When Giants Fall

SUBHEAD: If you think Walmart will survive what’s killing other retail generally, you’re wrong.

By James Kunstler on 22 May 2020 for Kunstler.com -
(https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-giants-fall/)


Image above: "Wal*Mart" pun art by Mark Tichenor. From (https://www.redhen.ca/mal_wart.htm).

It was only a few decades ago that Walmart entered the pantheon of American icons, joining motherhood, apple pie, and baseball on the highest tier of the altar.

The people were entranced by this behemoth cornucopia of unbelievably cheap stuff packaged in gargantuan quantities. It was something like their participation trophy for the sheer luck of being born in this exceptional land, or having valiantly clawed their way in from wretched places near and far — where, increasingly, the mighty stream of magically cheap stuff was manufactured.

The evolving psychology of Walmart-ism had a strangely self-destructive aura about it. Like cargo cultists waiting on a jungle mountaintop, small town Americans prayed and importuned the gods of commerce to bring them a Walmart.

Historians of the future, pan-frying ‘possum cutlets over their campfires, will marvel at the potency of their ancestors’ prayers.

Every little burg in the USA eventually saw a Walmart UFO land in the cornfield or cow-pasture on the edge of town. Like the space invaders of sci-fi filmdom, Walmart quickly killed off everything else of economic worth around it, and eventually the towns themselves.

And that was where things stood as the long emergency commenced in the winter of early 2020, along with the Covid-19 corona virus riding shotgun on the hearse-wagon it rolled in on.

We’re in a liminal, transitional moment of history, like beach-goers gawking at the glassy-green curve of a great wave in the throes of breaking. Such mesmerizing beauty!

Alas, most people can’t surf. It looks easy on TV, but you’d be surprised at the conditioning it takes, and Americans are way, way out of condition. (All those tattoos don’t give you an ounce of extra mojo.)

And so, in this liminal moment, the people still trudge dutifully to the Walmarts with their dwindling reserves of cash money to get stuff, going through all the devotions that we took for granted before the wave welled up and threatened to break over us.

Which is happening. Despite all the fake-heroic blather from the Federal Reserve, from Nancy Pelosi, from Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin — from everybody in charge, to be really fair — and in the immortal words of another recent president — this sucker is going down. Specifically, what’s going down is the aggregate of transactions we call “the economy.”

Meanwhile, the people in charge struggle to prop up the mere financial indexes that supposedly represent economic activity, but more and more just look like a shadow play on the wall of some special slum where the street-corner economists peddle their crack. 

Eventually, the people don’t even have money for the crack, and to make matters worse, whatever money actually remains on the street is worthless.

The wave is breaking now, and a lot of things will be smashed under it — are getting smashed as you read. As in any extinction event, it will be the smaller organisms that survive and eventually thrive and that’s how it will go in the next edition of America, whether we remain states united or find ourselves organized differently.

Accordingly, the giants must fall. When the communities of America rebuild, it will be the thousands of small activities that matter, because they will entail the rebuilding of social capital as well as exchanges that amount to business. 

Social capital is exactly what Walmart and things like it killed in every community from sea to shining sea. People stopped doing business with their neighbors. It took a cataclysm for them to finally notice.

If you think Walmart will survive the same cataclysm that’s killing chain-store retail generally, you’re going to be disappointed.

Everything about it is over and done, including the Happy Motoring adjunct that allowed the cargo-cultists to haul their booty those many miles home. (And, ironically, it wasn’t the oil issue that determined this, but the end of the financing system that allowed Americans to buy their cars on installment loans, when it ran out of credit-worthy borrowers.)

Amazon will be the last giant standing perhaps, but it will go down, too, eventually, on its ridiculous business model, which depends utterly on a doomed trucking system. It will be like the last dinosaur roaring at the dimming sun — while the little proto-mammals skitter to their hidey-holes beneath it.

One thing remains constant: human beings are very adept and resourceful at supplying each other’s needs, which is what business amounts to. Young people, freed from the fate of becoming serfs to corporate giants, can start right now at least imagining what they can do to be useful to others in exchange for a livelihood.

The earnest and energetic will find a way to do that at a scale that makes sense when a new order emerges from the wreckage. After a while, it won’t matter much what any government thinks about it, either. 

Like all the other giants, it will fall, too.
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Tesla and the Laws of Physics

SUBHEAD: Reality prevents Elon Musk's lies about  new e-vehicles performance from being true.

By Tyler Durden on 25 November 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-25/elon-musk-lied-about-performance-targets-new-tesla-roadster-semi-truck)


Image above: A prototype Tesla semi-tractor still driven by a human being. From (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667366/tesla-semi-truck-announced-price-release-date-electric-self-driving).

When Elon Musk stepped on stage at Tesla’s product-launch event earlier this month, he knew the market’s confidence in Tesla’s brand had sunk to an all-time low since he took over the company a decade ago.

So, he resorted to a tactic that should be familiar to anybody who has been following the company:

Shock and awe!

While the event was ostensibly scheduled to introduce Tesla’s new semi-truck – a model that won’t make it’s market debut for another two years, assuming Tesla sticks to its product-rollout deadline – Musk had a surprise in store: A new model of the Tesla Roadster that, he bragged, would be the fastest production car ever sold.

Musk made similarly lofty claims about the battery life and performance of both vehicles. The Tesla semi-trucks, he said, would be able to travel for 500 miles on a single charge. The roadster could clock a staggering 620 – more than double the closest challenger.

There was just one problem, as Tesla fans would later find out, courtesy of Bloomberg: None of it was true. In fact, many of the promises defy the capabilities of modern battery technology:

Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing.

To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.

Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes. That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own Superchargers.

The diminutive Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in an electric car.

These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery.

“I don't think they're lying,” Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work."

While Jaffe seems inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, there’s little, if anything, in Musk’s recent behavior to justify this level of credulity.

In recent months, Musk has repeatedly suffered the humiliation of seeing his lies and half-truths exposed. For example, the self-styled “visionary” claimed during the unveiling of the Model 3 Sedan that he would have 1,500 copies of the new model ready for customers by the end of the third quarter.

Instead, the company managed a meager 260 models as factory-line workers at its Fremont, Calif. factory struggled to assemble the vehicles by hand as the Model 3 assembly line hadn’t been completed.

Increasingly agitated customers who placed deposits with Tesla back in March 2016 have begun asking for refunds, only to be chagrined by the company’s sluggish response.

