The bottom of the Ya was not scraped for some months here in Nuku Hiva bay. See the movie and it looks like a complete nature reservation, an eco system, whatever.
Also some lobsters are living there. What to do with them? They won’t survive an ocean trip we guess. So Rik passed by to hunt them. Peter did the underwater camerawork.
And Mother Nature brought us all this.
Enjoy
I dare say, The Marquesian fishing industry is one of the most sustainable fishing indrustries in the world. Here a 2 minute movie of the industrial process.
Next to the nature features, also consider the sustainability of the labor circumstances.
Compare this to the European industry and draw your conclusion.
Let us not forget that we human beings are most happy with simple, understandable, processes, on a human size.
And by the way, that is often sustainable too.
First we saw solar panels on the roofs on campers. That must have been in the early 1980s.
In these days, only a fool could think that it would be enough to drive a car with it.
But, fools inspire!
Already in 1987 the World Solar Challenge started: the challenge was to cross Austalia on solar power only. Who is the fastest?
So, also in times of bad politics,we can remain optimistic. Because when the will stays, people continue to improve, to innovate. No worries.
Just like Sustainable Yacht ‘Ya’ can come everywhere on nearly any remote place at sea or at lakes, the Velomobile can come everywhere on land. And, both without using a single drop of fossil fuels.
The Velomobile is a bike-with-a-smart-skin.
The skin is a capsule, hyper aerodynamic, and it is you who just fits in that capsule. You can bike like any biker, with two big advantages:
First, you stay dry. Second, you can get a speed of 25-30 km/hour and maintain that speed.n Third, they are often used to commute and that saves a lot of money on driving a car (and petrol).
The high speed is possible because that capsule is so beautifully shaped, that the resistance has become really low. So it is easy to drive. And -fourth advantage- it is fossil free!
The children of San Mateo in Ecuador painted the future for the planet Earth on the sails.
Advising in investments is tricky, advising in sustainable investments is the same.
But here is some information to give an idea.
The main rule or investing your money is, to invest little bits in many places. Never bet on one horse. So, you can put you money in solar panels, windmills, in hydrogen, in smart grid, whatever, but never put all in one thing or company.
The market of financial products for sustainable investmenst offers already a diversity of options.
You can put your money in shares of companies. You buy them in the stockmarket, at a broker. That is rather cheap. You buy could buy stocks from a hydrogen company like Air Products, Liquide, Plug Power. But, you have to dive deep down into the activities of these companies. For example, most of the hydrogen is made out of gas (methane), and that is not sustainable; they should make it out of water, with the use of renewable energy.
You can also invest in funds. A fund charges a percentage of management fee, purchase and selling fees and that is a disadvantage. Advantage is that you can choose funds with each its own mix of investments. Like only solar, or ‘renewables’ which is generally solar and wind. Or funds for water. Often it is the best to go for the conventional sustainable funds. In Holland the ASN bank and Triodos bank have funds.
There are much more funds and investmen varieties. Such as ‘Impact Investing’, which is a broader thing. Such as SRI (Social Responsable Investment) or ESG (Environmental and Social Government Investing). Check this for more about that.
You can also choose for emission rights. In Europe there is an ETS Emission Trading Scheme, set up by the European Union government. In that scheme, a company gets a certain amount of emission rights. If the company wants more to emit, it can buy extra emission rights, from companies who emit less. So the lesser you emit, the more profit you could make. You, as a private, can also buy these emission rights. You get a paper, an ETF, prooving you are the owner. If you are an activist, you simply throw away the paper and there are less emissions to emit. What you see now, is that these ETFs grow in value. Read this for more info.
There are many many sorts of ETFs for sustainability purposes to invest. But realize, they can go up and down.
Most investments are interesting if you put in like 1000 Euro or much more. But nice to mention is that there is the Enerfip , and this already works a bit from 10 Euro. So there is always a start to invest in sustainability.
