Elon Musk, stud

 By Bill Amend

Armed goons

 From Cathy Wilcox

US manufacturing picks up in January

 As usual, the line to watch is the thick green one.  

To recap:  

• The economy started to recover in late 2024, the expected response to the Fed's earlier interest rate cuts.
• But this recovery was aborted after Trump massively increased uncertainty with his tariffs
• A year later, we are seeing the first tentative signs that the recovery might have resumed.
• But note, the upward slope of the green line is much less steep than in previous recoveries

GWR's battery train goes into service

 I've talked about these trains before, here and here, but they were previously still in test mode.  Now, passenger services have started.  GWR is testing them on this short stretch of track under real operating conditions, and if they work here, they will be rolled out to other branch lines where the traction is currently diesel.  The discussion of the battery chemistry is interesting. 

This way of reducing CO2 and diesel emissions from rail is one that could be copied by other countries, including those with bigger distances between towns, like Australia and Canada.    

Meet the biggest heat pumps in the world

 

MVV Energie is building the world's most powerful heat pump systems

From the BBC

The pipe that will supply the heat pump, drawing water from the River Rhine in Germany, is so big that you could walk through it, fully upright, I'm told.

"We plan to take 10,000 litres per second," says Felix Hack, project manager at MVV Environment, an energy company, as he describes the 2m diameter pipes that will suck up river water in Mannheim, and then return it once heat from the water has been harvested.

In October, parent firm MVV Energie announced its plan to build what could be the most powerful heat pump modules ever. Two units, each with a capacity of 82.5 megawatts.

That's enough to supply around 40,000 homes, in total, via a district heating system. MVV Energie aims to build the system on the site of a coal power plant that is converting to cleaner technologies.

The scale of the heat pumps was determined partly by limits on the size of machinery that could be transported through the streets of Mannheim, or potentially via barges along the Rhine. "We're not sure about that yet," says Mr Hack. "It might come via the river."

One person well aware of the project is Alexandre de Rougemont, at Everllence (formerly MAN Energy Solutions), another German company that also makes extremely large heat pumps. "It is a competition, yeah," he says. "We're open about it."

Heat pumps soak up heat from the air, ground or, in these cases, bodies of water. Refrigerants inside the heat pumps evaporate when they are warmed even slightly.

By compressing the refrigerant, you boost that heat further. This same process occurs in heat pumps designed to supply single homes, it just happens on a much larger scale in giant heat pumps that serve entire city districts.

As towns and cities around the world seek to decarbonise, many are deciding to purchase large heat pumps, which can attach to district heating networks.

These networks allow hot water or steam to reach multiple buildings, all connected up with many kilometres of pipe. Ever bigger models of heat pump are emerging to meet demand.

"There was a lot of pressure on us to change the heat generation to new sources, especially renewable sources," explains Mr Hack as he discusses the decommissioning of coal-fired units at the Mannheim plant. The site is right by the Rhine, already has a hefty electricity grid connection, and is plugged in to the district heating network, so it makes sense to install the heat pumps here, he says.

He notes that the technology is possible partly thanks to the availability of very large compressors in the oil and gas industry – where they are used to compress fossil fuels for storage or transportation, for example.

Work on the Mannheim project is due to start next year. The heat pumps – with a combined capacity of 162MW – are set to become fully operational in the winter of 2028-29. Mr Hack adds that a multi-step filter system will prevent the heat pumps sucking up fish from the river, and that modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.

Installations such as this are not cheap. The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($235m; £176m). Mr de Rougemont at Everllence says that, at his company, heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity – this does not include the additional cost of buildings, associated infrastructure and so on.

Everllence is currently working on a project in Aalborg, Denmark that will be even more powerful than the system in Mannheim, with a total capacity of 176MW. It will use smaller modules, however – four 44MW units – and is due to become operational in 2027, when it will supply nearly one third of all heating demand in the town.

Those 44MW machines are actually the same ones used in a previous project, now fully operational, to the south of Aalborg in Esbjerg. There, they don't run at maximum capacity but rather supply 35MW each.

Large hot water storage tanks, each able to hold 200,000 cubic metres of liquid, will give the system added flexibility, adds Mr de Rougemont: "When the electricity price is high, you stop your heat pump and only provide heat from the storage."

Veronika Wilk at the Austrian Institute of Technology says, "Heat pumps and district heating systems are a great fit." Such systems can harvest heat from bodies of water or even wastewater from sewage treatment plants.