While nobody in the mainstream press has (somewhat bafflingly) made the connection, Tesla revealed earlier this month that it burned an unprecedented $1.4 billion of cash during the third quarter - or roughly $16 million per day - despite Elon Musk's assurance that Tesla had its "all-time best quarter" for Model S and X deliveries.

And let’s not forget the fiasco surrounding Tesla’s autopilot software. Musk has repeatedly exaggerated its performance claims. And customers who paid more than $8,000 for a software upgrade more than a year ago have been repeatedly disappointed by delays and sub-par performance.
Musk’s exaggerations about the Tesla Roadster were particularly egregious.

Tesla claims that its new $200,000 Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, clocking zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: some 620 miles on a single charge. That's a longer range than any battery-powered vehicle on the road—almost twice as long as Tesla's class-leading Model S and Model X.

To achieve such power and range, Musk said the tiny Roadster will need to pack a massive 200-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s twice the size of any battery Tesla currently has on the road. Musk has previously said he won't be making the packs bigger on the Model S and Model X because of space constraints. So how can he double the pack size in the smaller Roadster?

BNEF’s Morsy has a twofold answer. First, he expects Tesla will probably double-stack battery packs, one on top of the other, beneath the Roadster's floor. That creates some engineering problems for the battery-management system, but those should not be insurmountable. Still, Morsy said, the batteries required would be too large to fit in such a small frame.

“I really don’t think the car you saw last week had the full 200 kilowatt hours in it,” Morsy said. “I don’t think it’s physically possible to do that right now."

Is it possible that, thanks to incremental improvements in battery density and cost, Musk somehow manages to hit these lofty targets? Perhaps, though, as Bloomberg points out, the fact that Musk is basing these claims on a set of projections that haven’t yet been realized is hardly confidence inspiring.

To be sure, there’s an important caveat to Musk’s claims. While they may be staggeringly exaggerated, there’s still the possibility that incremental improvements in battery technology will make these targets more feasible by the time the models hit the market.

Again, Musk may be banking on the future. While Tesla began taking deposits on the Roadster immediately—$50,000 for the base model—the first vehicles won't be delivered until 2020. Meanwhile, battery density has been improving at a rate of 7.5 percent a year, meaning that by the time production starts, packs will be smaller and more powerful, even without a major breakthrough in battery chemistry.

“The trend in battery density is, I think, central to any claim Tesla made about both the Roadster and the Semi,” Morsy said. “That’s totally fair. The assumptions on a pack in 2020 shouldn’t be the same ones you use today."

However, in its analysis of the feasibility of Musk’s claims, Bloomberg overlooked one crucial detail: Back in August, the company's veteran director of battery technology, Kurt Kelty, unexpectedly resigned to "explore new opportunities," abruptly ending a tenure with the company that stretched for more than a decade, and comes at a critical time for Elon Musk.

Kelty’s resignation – part of an exodus of high-level executives that is alarming in and of itself - hardly inspires confidence in Tesla’s ability to innovate. We’ve noticed a trend with Tesla: The more the company underdelivers, the more Musk overpromises. In our opinion, this is not a sustainable business strategy.
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When the trucks stop running

SUBHEAD: Review of book by Alice J. Friedemann about impacts of loss of trucking on society.

By Allan S. Christensen on 8 May 2017 for Resilience -
(http://fromfilmerstofarmers.com/blog/2017/april/book-review-when-trucks-stop-running-energy-and-the-future-of-transportation/)


Image above: You don't see many Amish men and their horses hauling those wind 100' generator blades around on dirt roads.From original article.

I left off last week's post – "Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, Industrial-Scale Renewable Energy Does" – by mentioning the existence of a rather excellent resource.

By that I didn't mean an energy resource, but rather a book – a book that nonetheless gives a rather fine breakdown of our various energy resources and their applicability to a world in the midst of peak oil and declining EROEI levels (Energy Returned On Energy Invested). That book would be When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation by systems analyst Alice J. Friedemann.

But before I get to the book, it's worth reiterating from said previous post the notion that just as the coal lobbies, nuclear lobbies, and all the other "dirty" fuel lobbies are wont to exaggerate and obfuscate the specifics of their energy resources, so too are lobbyists for the large-scale application of "renewable" energy sources more than willing to exaggerate, obfuscate, and even fudge the facts when it comes to conveying the benefits and advantages of their energy resources.

And as I also pointed out, the latter is just as often the work of PR agencies and other marketeers, the goal effectively being anything but conveying a clear understanding of our current energy situation. Friedemann perfectly explains why this is (italics mine):

In business, ...analysis is essential to prevent bankruptcy. Yet when scientists find oil, coal, and natural gas production likely to peak within decades, rather than centuries, or that ethanol, solar photovoltaic, tar sands, oil shale, and other alternative energy resources have a low or even negative energy return on the energy invested, they are ignored and called pessimists, no matter how solid their findings. For every one of their peer-reviewed papers, there are thousands of positive press releases with breakthroughs that never pan out, and economists promising perpetual growth and energy independence. Optimism is more important than facts. And, it's essential for attracting investors.

So don't let a title like When Trucks Stop Running give you the impression that Friedemann's book is simply one about the energetic options for the trucking industry, since what it actually does is use trucks as an interesting starting point for how to understand the viability of the various energy options available to our declining industrial way of life.

While it was coal-powered trains and railroads that, as described, allowed for extensive inland settlements distant from shipping ports, it was cheap oil supplies after WWII that allowed for the even more distant and scattered suburbs – "truck towns" – thanks to the proliferation of diesel-powered trucks (ten million trucks in the U.S. alone), the millions upon millions of miles of road (4.1 million miles in the U.S. alone), and the just-in-time transport enabled by it all.

With our industrial civilization now largely built around the continued operation of these trucks, Friedemann then explains that if our current way of life is to be maintained – and since supplies of various fossil fuels are finite and have begun, or are to soon begin, peaking – this suggests a turn towards renewables to power those trucks.

But as is pointed out, renewables themselves are just as dependent on trucks as the rest of our modern, industrial civilization is: trucks are needed to transport massive wind turbine blades and the rest of their thousands of components (more than 8,000 in all), they're necessary to transport the cement needed for windmill sites, they're necessary to build and maintain the very roads they themselves travel on, and so forth.


Image above: I stand corrected. Even Tonkas use diesel – turbo-diesel! Photo by Dana Martin. From original article.

You don't see many Amish men and their horses hauling those things around on dirt roads. The underlying question then becomes: How can the trucking system be adapted to run on alternative fuels in order to remain viable in a world of depleting fossil fuels of which said trucks rely on?

