.01 AM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="1308x956" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d8a7562fa768a6edfec8/1535563952409/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.30.01+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">Many car industry insiders would say that Tesla has a lead of several years in the engineering and implementation of this.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, lithium batteries and electric motors are not an exotic new technology with lots of primary IP. Nor are there any network effects or ‘winner takes all’ effects.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Deterministically, it seems pretty likely that in the medium term (that is, by the time batteries are cheap enough for wholesale conversion of the industry from ICE to electric) both the batteries themselves and the motors and control systems will be mostly commodities.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">That does not mean there will not still be plenty of science and engineering to them, but rather that, just as happened to components for smartphones, the entire global electronics industry will be competing to make the best parts, and will sell them to whoever wants to buy. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In such an environment, creating great components in-house does not necessarily give you any particular advantage any further up the stack.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Sony’s image sensor unit is doing very well in the smartphone business, but Sony’s smartphone unit is not doing well at all.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, Apple rigorously manages close to 200 suppliers (including Sony) and designs only a small number of critically differentiated parts itself (for example, the FaceID sensor).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, industry insiders have opinions about who makes the best power amp or GPU, but this is mostly invisible to consumers, except in the aggregate of the choices made by the OEM. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">So, Tesla will have its battery factories (in partnership with Panasonic), and be one of the biggest suppliers, but in a decade that will be (on one estimate) perhaps 15% of global EV battery production.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">On one hand, that’s impressive for a new entrant, but on the other, it illustrates the fact that batteries will probably give only a limited competitive advantage. Everyone will have batteries. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="In this chart, grey is 2017, orange is 2023 and yellow is 2028" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="2334x1312" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86d9874fa51ab650300dae/1535564178851/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.35.53+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">In this chart, grey is 2017, orange is 2023 and yellow is 2028</p> <p class="text-align-justify">It’s probably useful here to compare batteries in particular with the capacitive multi-touch screens in a smartphone.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Apple was the first to popularise these screens, and arguably still implements them best, and these screens fundamentally changed how you made a phone, but the whole industry adopted them.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are better and worse versions, but everyone can buy these screens now, and making a multitouch phone by itself is not a competitive advantage.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Meanwhile, electric is not just about replacing the fuel tank with a battery.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Electric disrupts the internal combustion engine and everything associated with it - you remove the whole drive train and replace it with something with 5 to 10 times fewer moving or breakable parts. You rip the spine out of the car.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is very disruptive to anyone in the <em>engine</em> business - it disrupts machine tools, and many of the suppliers of these components to the OEMs. A lot of the supplier base will change. </p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 10.41.02 AM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png" data-image-dimensions="1446x996" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b86dad14d7a9c71a2bc0c60/1535564502002/Screen+Shot+2018-08-29+at+10.41.02+AM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is not the same as disrupting the OEMs themselves.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">If the OEMs can buy the components of an electric car as easily as anyone else, then the advantage in efficient scale manufacturing goes to the people who already have a lead in efficient scale manufacturing, since they’re doing essentially the same thing.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">In other words, it’s the same business, with some different suppliers, and electric <em>per se</em> looks a lot more like sustaining innovation.   </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Second, software, modularity and integration</span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">If the components will be a commodity, integrating them may not be - at least, not necessarily. </p> <p class="text-align-justify"><strong>First, </strong>the integration of the electric drive train components themselves is not trivial, and doing it better can get you more efficiencies.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is one of the places where Tesla probably has an engineering lead, today.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">What’s not clear is how big that lead will be in (say) five years, and quite what competitive advantage it gives. If, for the sake of argument, Tesla has a <strong>10% or 20%</strong> advantage on range at a given price, this matters for a touring sedan, but does it also matter for a minivan doing the school run, that drives 10 miles a day and parks in a garage with a charging point every night?