We are in the middle of an energy transition process. There is also a political facet on this process. As for millenia, all centralized things will create centralized power. But, now when the decentralized production has grown so rapidly, there is the question what will happen? The right wing powers still fight for nuclear energy, neglecting the fact that the nuclear garbage from uranium/plutonium is dangerous for about 20,000 years. The left wing goes for continuation of the decentralization, because that is cheaper. So you understand, I (Peter) have become a left winger.
But, no matter what I think, there is a site (and in future a book) describing the energy transitinon and predicting a complete new final situation, called the holon. From here, the writer Auke Hoekstra takes over:
We are writing a book on the energy transition titled “Power to the People” with the tagline “abundant clean energy, always and everywhere”. This is my attempt to explain to my fellow writers and to my audience on Twitter and BlueSky how our thinking about energy systems has evolved as we switch from fossil fuels to solar and wind. (Don’t fear: the book will be well written, illustrated, etcetera. This is just a quick personal blog.)
Life is basically the intelligent use of energy and matter to avail us of food, make ourselves comfortable, and procreate.
A few million years ago, our anchestors started to differentiate themselves from other animals by using tools, and about a hundred thousand years ago we learned to control fire to cook our food, keep ourselves warm and protect ourselves from other animals. Fire later allowed us to create the bronze age, iron age and then the industrial revolution.
As we became cleverer, we also found new ways to acquire our energy. First we hunted and gathered but this required about 5 square kilometers per person. Then we invented agriculture and this allowed us to produce thousands of times more food per surface area. This in turn allowed us to invent more advanced technologies that in turn required more energy. First we used wood from forests but our requirements grew so fast that vast deforestation was the result, often leading to the downfall of empires. About four hundred years ago we started to solve our wood problem by digging up and burning coal, and soon we were using steam engines running on coal to mine coal. Around two hundred years ago we added oil and gas to our fossil fuel portfolio. But the clever among us always knew that fossil fuel was temporary. People like Jevons and Mouchot warned us that coal would run out over 150 years ago. About a hundred years ago Thomas Edison stated we were burning away our future and Alexander Graham Bell warned about green house gasses causing global warming.
So we started to look for something better. Not bio-fuels because we knew they simply took too much land. Not fossil fuels because they were inherently scarce. Solar (and its first derivative wind) was always the favorite candidate for visionaries, simply because it’s by far the biggest and longest lasting source in our aptly named solar system. The problem was simply that making advanced, efficient and cheap solar cells and wind turbines is hard. It required advances in the understanding of energy and matter. So we looked at other options. First at water (the second derivative of solar) and since the construction of large hydroelectric dams mostly required knowledge of concrete we managed to get very cheap energy from these. But the availability of hydro is limited to at most 10% of our our energy. Spurred on by the second world war, nuclear fission beat solar and wind to the punch. For a time (especially in the fifties and in the USA) nuclear power plants where ‘all the rage’ with proponents promising energy ‘too cheap to meter’ and popular series like ‘the Jetsons’ promising us flying cars running on atomic energy. However, dealing with the radiation (both during and after production of the energy) proved to be a bigger engineering challenge than we thought and nuclear power became neither too cheap to meter, nor small enough to put in a car. That nuclear power could also be used to make bombs, that it occasionally had high profile accidents, and that we couldn’t agree on how to deal with the waste, didn’t help its popularity. In the end, after the rush of some nations to create power plants to make atom bombs, the expansion of nuclear power slowed down and it started losing ‘market share’ to fossil fuels again.
Fortunately, we never stopped developing solar and wind. After Einstein explained the nature of light in 1907 and the space race required us to develop solar panels at any cost, we finally started to develop better solar cells, and now, around a hundred years after Thomas Edison’s prophetic words, our most abundant and longest lasting source of energy has finally become our cheapest. Wind has become a good second in terms of abundance and price and we are now able to assemble enormous offshore wind turbines in less than a day. On top of that scientists have finally discovered the use of learning curves during transitions. Simply put: you can largely predict how products will become cheaper and better performing as we produce more products. This was originally observed by Wright during the second world war: he saw that every doubling of cumulative production dropped the cost by a predictable amount. Moore’s law made the learning curve more famous by pointing out computing power improved very predictably. It turns out solar and wind are perfect examples of technologies that get predictably cheaper over time. Using learning curves we can now show that the sooner we switch, the faster we learn, and the cheaper the transition becomes.