Because if the trucking system can't be adapted, then there wouldn't be much reason for building out the large-scale windmill, solar photovoltaic, and all the other fandangle electricity generating ideas being hyped.

For starters, diesel-engine trucks can last decades, this implying a decades-long replacement time due to the billions of dollars already sunk in said trucks of which isn't going to be thrown away.

Simultaneously, a chicken-and-egg problem exists of an aversion to buying alternative-fuel trucks due to the non-existence of fuelling stations, buttressed by an aversion to the building of alternative-fuel stations since the alternative-fuel trucks don't exist either.

What is ideally called for then is a "drop in fuel" – a fuel that utilizes the existing infrastructure and so works with the engines and pipeline systems we've currently got.

But as Friedemann explains, ethanol and biodiesel can't travel in oil pipelines for a variety of reasons, one of these being the resultant corrosion of said pipelines.

Instead, ethanol will continue to travel by trains and trucks powered by twice-as-energy-dense... diesel.

Furthermore, hydrogen isn't a drop in fuel for the simple reason that it can't be used in existing engines, never mind that it would ruin existing oil and/or natural gas pipelines anyway. And although natural gas already has pipelines to be transported through, it can't be used in existing engines either.

In short, a drop in fuel doesn't exist.

That being the case, Friedemann proceeds to break down the three most notable alternatives to diesel-powered, internal-combustion-engine trucks: battery-powered trucks, hydrogen-powered trucks, and trucks running on a catenary system (an overhead wire system as used by trolleys/trams/streetcars).

Battery-powered trucks:
While it might be possible to get a battery-powered remote-control Tonka truck with a cute little Tesla sticker on it, the battery-powered trucks that matter are the massive ones that can haul 30 tons of cargo or pour cement, generally weighing more than 40 times your average car.

Problem is, the amount of batteries needed to allow a truck like this to travel an appreciable distance results in a significant dent in available cargo space, which is then made even worse by the decreased amount of payload a truck can carry due to the sheer weight of the batteries themselves.

This doesn't make for economical transport, and nor does it help that the advancement of batteries is bumping up against physical and thermodynamic limits (as Friedemann has explained on her blog, Energy Skeptic).

But supposing you've got the money to burn (and/or have made some key donations to people in the right government departments and/or positions) and wack it all together anyway, the inherent limitations to the energy density of batteries not only dictates the need for more frequent stops, but for prolonged stops of several hours in order to recharge the batteries.

As if that weren't bad enough, battery-powered trucks have many performance issues, such as mediocre acceleration and problems driving up steep hills, shoddy performance in subzero temperatures, declining range as batteries degrade, and simply cost much more than a conventional diesel truck.

As a result, the battery-powered trucks currently in use are heavily subsidized by governments and exist in the form of smaller-sized hybrids used for garbage pickup since this allows them to utilize all the stopping and starting to recharge their batteries. In other words, they aren't even the type of truck that hauls large loads and travels for long distances without stopping.

Hydrogen-powered trucks:
As should go without saying, hydrogen isn't a fossil fuel we mine from the ground but rather an intermediary of sorts that other energies (such as from wind, solar, etc.) can be transferred over to for storage or other means of usage.

In other words, hydrogen isn't an energy source but more like a battery, and since it takes an enormous amount of energy to split hydrogen from water (water which must be very pure), 96% of H₂ is derived from natural gas.

In effect, hydrogen has an abysmal efficiency rate due to the multiple stages where energy is lost – liquification, hydrogen re-forming, fuel cell efficiency, etc.

On top of all this, hydrogen-powered trucks are so horrible at acceleration that they actually require a secondary propulsion system – batteries – which results in a single truck costing more than a million dollars each – in comparison to the $100,000 or so for a diesel truck.

Catenary system:
Problems quickly appear here due to the frequency of trucks traveling on the system – once every few seconds versus trolley/tram/streetcar systems in which passenger vehicles generally come once every ten minutes or so. This puts a significant strain on the system due to the enormously large loads of electricity that must pass through the overhead wires.

Moreover, the tens of thousands of trucks that would travel on a single system each weigh twice as much as one of the few hundred trolleys/trams/streetcars on an urban transit system and so require much more energy to move.

Then there's the massive overhead costs to install such a system over tens of thousands of kilometers (at several million dollars per kilometre) and the abhorrent amounts of electricity that tens of thousands of trucks would necessitate, compounded by the fact that catenary enabled trucks also require an added battery or fuel cell system for those times when trucks need to drive off the catenary system towards a delivery/pick-up point (or simply overtake another vehicle), or for those times that the power goes out and one doesn't want the highways to turn into McParking lots.

And that's all supposing that there's even enough energy in the first place to charge those batteries, or to be a feedstock for the hydrogen fuel cells, or to power the overhead catenary system.

Because while being a slim and easy-to-read 131-page book, When Trucks Stop Running also gives a barrel-by-barrel, kilowatt-by-kilowatt account of why none of our fossil fuel energy sources – not oil, not coal-to-liquids, not natural gas, not even any of their combination – are capable of maintaining the trucking system and thus our current industrial way of life.

Likewise, the book also conveys why no amount or combination of renewable energies are enough to maintain a trucking system which is needed to maintain a... renewable energy system. And sorry, Friedemann also explains why energy storage systems are a crapshoot as well.

In effect, you aren't going to find much in When Trucks Stop Running to help sell your favourite brand of snake oil in order to prop up your Madison Avenue lifestyle. Otherwise, it's an excellent read.


Image above: Without fossil fuels, how will the trucking industry be able to move around all the components necessary to maintain the trucking industry? Photo by Jeshua Nace. From original article.

That all being so, Friedemann suggests in summation that rather than waste the fossil fuels we've got left on attempting to build out systems that won't have much of a shelf life, we'd be much better off using that fossil energy to convert away from industrial agriculture, to build passive solar houses and buildings, maintain and upgrade domestic waterway transportation infrastructure as well as other low-energy systems.

Regardless, no PR agency, or energy lobbyist, or charlatan is going to be content with letting Friedemann get away with the last word here. For as was mentioned in the passage of hers I quoted earlier:

[W]hen scientists find [uncomfortable facts], they are ignored and called pessimists, no matter how solid their findings. For every one of their peer-reviewed papers, there are thousands of positive press releases with breakthroughs that never pan out...