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">How much of a competitive advantage will that be in 10 years, compared to all the other factors that people use to choose a car? Is this a margin advantage, a competitive advantage, or just a checkbox to be compared with other features? We’ll see. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This integration question is actually much broader than just the drive train. There’s an old car industry joke that you can see the organization chart of a car company in the dashboard, and also see that the steering wheel team hates the gear stick team.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">A modern car has dozens of different electrical and electronic systems, and these are mostly separate and independent. The ABS has nothing to do with the blind spot detection.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">All of these systems are bought by different teams at the OEM from different suppliers, and the only point of integration is the switches on the dashboard.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Each of these components has what the car industry calls ’software’ (“millions of lines of code!”), but this is really what Silicon Valley would call firmware, or at most 'device drivers' also, unlike Silicon Valley products,  these systems are expected to last for ten years and 150k miles). </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Much of this is probably going to change. We will go from complex cars with simple software to simple cars with complex software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Instead of many stand-alone embedded systems each doing one thing, we’ll have cheap dumb sensors and actuators controlled by software on a single central control board, running some <a href="http://www.ros.org/">sort of operating system</a>, with many different threads (there are a few candidates). This is partly driven by electric, but becomes essential for autonomy. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is clearly a challenge to the suppliers who make those separate systems, and there are also plenty of reasons why this might be hard for an incumbent car company to adapt to (most obviously, that org chart).</p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is also exactly the sort of thing that non-tech companies tend to think will be easy (‘we’ll just hire some developers!’), and instead make into a horrible mess, and they may have to go through a cycle of learning that they don’t do it well themselves before buying it from someone who does it better.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">That is, this looks a lot more like disruption than electric itself does. Tesla is of course already here, which is why it could fix a brake problem in the Model 3 over the air - the code it needed to change wasn’t in the brakes.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The question again, though, is quite what this means in the market for cars as opposed to the market for car <em>components</em>.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There’s a useful parallel here with PCs and laptops. Apple is very specific in what components it uses and how they are optimized to work together and fit into the available space, and this produces small, light, power-efficient laptops.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Conversely, a laptop from Dell, or a desktop PC, has much more flexibility and interchangeability of parts, which also means less integration and more empty space inside the case.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Each approach has its benefits, and the modular PC model had perfect product-market fit in the 1990s. So, how far does this translate into reasons to buy? </p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Third, Tesla’s ‘experience’ disruption</span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">The obvious place to answer this question comes when you turn on the car, and this also takes us to the other parts of what makes owning a Tesla better, today.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">So far, we have been talking about the electric drivetrain itself - the ‘skateboard’. It seems more likely that this disrupts the OEMs’ supply chain than the OEMs themselves.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, there is a whole other class of aspects of a Tesla that are different, both inside the car and in things like the dealer experience. How do we think about these? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The easiest place to see disruption from Tesla is in the dashboard of the Model 3.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are reasons discussed above why it will be organizationally difficult for a car company to put absolutely everything onto one screen. But the deeper reasons might just be how much they want to do it.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The Model 3 dashboard is partly about cost saving (fewer widgets to install), but this is also a rejection of a huge number of deeply embedded beliefs about what a car should be. This is not how car people think. Car UIs today feel little like feature phones in 2006, <a href="https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/01/10/cars-as-featurephones">as I wrote here last year</a>.</p> <p class="text-align-center"><img alt="Screen Shot 2018-08-21 at 1.17.23 PM.png" data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png" data-image-dimensions="2286x1420" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-image-id="5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f" data-image-resolution="750w" data-load="false" data-src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df861/t/5b8728d8352f53fb5426308f/1535584661047/Screen+Shot+2018-08-21+at+1.17.23+PM.png?format=750w" /></p> <p class="text-align-justify">There are other cool things that come from the <em>de novo</em> model. Outside the car itself, Tesla can sell direct on a fixed price instead of going through dealers.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">OEM dealers often have contracts around who can install new software (so no remote updates allowed) and those dealers make most of their profits from repairs.