However, where bio fuels, fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are… well… fuels, solar and wind are flows. You could say that fuels come with a bag, while for flows like solar and wind you have to bring the bag yourself. How to store solar and wind has long been a vexing question that has lead to raging scientific debates over the past decades. For a while the conventional wisdom was that solar and wind could never produce more than 60%, 70% or 80% of energy, and we would always need fossil fuel or nuclear for a large part of our energy requirements.
The proposal from the fossil fuel industry was to capture the carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas) from the exhaust of coal and gas plants and to put it underground. This is called CCS for Carbon Capture and Storage. However, we found that this was expensive (both in terms of money and in terms of energy) and the closer you came to filtering out all carbon dioxide the more expensive it became. We also found that we could not really guarantee that the carbon dioxide stayed underground long enough. And finally, and possibly most damning, we found that the fossil fuel industry severely under-reported how much methane escaped during the production of all fossil fuels. These ‘fugitive emissions’ cause a large amount of global warming, even before we start capturing exhaust using CCS. So although there is an enormous lobby from the fossil fuel industry promoting CCS, it is becoming less and less popular. And capturing was never an option for cars and most other uses where oil is burned. So increasingly the consensus is that we have to get rid of all fossil fuels.
Nuclear is still a viable option. But in a system with a lot of solar and wind, energy is basically free a large part of the time. So an already expensive energy source like nuclear, that preferably runs constantly at maximum power to earn back its investment costs, is not an ideal partner to cheap solar and wind. We were hoping that nuclear would get cheaper now that we revisited it, but that’s not what we are seeing. And by now we also understand why this is. Where solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are ideal examples of the kind of small, standardized, repeatable production processes with a steep learning curve, nuclear power plants are large, long term, and always unique projects, unsuited for the learning curve effect. Many even argue that every time we build a new power plant, we learn new risks that we want to address next time, making the next nuclear power plant more (instead of less) expensive.
So what to do now that CCS and nuclear aren’t the ideal complements to wind and solar that we hoped they would be? What to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? How do we match supply and demand in a system running predominantly on solar and wind?
It turns out there is a new technology that is even better suited to learning than solar panels: batteries. Battery cells are small and highly standardized units that we can learn how to produce better and better as we churn out more cells. Moreover, they are dependent on material technology that is developing rapidly. There are thousands of possible chemistries that can be created in a myriad of ways and artificial intelligence is increasingly able to quickly test the different alternatives in virtual environments on the computer. The result is that battery prices are plummeting at an astonishing rate of 28% of every doubling of production and that production increases by 60% per year. These are improvement rates that even solar panels and computer chips cannot keep up with. A new age with plenty of electricity storage is upon us and will completely change our electricity systems. On top of this batteries are also increasingly longer lasting (which decreases the cost of storage even further) and using less and less expensive materials.
Batteries are perfect to cover a few days of storage, especially since putting energy into storage and then getting it out is extremely efficient with batteries. But for long term storage you need something that is even cheaper per kWh of energy stored. And because you use this storage so infrequently it doesn’t matter if the process of storing and retrieving energy is less efficient. Electro fuels – or eFuels for short – fit this bill. They can for example be created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. This hydrogen you can store (e.g. in underground salt caverns) or turn into another liquid fuel like methanol. And on top of that we are getting a handle on demand response. And when demand can follow the supply of solar and wind, you don’t need storage buckets made from batteries or eFuels. So the new system that consensus is building towards is one where solar and wind provide almost all energy, with ten to twenty percent of energy flowing through batteries at one time or another and five to ten percent of energy flowing through the eFuel process. (Of course some countries have abundant hydro or geothermal and for them it becomes even easier.)