And you know what that means, right?
Elon Musk just announced the unveiling of the Tesla Semi truck!! And it's "Seriously next level"!!

Okay, okay, I don't mean to say that the latest MuskMobile will "never pan out", just that Concordes generally necessitate too much energy to make them viable without significant subsidies of one sort or another.

And that isn't to say that there's anything inherently wrong with subsidies either, just that while Friedemann also points out that "it is energy, not money, that fuels society", it is also energy, not money, that fuels subsidies (money is after all a proxy for energy, as I've previously written).

In other words, using energy to subsidize energy probably isn't much of a viable long-term plan, but it can certainly score you the starring role as the latest messiah in this age of optimism being valued over facts.


Image above: Sorry there Elon, but it looks like even the big boys realize their Tonkas have no choice but to use diesel – mighty diesel! Photo by Wallace Shackleton. From original article.

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Ninth Ward fights freeway

SUBHEAD: New Orleans plans traffic onto new interstate route through the black neighborhood.

By Michael Stein on 20 March 2017 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39900-new-orleans-ninth-ward-fights-freeway-through-historic-black-neighborhood)


Image above: Public meeting attendees raise their hands to question Arcadis consultant representative Scott Hoffeld. Photo by Michael Stein. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: You might not think this article touches your life if you live on Kauai, but the events in this story are echoed in our experience on Kauai. You've seen it before -  a consultant advocating a plan your community doesn't want and obfuscating answers from residents and promising all concerns will be handled later in the process. Bullshit! Right now the Kauai County trying to adopt an "update" of our General Plan that will not keep Kauai rural but suburbanize it with double the current population. It will hit the westside hard with a tripling of population and an increased dependence on GMO/Pesticide experiments and further militarization of PMRF to support that population. This will mean a greatly increased presence of Navy, Marine and Air Force activities and personnnel. It's just going to be shoved down our throats. Only pushing back will slow this process to a halt.]

"You say you come to inform, but there's no information. You're playing games with my home." Schoolteacher and Ninth Ward resident Derrick Anthony Renkins Jr. was standing at a rancorous public meeting, passionately opposing the proposed Florida Avenue Roadway, a project that would funnel truck traffic through the Ninth Ward from neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

There were about 200 Ninth Ward community members in the Saint Mary of the Angels church that night to see what the Department of Transportation had planned for their home.

This situation was unfortunately familiar for them. Ninth Ward residents continuously contend with infrastructure projects that disregard their well-being and ignore their input.

It's these polices that isolated the Lower Ninth Ward from the rest of the city, robbed it of public resources and caused it to suffer the worst devastation during Hurricane Katrina.

There was national recognition after Katrina that much of the storm's destruction was human-made, and the US has moved closer to acknowledging the devastating impact of racist infrastructure projects and city planning.

Former Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx admitted that "urban renewal" and highway building have harmed poor Black neighborhoods and recommended that future infrastructure projects benefit communities that "have been on the wrong side of transportation decisions."

Louisiana and the city of New Orleans have left this advice unheeded, and the Ninth Ward now faces another infrastructure project that would damage the community and uproot families.

At the front of the church stood Scott Hoffeld, a representative from the private consultancy firm Arcadis. Many in the crowd watched Hoffeld with frustration while he explained the proposal. When he was finished, he asked the crowd if they had any questions. Dozens of hands shot up.

Most Ninth Ward residents are already fed up with the existing truck traffic saturating their roads. Activists have been working to divert St. Bernard trucks away from the Ninth Ward, but they're now threatened by a plan that would permanently establish a truck route through their community.

"The fact is, freeways ruin neighborhoods," explains Beth Butler, the executive director of A Community Voice, a local nonprofit organization. "It's astonishing that in this day in time they would put a freeway through a Black neighborhood."

Residents complain that trucks pollute their communities, damage their roads and reduce their property values.

There is also concern about the source of these trucks, namely the Chalmette Refinery. This large petrochemical plant ships out an array of dangerous materials, and many worry about toxic spills and contamination. "They've already experienced environmental racism," says Butler. "It shouldn't keep happening."

Then there is the issue of eminent domain. A 2013 environmental assessment concluded that the project requires the acquisition of up to 105.4 acres of land, including 128 residences, nine water resources, six commercial structures and a church.

"Before we rebuilt [after Katrina], we had a big meeting, why didn't y'all tell us then that you were putting the roadway here?" asked Vernice Lyons, a homeowner in the Lower Ninth Ward. "Because we wouldn't have rebuilt it.

We built our houses from the ground up. We had nothing but lots there. But y'all waited till after we rebuilt and now y'all want to take us away again?"

"I'm sorry, that was before our contract," Hoffeld responded. "These projects are sometimes imperfect."

Hoffeld tried to assure the crowd that the roadway was intended to benefit the Ninth Ward, not damage it. But the original iteration of this roadway was a raised highway that didn't include a single onramp in the Ninth Ward, casting doubt among residents that this project was intended in any way for their benefit.

Hoffeld admitted that a central purpose of the new high-speed roadway would be to provide interstate access to trucks coming from St. Bernard. The audience rejected this justification on two grounds. The first was a general refusal to suffer damage in their community for another's gain.

The second demurral came from people who have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives and have a comprehensive understanding of the street grid. They insisted that this road isn't necessary because there is already a freeway that provides interstate access.

The existing freeway takes St. Bernard trucks downriver away from the city, instead of west into the Ninth Ward. Truckers familiar with the area attest to the convenience of this route, and say a new Florida Avenue roadway wouldn't do much to truncate their commutes.

When asked if he would utilize the new roadway once it was built, veteran trucker Lloyd Gaimer said it wouldn't be much quicker. "It's all about the same, I'll take either one."

Randy Guillot, vice chairman of American Trucking Associations and member of the Louisiana Trucking Association, insists that this roadway isn't consistent with New Orleans' contemporary infrastructure needs. "It would be much more appropriate to spend the money elsewhere," he says.

Ninth Ward residents agree, citing a long list of desired infrastructure developments in their community including levee improvements to protect them from future flooding.

Many activists on the front line of the opposition say the Louisiana Department of Transportation appears to be trying to deceive them as to its true motivation for pursuing the plan. "We're not getting the whole picture," says community activist Rev. Willie Calhoun Jr. "You're dealing with ignorance here. I'm not calling the people ignorant, but they lack the knowledge of what the overall game plan is."

At the meeting, the audience continued to push Hoffeld about the roadway's true purpose.
"From a legislative standpoint, there are components of this plan that must be constructed," he told the crowd.