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Around half of repair spending is on things directly linked to the ICE - no ICE means no oil leaks or broken fan belts. Dealers also play an important role in setting pricing and incentives, and driving demand to specific models.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">These are all more things that are hard for the incumbent industry to adapt to.  </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, again, it’s unclear to me how <em>central</em> these things are. The counter-argument, perhaps, is that that this is comparable to things like the Apple Stores, or the on-device activation of your phone account when you buy an iPhone.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">These are nice, and a selling point, and hard for Samsung to match, but do we think Apple’s market share would collapse without them? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is of course very subjective (“how much does this cool thing matter?”), so here’s a thought experiment: if these factors were the <em>only</em> difference between a Tesla and a BMW or Mercedes, and the drive train, acceleration etc were all identical, would they be enough?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">If BMW suddenly started selling direct and doing seamless OTA firmware updates, would Tesla’s share price collapse? Probably not. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Less subjectively, it’s not clear there will be winner takes all effects here. There <em>might</em> be a developer ecosystem on the car itself, but it’s just as likely that the proper place for apps in your car is on your phone, <a href="https://smartcar.com/">or in the cloud</a>. Certainly, it’s too early to be sure. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Finally, as really should be obvious, there will be chargers everywhere. Once the actual motivation is there, all sorts of companies will build charging stations everywhere they can. The only barrier is capital - there’s no competitive moat here.</p> <h3 class="text-align-justify"><span style="color:#2980b9;">Fourth, autonomy </span></h3> <p class="text-align-justify">All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (<a href="https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences">I wrote about this here</a>), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In most of the previous conversation, I talked about how Tesla as a technology company would or would not disrupt non-tech companies. However, in autonomy, Tesla is not just competing with car companies - it’s competing with other software companies. It doesn’t have to beat Detroit at software - it has to beat all the rest of Silicon Valley at software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">In this competition, Tesla’s thesis is that the data it can collect from its cars will give it a crucial advantage.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The only reason that anyone is interested in autonomy today is that the emergence of machine learning (ML) in the last 5 years probably gives us a way to make it work.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Machine learning, in turn, is about extracting patterns from large amounts of data, and then matching things against those patterns. So how much data do you have?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, Tesla’s approach to autonomy has been to put as many sensors as possible into the cars it’s already selling, and collect as much data as possible from those sensors. It can do this because its cars are already built on a software platform (as discussed above) - it can ‘just’ add the sensors, in ways that the existing OEMs cannot yet do.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Then, as it gets more and more levels of autonomy working, it can push that out over the air (OTA) to the cars as software updates. Since it already has so many cars with these sensors on the road, this will have a self-reinforcing ‘winner takes all’ effect: it will have more data, and so its autonomy will be better, and so it will sell more cars, get more self-driven miles and so have more data. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">If this pays off, it would indeed be a profound and compelling competitive advantage for Tesla, even without thinking about all the other possibilities, such as renting your Tesla out as an autonomous taxi. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">However, this is just a thesis, and there are two basic questions underlying it: can we do autonomy with vision, and what winner takes all effects apply?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">First, vision. The really obvious problem with Tesla’s autonomy plan is that today ‘as many sensors as possible’ means that Tesla is using cameras placed around the car to give a 360 degree view, plus radar that is only forward-facing (and some short-range ultrasonics). This means it must rely on vision alone to get a full 360 degree 3D model of the world around the car. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Unfortunately, computer vision is not yet able to do this well enough.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Most people in the field would agree that this will be possible at some point (after all, humans don’t have LIDAR), but it’s not possible yet.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Moreover, this isn’t a question of just adding more data and getting vision to work by brute force (or at least, we don’t know that it is). This is why pretty much everyone else is using vision combined with multiple LIDAR sensors and often multiple radar units as well.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">Today, that adds tens of thousands of dollars of cost to each vehicle. If you’re only running an engineering testing and development fleet of at most a few dozen or hundred vehicles, this is bearable, but it’s clearly not possible to add this to every new Tesla Model 3 - the sensors would cost more than the car. (There’s also the issue that you have to add bulky, fragile and impractical lumps all over the car.)</p> <p class="text-align-justify">The cost and size of these sensors is falling fast (for example, there is a race to get the first solid-state LIDAR working), but we are still some years away from their being cheap enough to put on a production car. