⚡️Don't get zapped
Happy Monday all and welcome to the Green New Spiel.
Today we look at beaming energy through the air, how big tech is driving demand for clean energy, how auto producers are keeping up the momentum and electrifying their fleets and looking into how dirty our obsession with Bitcoin truly is.
I don’t know about you but that sounds like an exciting line up to me! I hope you enjoy the Spiel and let me know what you think. Make sure to subscribe below if you want to receive the Green New Spiel directly to your inbox every Monday.
📖 The long read: 🔌 Changing the energy infrastructure game
Nikola Tesla, the electrical and mechanical engineer after which both Nikola and Tesla were named, began an experiment at the start of the 20th century to see whether he could transmit electricity wirelessly over long distances. His attempt unfortunately failed and the experiment was rolled up shortly thereafter however it looks like it may just have been revived almost a century later.
An Australian firm, Emrod, is collaborating with a Kiwi energy distributor, PowerCo, on a pilot project to transmit energy from a solar farm on the North Island of New Zealand to remote settlements kilometers away as a narrow beam of microwaves. By keeping the transmission in a tight beam form, it hopefully will address two key issues: 1) avoiding unintended users picking up the microwave beam and not paying for the electricity and 2) minimising the amount of energy lost through transmission versus beaming it in all directions.
Currently, the main application of power beaming could be commercially viable for use in remote locations, avoiding the need for expensive infrastructure set-ups or upgrades. It is hoped that as the efficiency improves, their target market could increase. This could address the ever more prevalent issue that countries face with their ageing grid infrastructure: Emrod do currently have outage response products but if sufficiently scaled they could help countries and states when facing grid failures (think of Texas over the last few weeks).
Is this not dangerous? Could we all not get zapped?
It’s not hard for our imagination to runaway to Hollywood-esque catastrophic scenarios of birds or planes flying through such beams however Emrod believe they have a solution: the beams will be surrounded by laser curtains which are low power laser beams that are not in themselves dangerous. Should the laser curtain be interrupted or breached by a low flying object or animal, the microwave beam will be immediately stopped.
Emrod is not alone - a number of companies and military engineers are working on this effort too.
Read The Economist’s article here.
And in other news:
🍏 Big tech drives green
Tech companies are some of the biggest buyers of clean energy; this is no huge surprise given the number and size of their data centres and the amount of energy needed to keep them cool. The Financial Times reports that the combined power usage of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple is roughly equivalent to New Zealand’s total demand. Click here to see how far Amazon jumped in 2020 to lead the rankings.
🚗 More auto producers pledging to go electric
Both Jaguar and Ford have recently pledged to go electric over the coming years. Jaguar Land Rover announced that its Jaguar brand would be fully electric by 2025 and will also launch fully electric models of its more profitable brand, Land Rover, by 2030. This news comes at a similar time as Ford’s announcement pledging that all its cars sold in Europe will be electric by 2030.
It looks like policies to cut the sale of new petrol or diesel cars is working; for those of you who don’t know, the UK Government accelerated their ban on new petrol and diesel car sales from 2040 to 2030 back in November of last year.
💸 Do we have a dirty obsession with Bitcoin?
The operation and mining of Bitcoin continues to require ever increasing levels of electricity. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (part of the university) estimates that in 2019 Bitcoin used more energy than Argentina. A fun comparison they claim is that electricity used for Bitcoin is enough to power all kettles in the UK for almost the next three decades. That’s a lot of tea.
Naturally the source of the energy used will indicate how dirty the carbon emissions associated with Bitcoin truly are: a recent opinion article by Bloomberg agues that Tesla’s recent acquisition of $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin may seem hypocritical given that a large portion (38%) of the cryptocurrency is mined using coal. Our friends at Cambridge however don’t come to the same conclusion as they argue that the estimates of the energy mix are still varying widely and too early to give a clear indication. What do you think? Was Tesla in the wrong?
See more Bitcoin energy usage comparisons here.
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Thanks for reading, ciao!
Carlo