He was referring to a 28-year-old piece of legislation that mandates the construction of a new bridge on Florida Avenue. It's called the Transportation Infrastructure Model for Economic Development (TIMED) program, created by the state legislature in 1989. It was the single largest transportation bill in state history, allocating $1.4 billion for 16 infrastructure projects.

TIMED projects have already cost an estimated $5.2 billion and two of the projects were never completed. One of these unfinished projects is the new Florida Avenue bridge.

Today, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Ninth Ward residents agree on at least one thing: There is still a pressing need for a new Florida Avenue bridge. The Lower Ninth Ward is cut off from the rest of New Orleans by a canal, and the existing bridges that link the Lower Ninth Ward are often unavailable, regularly closed for construction or raised to allow boats to pass.

This keeps the Lower Ninth Ward isolated from the rest of the city, restricting access to hospitals, jobs and supermarkets.

Louisiana State Sen. Wesley T. Bishop, a native of the Lower Ninth Ward, attended the public meeting and told the crowd, "There is a need to have another way to get out of the Lower Ninth Ward, but the way it's being proposed to us is unacceptable. We're trying to find a way to keep the project."

The current proposal from the Louisiana Department of Transportation combines the Florida Avenue bridge and Florida Avenue Roadway projects.

Butler believes that the current composition of the proposal is meant to force the community to accept the unwanted roadway in order to get the much-needed bridge.

"This is an optional program, that has not been made clear to people," she says. "People were told things that made them think that you had to take the freeway with the bridge."

Calhoun reported that an Arcadis representative told him the bridge wouldn't be built without the roadway. Calhoun and Butler are working to inform people that the state is required by law to build a new bridge, whether or not the Florida Avenue extension project is approved.

This roadway has been proposed many times in the past. As Calhoun recalls, "My father talked about this in the '60s -- this is way more in-depth than you think."

The idea for a thoroughfare from New Orleans into St. Bernard can be traced back to the 1927 New Orleans Master Plan. But the city's needs are very different than they were in 1927, 1989 or even 10 years ago, and some question if this plan is a prudent use of government funds.

The original TIMED program allocated $30 million to build the new bridge. An assessment from 2013 estimated that the entire Florida Avenue extension project could cost over half a billion dollars.

Southern Louisiana is in great need of infrastructure development. Not only are its streets crumbling, but its coastline is also experiencing erosion at a rate of one football field every hour.

The state recently created a $50 billion plan to combat this subsidence, but there is still a $30 billion budget shortfall.

Louisiana is also dealing with one of the largest budget deficits in state history, and many are perplexed as to why the Louisiana Department of Transportation is focusing on an expensive plan that is not only opposed by the community, but offers limited commercial value.

So the question remains, who benefits from the roadway's construction? Calhoun said he doesn't know, but wouldn't be surprised if "this is just more of Bobby Jindal's people getting money," referencing the rampant corruption in Louisiana politics.

But he also suggested that perhaps this is just an infrastructure project that has floated around the state's bureaucracy for so long that it's attained a weight of its own, being pushed by nobody in particular, but advancing nonetheless. "I don't even think our elected officials have been told the real deal on this," he said. "They're trying to promote it just to promote it."

Ultimately, what many Ninth Ward residents say is most frustrating is that they feel ignored. Those attending the public meeting said they believe the state is withholding information and that even if they were fully informed, there isn't anything they can do to stop the project.

Many saw the meeting as only a façade of public outreach, meant to check a bureaucratic box rather than truly hear and integrate community concerns.

"For the Department of Transportation to allow you to come and stand in front of us and not prepare for your presentation lets me know that once again, my life does not matter," Renkins Jr. told Hoffeld at the end of the meeting. "The task at hand is for you to reach out to me, not for me to reach out to you."

The highway authority is scheduled to make a final decision on the future of the project in January 2018. Between now and then, there is only one public meeting and a final public hearing scheduled. It remains unclear whether community leaders have any recourse to stop a project that is so ubiquitously derided in the Ninth Ward.

"Do we have any say as a community?" asked one frustrated meeting attendee. "At the end of the day, ya'll gonna do what ya'll want to do. I don't know anywhere else in the city where they would allow this to happen."

"They don't understand New Orleans," says Butler. "These are communities that are working class. It's the only affordable housing in the city almost.

The history of these communities; they are families that have built this city. They are strong African American families, working class, who just did everything right and were never rewarded for it.

But at least they had their own community, their own churches. This plan is going to pulverize this Black neighborhood that they know nothing about."

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Robots to replace truck drivers

SUBHEAD: One of the few decent paying jobs for those without college degrees is threatened.

By Natalie Kitroeff on 25 September 2106 for L.A. Times -
(http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-automated-trucks-labor-20160924/)


Image above: Two Otto self driving semi-tractors sit in garage. They have been test driving with autonomous technology up and down Interstate 280 and the 101 Freeway. Photo by Tony Avelar. From original article.

Trucking paid for Scott Spindola to take a road trip down the coast of Spain, climb halfway up Machu Picchu, and sample a Costa Rican beach for two weeks. The 44-year-old from Covina now makes up to $70,000 per year, with overtime, hauling goods from the port of Long Beach. He has full medical coverage and plans to drive until he retires.

But in a decade, his big rig may not have any need for him.

Carmaking giants and ride-sharing upstarts racing to put autonomous vehicles on the road are dead set on replacing drivers, and that includes truckers. Trucks without human hands at the wheel could be on American roads within a decade, say analysts and industry executives.

At risk is one of the most common jobs in many states, and one of the last remaining careers that offer middle-class pay to those without a college degree. There are 1.7 million truckers in America, and another 1.7 million drivers of taxis, buses and delivery vehicles. That compares with 4.1 million construction workers.

While factory jobs have gushed out of the country over the last decade, trucking has grown and pay has risen. Truckers make $42,500 per year on average, putting them firmly in the middle class.

On Sept. 20, the Obama administration put its weight behind automated driving, for the first time releasing federal guidelines for the systems. About a dozen states already created laws that allow for the testing of self-driving vehicles.

But the federal government, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will ultimately have to set rules to safely accommodate 80,000-pound autonomous trucks on U.S. highways.

In doing so, the feds have placed a bet that driverless cars and trucks will save lives. But autonomous big rigs, taxis and Ubers also promise to lower the cost of travel and transporting goods.