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">But meanwhile, even if you do have a sensor suite and ‘sensor fusion’ that can create an accurate 3D model of the world around the car, the rest of the autonomous puzzle isn’t working yet for anyone, nor does anyone in the field think that this is close. Bits of it work quite well - cruise control on highways, say - but the whole does not. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">Hence, Tesla’s first bet is that it will solve the problem of building a model of your surroundings using only vision before the other sensors get small and cheap, <em>and</em> that it will solve all the rest of the autonomy problems by then as well. This is strongly counter-consensus.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">It hopes to succeed taking the harder way before anyone else does it the easier way. That is, it’s entirely possible that Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project), or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1,000 or $2,000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">The second bet is that Tesla will be able to get autonomy working with enough of a lead to benefit from a strong winner-takes-all effect - ‘more cars means more data means better autonomy means more cars’. After all, even if Tesla did get the vision-only approach working, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no-one else would. Hence, the bet is that autonomous capability will not be a commodity. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This takes us back to the data. Tesla clearly has an asset in the data it can collect from the 200k+ Autopilot 2 cars it’s already sold. On the other hand, Waymo’s cars have driven 8m miles, doubling in the last year or so. Tesla’s have driven more (without LIDAR, but set that aside), but how much do you need? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This is really a question about all machine learning projects: at what point are there diminishing returns as you add more data, and how many people can get that amount of data? </p> <p class="text-align-justify">It does seem as though there should be a ceiling for autonomy - if a car can drive in Naples for a year without ever getting confused, how much more is there to improve?</p> <p class="text-align-justify">At some point you’re effectively finished. So, how many cars gathering data do you need before your autonomy is as good as the best on the market? How many companies might be able to reach that? I</p> <p class="text-align-justify">s this 100 or a thousand cars driving for a year, or 1 million cars? And meanwhile, machine learning itself is changing quickly - one cannot rule out the possibility that the amount of data you need might shrink dramatically. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">So: it’s possible that Tesla gets the vision-only approach to work, and gets the rest of autonomy working as well, and its data and its fleet makes it hard for anyone else to catch up for years.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">But it’s also possible that Waymo gets this working and decides to sell it to everyone. It’s possible that by the time this starts to go mainstream, 5 or 10 companies get it working, and autonomy looks more like ABS than it looks like x86 or Windows. It’s possible that Elon Musk’s assertion that it should work with vision alone is correct, and 10 other companies then get it working. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">All of these are possible, but, to repeat, this answer is not a question of disruption, and this is not a matter of whether software people will beat non-software people - these are all software people. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">This post began as a much shorter piece about Tesla and Netflix, comparing two companies that are using software to change other industries. But the fascinating thing about Tesla is that there are so many different things going on, and so many different kinds of innovation. I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of things. One of the issues that recurs in thinking about Tesla is that tech people don’t really know enough about cars, and car people don’t really know enough about software. </p> <p class="text-align-justify">But the history of the tech industry is full of companies where having a lovely product, or being the first to see or build the future, were not enough. Indeed, the car industry is the same - a great, innovative car and a great car company are not the same thing. Tesla owners love their cars.</p> <p class="text-align-justify">I loved my Palm V, and my Nokia Lumia, and my father loved his Saab 9000. But being first isn’t enough and having a great product isn’t enough - you have to try to think about how this fits into all the broader systems. </p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-tags--news.html.twig * field--node--field-tags.html.twig * field--node--news.html.twig * field--field-tags.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field__items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/electric" hreflang="en">electric</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/clean-energy" hreflang="en">Clean energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tags/new-energy" hreflang="en">new energy</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/commerce/field/field.html.twig' --> Fri, 26 Apr 2019 02:04:24 +0000 admin 5211 at https://www.pure-electric.com.au Article 3 https://www.pure-electric.com.au/node/5195 <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span>Article 3</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/fields/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span>admin</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden">Thu, 04/18/2019 - 18:23</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x links--node.html.twig x links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/devweekend/templates/menu/links--node.html.twig' --> Thu, 18 Apr 2019 08:23:49 +0000 admin 5195 at https://www.pure-electric.com.au https://www.pure-electric.com.au/node/5195#comments