Dr Wilk notes that, when you use multiple large heat pumps on a district heating network, you gain flexibility and efficiency. You could run two out of four heat pumps in the autumn, say, when less heat is required than during the depths of winter.

All the systems mentioned so far harvest energy from water sources but, less commonly, very large heat pumps can use the air as a heat source, too. Even in a relatively cold city such as Helsinki.

"The sea in front of Helsinki is too shallow," explains Timo Aaltonen, senior vice president of heating and cooling at Helen Oy, an energy firm. "We calculated that we would need to build a tunnel more than 20km long to the ocean, to get enough water [with a] temperature high enough."

Helsinki is in the process of radically overhauling its district heating system. The city has added heat pumps, biomass burners and electric boilers to a 1,400km network that links up nearly 90% of buildings in the Finnish capital, adds Mr Aaltonen.

Heat pumps convert single kilowatt hours of electricity into multiple kilowatt hours of heat but electric boilers can't do this and are therefore considered less efficient.

I ask why Helen Oy decided to install hundreds of megawatts of these boilers and Mr Aaltonen says that they are cheaper to install than heat pumps and having them also means he and colleagues don't have to rely entirely on the air, which is limited in terms of how much heat it can provide at scale. Plus, the electric boilers can help to soak up surplus renewables and provide an electricity grid-balancing function, he says.

152 years of S&P500 returns

 From Visual Capitalist

Observe how the returns are skewed to the right, i.e., are greater than zero.   And how big falls are not always immediately followed by big rallies--for example, 1931's -50% was followed in 1932 with -10%.  1933, however, was between plus 40 and plus 50%.   There were a couple of bear traps (false rallies) between 1929 and 1933.  And the level of the S&P500 didn't pass the 1929 peak until 1954.

Real zero vs net zero

The original idea of net zero was that we would cut emissions as close to zero by 2050 as we could, and what was left over we would try to offset.

This was greeted with cries of glee by big oil, airlines and others.   They decided not to wait until 2050, but to start immediately "reducing" their emissions by buying carbon offsets.   So, for example, an Ozzie petrol (gasoline) company started selling its "zero carbon" petrol.  How did it achieve this miracle?  But buying carbon offsets.  Qantas "offset" the emissions from its flights.   An electric utility announced its "green" credentials.  Zero emissions, it trumpeted, thanks to offsets.

But these offsets were dodgy.  For example, a farmer who had been paid not to clear scrub off some of his land admitted that he was never going to clear the land anyway.  The payments for the "offsets" were a handy increase to his income, but had absolutely zero effect on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.  

Peasants who promised not to clear some jungle near them were paid for these "offsets" and then, when this was checked up on 10 years later, were found to have cleared the jungle anyway.  Did they give that money back?  What do you think?  

CCS (Carbon capture and storage) projects used the carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere to increase the oil that could be pumped from underground.  And the CO2 likely escaped back into the atmosphere anyway.  

Forests planted to "remove CO2 from the atmosphere" burned down in one of Oz's periodic and ever more frequent bushfires thus putting all that carbon back in the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, of course, emissions kept on rising.

Net zero is irredeemably sullied.  It's a nonsense.  A lie.  A way to let hoi polloi believe that something is being done, when nothing is.  A way for carbon polluters to pretend they care.

So we need real zero.  We need to cut emissions by some minimum percentage each year, year after year, no phiffing and phaffing around with accounting book entries.  Real cuts to emissions.  Real reductions.  Real progress.

Also:  none of those blithely promising net zero by 2050 will be around in 2050 to explain why we haven't achieved it.  So we need annual targets, not so far-away airy-fairy promise.

If we all cut our emissions by just 3% a year, we would cut them by a cumulative 53% by 2050.  If we could increase that by 1%, to 4% a year, annual emissions would fall by 64% by 2050.

Both of these targets are feasible.   Together, electricity generation and land transport are responsible for ~50% of total CO2 emissions.  Given the fall in solar, battery and EV costs, which have made these cheaper than their fossil fuel alternatives, we will be able to cut emissions by 50% over the next 25 years as we replace coal power stations with zero-carbon alternatives and petrol cars and lorries with EVs.  We can replace gas heating by heat pumps, which will cut emissions by another ~8%.  

That still leaves air travel, steel and cement.  Yet here, too, we are making slow progress.  Then there's agriculture.  We might be saved despite ourselves by the growth of vat meat and milk, which will slash emissions and allow cleared land to be reforested.  

We can do it, but we must be alert to the scams fossil fuelists will try to fob us off with.  Let's start by banning the term net zero.