It would also be the first time that machines take direct aim at an entire class of blue-collar work in America. Other workers who do things you may think cannot be done by robots — like gardeners, home builders and trash collectors — may be next.

“We are going to see a wave and an acceleration in automation, and it will affect job markets,” said Jerry Kaplan, a Stanford lecturer and the author of “Humans Need Not Apply” and “Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know,” two books that chronicle the effect of robotics on labor.

“Long-haul truck driving is a great example, where there isn’t much judgment involved and it’s a fairly controlled environment,” Kaplan said.

Robots’ march into vehicles, factories, stores, and offices could also profoundly deepen inequality. Research has shown that artificial intelligence helps erase jobs that require basic skills and creates more roles for highly educated people.

“Automation tends to replace low-wage jobs with high-wage jobs,” said James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law who researches the effect of innovation on labor.

“The people whose skills become obsolete are low-wage workers, and to the extent that it’s difficult for them to acquire new skills, it affects inequality.”

Trucking will likely be the first type of driving to be fully automated – meaning there’s no one at the wheel. One reason is that long-haul big rigs spend most of their time on highways, which are the easiest roads to navigate without human intervention.

But there’s also a sweeter financial incentive for automating trucks. Trucking is a $700-billion industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers.

“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said.

The companies pioneering these new technologies have tried to sell cost savings as something that will be good for trucking employers and workers.

Otto, a self-driving truck company started by former Google engineers and executives, pitches its system as a source of new income for drivers who will be able to spend more time in vehicles that can drive solo as they rest.

Uber bought the San Francisco-based company in August.

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On the Thermodynamic Black Hole

SOURCE:  Ray Songtree (rayupdates@hushmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Empty supermarkets, empty gas stations, even empty ATMs and pubs with no beer.

By Mike Stasse on 23 September 2016 for Damn the Amtrix-
(https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/on-the-thermodynamic-black-hole/)


Image above: An artist’s interpretation of what a black hole looks like. From (http://www.beacontranscript.com/pictures-of-black-holes/6386/).

I recently heard Dmitry Orlov speaking to Jim Kunstler regarding the Dunbar Number in which he came up with the term ‘Thermodynamic Trap’. Transcript here (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/kunstlercast-transcript.html)

As the ERoEI of every energy source known to humanity starts collapsing over the energy cliff, I thought it was more like a Thermodynamic Black Hole, sucking all the energy into itself at an accelerating pace… and if you ever needed proof of this blackhole, then Alice Friedemann’s latest book, “When the trucks stop running” should do the trick.

Chris Martenson interviewed Alice in August 2016 about the future of the trucking industry in the face of Peak Oil, especially now the giant Bakken shale oil field in the US has peaked, joining the conventional oil sources. This podcast is available for download here.


Image above: Chris Martenson on "When the Trucks Stop Running" by Alice Friedman (http://energyskeptic.com/). From (https://youtu.be/-EKmNgvUw3k).

Alice sees no solutions through running trucks with alternative energy sources or fuels. I see an increasing number of stories about electric trucks, but none of them make any sense because the weight of the batteries needed to move such large vehicles, especially the long haul variety, is so great it hardly leaves space for freight.

A semi trailer hauling 40 tonnes 1000km needs 1000L of liquid fuel to achieve the task. That’s 10,000kWh of electric energy equivalent.

Just going by the Tesla Wall data sheet, a 6.4kWh battery pack weighs in at 97kg. So at this rate, 10,000kWh would weigh 150 tonnes….. so even to reduce the weight of the battery bank down to the 40 tonne carrying capacity of the truck, efficiency would have to be improved four fold, and you still wouldn’t have space for freight..

There are not enough materials on the entire planet to make enough battery storage to replace oil, except for Sodium Sulfur batteries, a technology I had never heard of before. A quick Google found this…..:

The active materials in a Na/S battery are molten sulfur as the positive electrode and molten sodium as the negative. The electrodes are separated by a solid ceramic, sodium alumina, which also serves as the electrolyte. This ceramic allows only positively charged sodium-ions to pass through.

During discharge electrons are stripped off the sodium metal (one negatively charged electron for every sodium atom) leading to formation of the sodium-ions that then move through the electrolyte to the positive electrode compartment. The electrons that are stripped off the sodium metal move through the circuit and then back into the battery at the positive electrode, where they are taken up by the molten sulfur to form polysulfide.

The positively charged sodium-ions moving into the positive electrode compartment balance the electron charge flow. During charge this process is reversed. The battery must be kept hot (typically > 300 ºC) to facilitate the process (i.e., independent heaters are part of the battery system). In general Na/S cells are highly efficient (typically 89%).
Conclusion: Na/S battery technology has been demonstrated at over 190 sites in Japan.

More than 270 MW of stored energy suitable for 6 hours of daily peak shaving have been installed. The largest Na/S installation is a 34-MW, 245-MWh unit for wind stabilization in Northern Japan. The demand for Na/S batteries as an effective means of stabilizing renewable energy output and providing ancillary services is expanding.

U.S. utilities have deployed 9 MW for peak shaving, backup power, firming windcapacity, and other applications. Projections indicate that development of an additional 9 MW is in-progress.

I immediately see a problem with keeping batteries at over 300° in a post fossil fuel era… but there’s more…

Alice has calculated that Na/S battery storage for just one day of US electricity generation would weigh 450 million tons, cover 923 square miles (2390km², or roughly the area of the whole of the Australian Capital Territory!), and cost 41 trillion dollars….. and according to European authorities, 6 to 30 days of storage is what would be required in the real world.

The disruption to the supply lines of our ‘just in time’ world caused by trucks no longer running is too much to even think about.

Empty supermarket shelves, petrol stations with no petrol, even ATMs with no money and pubs with no beer come to mind.

I remember seeing signs on the Bruce highway back in Queensland stating “Trucks keep Australia going”.  Well, oil keeps trucks running; for how much longer is the real question.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Can Electric Trucks Replace Diesel 8/22/16

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Can electric trucks replace diesel

SUBHEAD: No. Just 16,000 catenary trucks would use all of California’s electricity with only 2400 to 8300 miles of overhead wires.

By Alice Friedman on  22 August 1016 for Energy Skeptic -
(http://energyskeptic.com/2016/all-of-california-electricity-per-year-to-power-16000-catenary-trucks-on-2400-to-8275-miles-of-highway/)


Image above: Proposed Catenary System for I-710 Zero-Emissions Corridor by Siemens Mobility. From (http://fortune.com/2015/08/31/electric-freight-trucks/).

Since without trucks, civilization shuts down within a week, there is no higher priority than keeping trucks running. So it is very important to see if trucks can be electrified, or if a 100% renewable electric is even possible, or there’s no point in using the remaining fossil energy to build windmills, solar PV, nuclear, and other electricity generating installations.

Catenary power distribution:
A catenaryis a curve formed by a wire, rope, or chain hanging freely from two points and forming a curved U shape. From a catenary a relatively level electrified wire can be supported at a fixed level above the ground to supply power.
 
The two-pole catenary wire system ensures a safe, level contact with electric power lines that enable stable energy supply for heavy trucks and mass transportation on public roads.

Hypothetical solution:
It makes sense to electrify trucks since fuel from oil, coal, and natural gas is finite and unsustainable, and biomass doesn’t scale up (and probably has a negative EROI or at best, is close to break-even).

Sustainable electricity generation is impossible without trucks. For example, trucks are needed from start to finish in the life cycle of wind turbines — from the trucks needed to carry the 8,000 components from dozens of factories world-wide to the factory where it is assembled, to the cement and other trucks that prepare the wind turbine site and take the wind turbine to its destination, and to build and maintain the roads the wind turbine arrives on, as well as the transmission lines and towers that connect wind turbines to the grid.

If trucks can’t be electrified and/or a 100% renewable grid isn’t possible, the remaining fossil energy would be better spent on energy conservation, insulation, conversion of industrial farms to organic agriculture, smaller and more widely spread grain storage facilities,passive solar homes and buildings, lower speed limits, and so on.

However:
Although trolley buses run on overhead wires in several cities, there are usually only a few hundred or less running 15 minutes apart. Scaling that up to 20,000 heavy-duty freight trucks that run just seconds apart, if that is even possible (we don’t know yet), is so energy-intensive that very few stretches of roads could be electrified.


Related posts:

• Diesel is finite. Trucks are the bedrock of civilization. So where are the battery electric trucks?
• Heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell trucks a waste of energy and money
• Hybrid electric trucks are very different from HEV cars
• Electric truck range is less in cold weather
• Who Killed the Electric Car?

See also:

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”

Catenary electric trucks are proposed for zero-emissions, certainly not energy conservation or efficiency!

The Problem:
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are trying to reduce the pollution of diesel drayage trucks hauling containers between the ports and inland warehouses.  Currently the I-710 has 10,000 drayage trucks making 3 to 5 round-trips a day between the ports and inland destinations.

Why use dual-mode catenary trucks rather than plain old battery electric or fuel cell?

One solution being investigated are dual-mode catenary trucks running on 24-miles of overhead wires along the I-710 corridor.  After leaving the wires to pick-up or deliver containers, catenary trucks would switch to another energy mode, either a battery, compressed natural gas, hydrogen fuel cell, or diesel.

This prevents the highway from turning into a giant parking when the power goes out, allows trucks to pass one another, and catenary wires won’t be needed within the round-trip range of the other mode of power to thousands of destinations and pickup locations within the ports.

According to Calstart 2013, “This is a new situation; transit applications obviously use catenary, but those uses have headway times of 10 minutes or more. Current traffic models have truck headways of five seconds or less in the I-710 corridor, which significantly increases power demands and complicates the distribution of power to the catenary wires.”

And consider the scale. If there are 16,349 catenary trucks in 2020 (SCAG 2013), that’s orders of magnitude more than San Francisco’s MUNI catenary vehicles: 311 trolley buses and 151 light-rail cars.  And heavy-duty trucks are heavy.  They can weigh twice as much as a trolley bus and require more power to move.

Bottom Line:
Catenary trucks are far from commercial. There is a one mile pilot-demonstration project catenary system under construction in Carson, California. In 2015 when I wrote “When trucks stop running” this $13.5 million project was expected to start in 2015 (Calstart 2013), but since then the date has slipped to 2017 and $4.5 million more dollars.

A similar project in Sweden finished in mid-2016.

In California, four demonstration trucks are planned: a battery-electric truck that can go for 10 miles after coming off the wires (ARB SEP 2014), a diesel truck, and two compressed natural gas trucks (Hsu 2016).

Whether this is enough trucks to find out if it is possible to scale up to tens of thousands of trucks and what the power requirement and distribution of electricity remains to be seen.

It will be hard to build dual-mode trucks that can match the performance of today’s diesel drayage trucks, which go 400 miles between refueling, last 604,000 miles, haul up to 44,000 pounds, operate at temperatures from 23 to 113 degrees F, go up 6% grades, and travel 10 to 14 hours a day.

Diesel drayage trucks are also far less expensive — a used one can cost as little as $3,000, a new one $104,360 (Calstart 2013).

A Battery Electric truck (BEV) truck costs $307,890 (ICCT 2013), a hydrogen fuel cell truck $1.3 million (ARB 2015), and a natural gas catenary truck $282,000 (GNA 2012).

Battery electric trucks (BEV) may never work out. Even if 5 to 10 times as much battery energy density (Wh/kg) were achieved and other technical issues solved, they’d still weigh too much: 2 to 4 tonnes (4400 to 8800 pounds)  in a 40 tonne truck.

Today’s batteries are 5 to 10 times heavier than 2 to 4 tonnes (ICCT 2013).  This is why the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach ruled out Battery-electric (BEV) trucks, which need a 7,700 pound battery that cuts too much into payload, and only goes 100 miles, half as far as required, and are out of service too long and too often, recharging for 4 hours every 120 miles (Calstart 2013b).

Siemens, which is building both the California and Sweden catenary systems points out that “With today’s technology, driving a semi-truck 500 miles would require a 23-ton (46,000 pound) lithium-ion battery, half the weight of the truck itself. [Hydrogen] Fuel cells would need a massive, $2 million hydrogen fuel tank to go the distance (Coren 2016).

And it’s not just batteries that are heavy — CNG tanks and hydrogen fuel cells (hydrogen tank alone 2166 pounds) are heavy as well, and require new  fuel distribution systems and fueling stations that each cost $1 million or more.

I never found a good reference for what CNG tanks and systems would weigh, the best I could find was this: “It is not practical to get 300 gallons of diesel equivalent in CNG on-board a truck — the combined weight of the gas and the system is over 10,000. If you work the weight of the fuel, 300 gallons of diesel = 1,140 gallons of CNG, which weighs 1.81 pounds per gallon, for a total of 2,072 pounds.

Add another 1,800 pounds for the CNG tanks, and about 1,300 pounds for the racks and protective plates, and the fully loaded CNG system weighs in at over 5,172 pounds, 141 percent heavier than the full 300-gallon diesel tanks” (Schneider 2014).

Another disadvantage of BEV trucks is the need for twice as many (32,968) as dual-mode catenary/battery (C/B) trucks (16,349) because the battery on the C/B truck can be continually charged from the overhead wires.

Nor would battery swapping solve the BEV problem, since it would be too expensive to carry multiple batteries for each truck (SCAG 2013) and build expensive battery-swapping stations (Berman 2011).

Another zero-emission solution rejected by the ports was a fixed guideway system, because over 20 years it would cost 14 times more than a dual-mode catenary system (GNA 2012 page 18).


Image above: Fixed overhead guideway system. Source: Klinski, J. 2015. LEVX intermodal freight transport system. Port of Hueneme. California sustainable freight action plan by Magna Force, Inc. From original article.

Question:
How much power would catenary trucks on 24 miles of wires along I-710 need?

Answer:
From .29% (ICF 2014) to 1% (my calculation) of all the electricity generated in California for a year. That means just 2,400 to 8,275 of California’s 175,000 miles of roads would use all of California’s electricity.My assumptions for I-710 catenary:

• 16,349 hybrid catenary trucks I-710 in 2020 (SCAG 2013)
• 3 round-trips per day per truck (Calstart 2013. On good days 4 to 5 trips are made)
• 48 miles per round trip (24 * 2 miles of catenary wires on I-710)
• 313 days of drayage deliveries (ports are closed on Sundays)
• 3.5 kWh/mile (2.21 kWh/kilometer) due to the inefficiency of the dynamic loading on catenary wires, with a 10% efficiency loss assumed (ICCT 2013).
• California produces 250,561 GWh of power a year (ICF 2014)

Calculations:

1. 2579 GWh needed by all catenary trucks per year = 16,349 trucks * 3 round-trips * 48 miles per trip round-trip * 313 days per year * 3.5 kWh/mile (3,438,783,264 kWh)
2. 1% of all generated California electricity used per year = 2579 GWh / 250,561 GWh per year California
3. 100% / 1% * 24 miles = 2,400 miles of roads would use all of California’s electricity
4. .16 GWh per truck per year = 2579 GWh per year / 16,249 trucks

But ICF 2014 estimates .29% of annual power. That’s still a lot!

ICF 2014 “Aggressive Adoption” by 2030 (all trucks electrified) assumptions for I-710

• .29% of all generated California electrity used per year = 722 GWh all trucks/year (table 13) / 250,561 GWh per year California
• Consume 3 kWh/mile (page 87). Using 3 kWh lowers my calculation to 2211 GWh/year, .88% of California electricity, still 3 times more than .29%
• 36,100 trucks = 722/.02  .02 GWh/year/truck (table 33), all trucks 722 GWh/year.
• 241,000,000 total miles all trucks a year (Table 12). Therefore, every day all trucks drive 769,968 miles collectively (241,000,000 / 313 working days).
• 100% / .29% * 24 miles = 8,275 miles of roads would use all of California’s electricity
• Just 21 miles/day on catenary = 769,968 miles a day all trucks / 36,100 trucks. In my calculation each truck goes 144 miles a day, and then 56+ miles using the other mode, since the specs call for 200 miles a day.  If just 21 miles, the other mode must go 180 miles a day. That can’t be right!

Conclusion:

Even if the ICF 2014 estimate of .29% of all California electricity is correct, that’s an awful lot of electricity. Just 8,275 miles of California’s 175,000 miles of roads would use all of California’s electricity– think how much power America’s 10 million trucks would need over 4 million miles of roads.

Since fossil fuels are finite and global production has peaked, or will soon (i.e., oil, coal, natural gas), it makes sense to try to run transportation on 100% renewable electricity. But is an 80 to 100% renewable electricity system even possible? I make a case in “When trucks stop running” that it isn’t.

And catenary doesn’t solve the main problem, which is keeping tractors and harvesters running so they can plant and harvest food. How would you string overhead wires across millions of acres of cropland?

Catenary also locks in a very expensive infrastructure on a road that may not be heavily used in the future. Will the ports continue to move as many goods if the unreformed financial system crashes again and trade drops in the consequent depression, or when energy becomes too expensive or too scarce a component of the supply chain? It’s more likely globalization will decline and more goods made locally in the future.

I was very upset that the father in “Angela’s ashes” spent money on booze rather than food for his children. So is a goal of zero-emissions rather than energy efficiency the best way to spend our remaining energy when no commercially viable way of replacing oil is even in sight, and it takes 50 years to make an energy transition (Smil 2010)?

References:

1. ARB. September 2, 2014. Heavy-duty hybrid vehicles technology assessment. California environmental protection agency, Air Resources Board.
   
2. ARB. 2015. Technology assessment: Medium- and Heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicles.
   
3. Berman, B. 2011. Plug-and-play batteries: Trying out a quick-swap station for E.V.’s. New York Times.
   
4. Calstart. 2013. I-710 project zero-emission truck commercialization study. Calstart for Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 4.7.
   
5. Coren, M.J. June 23, 2016. Siemens says it can power unlimited-range electric trucks using a 150-year-old technology. QZ.
   
6. Edelstein.  July 10, 2016. Road for electric trucks with trolley-like catenary opens in Sweden. greencarcongress.
   
7. GNA. March 8, 2012. Zero-emission catenary hybrid truck market study. Gladsteni, Neandross & Associates.
   
8. Hirsch, R. L., et al. 2005. Peaking of world oil production: impacts, mitigation, & risk management. Department of energy.
   
9. Hoffert, et al 2002 Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet, Science. Vol 298.|
   
10. Hsu, T. July 18, 2016. 100-Year-Old Street trolley technology could completely change trucking. trucks.com.  CNG: Kenworth Trucks , BAE Systems and TransPower.
    
11. ICCT. July 2013. Zero emissions trucks. An overview of state-of-the-art technologies and their potential. International Council for Clean Transportation.
    
12. ICF. September 2014. California transportation electrification assessment. Phase 1: final report. ICF International.
    
13. SCAG. February 2013. On the Move. Southern California delivers the goods. Final report. Southern California Association of Governments.
    
14. Schneider, D. February 10, 2014. The fuel alternatives: CNG & LNG part 1. wearethepractitioners.com
    
15. Smil, Vaclav. 2010. Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects. Praeger.

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