So the first shift was from scarce fuels (fossil or otherwise) to abundant flows (mainly solar and wind). The second shift (that we are still in the middle of) is from an electricity system without storage (because fuels bring their own bag) to one with storage (as the complement to solar and wind). The third shift is from a centralized top-down system where the energy comes from far away, to a decentralized bottom-up system where you get your energy much more locally. That last insight is still so fresh that we consider it the most important part of this book.
(We also made a – for now Dutch – website about it: holons.energy.)
The concept we like to use for this is the holon. Holons are semi-autonomous energy systems. The idea is that a building has its own energy storage and possibly energy production and that it takes care of matching supply and demand as much as possible. This results in cheaper energy for the building and it unburdens the electricity grid because less energy needs to be transported and peaks are flattened. Buildings are grouped into business parks or neighborhoods that add more storage and supply and again take care of their own supply and demand as much as possible. Again this reduces energy prices and alleviates use of the grid. By repeating this process from the bottom-up we create an energy system where the local parts are largely energy independent. Most of the energy doesn’t come from thousands of kilometers away but is produced locally or at least in the country or state itself. The system is inherently resilient and stable because every building and neighborhood has storage in case of a power outage somewhere else, and smart demand-response means that important uses of energy (e.g. communication infrastructure and hospitals) can be prioritized.
From an engineering perspective I like that holons are the best way to match supply and demand, thereby decreasing the need for generation and transport, and optimally using storage.
From a political perspective I like that in this age of polarization, holons have the potential for broad popularity. On the left people will like that it supports clean energy from wind and solar. On the right people will like that it offers your family, neighborhood and country more independence and freedom. Everybody can like the resilience and long term stability such a system provides. So whether you are a treehugger or a prepper: holons tick a lot of boxes.
From a social perspective I like that holons keep the energy flows (and therefore money flows) more locally so wealth doesn’t trickle away from families and local communities. Holons also have the potential to increase social cohesion because you can optimize them by trading supply, storage and flexibility locally.
From a personal perspective I like that holons offer us a positive actionable perspective for a future with abundant clean energy.
So that’s my take on where we are in the energy transition.
Since our overview article in 2021, there have been many developments in merchant cargo sailing.
Some numbers:
Very specific, 20.2grams of CO2 is emitted per kilometer per ton transported goods on a carbo ship between 1150 and 3500 TEU(source: ADEME). In general, the transport of a complete product takes 4-5% of the CO2 emissions of that product.
Problem with the ocean going ships is that they use pretty bad oil, and emit a lot of other pollutants, sucha as NOx (Nitrogen Oxides), SOx (Sulfur Oxides) and many other, including heavy metals.
So there is a lot to save.
Here an updated overview.
The Dutch schoonerbrig Tres Hombres sails from 2008 and is the first fossil free sailing merchant ship. Next to cargo there are trainees on board.
The shipping company is Fair Transport and in the meanwhile the Tres Hombres has family: The schooner Nordlys, and since last year, the steel Tukker.
It is getting bigger. The French company TOWT sails the Atlantic ocean with cargo and, since short, with guests. If you book, you get a simple cabin, great food, you can watch the fauna at sea, chat with the crew. Or, when you don’t have the time for that, you can work as much as you want, since there is full satellite contact to the internet.
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Pyxis Ocean sails from 2023. It is rigged with two WindWings, large steel sails designed by UK company BAR Technologies. The emission reduction is up to 30%.
This sail is called the Seawing, is just assisting to the propulsion on any downwind course. Meteorologists always route the ships to downwind ways, so it can save up to 20% on a regular trading course, in the tradewinds.
Rotors are vertical cylinders that spin with the wind and create a forward motion. In 2018 two rotors are fitted on the 240 meter long tanker MS Timberwolf . The emission reduction is about 10%.
Cruise company Hurtigruten Norway unveiled a design for a zero-emission cruising ship that relies on wind and solar power. She will be able to cruise along the fjords and further for many days. The vessel, shown here in a rendering, will be electric and equipped with batteries that will be charged with renewable energy when in port. They will also be powered by retractable sails covered in solar panels.
Michelin is developing sails that you can inflate on cargo ships with following winds. It is called Wisamo wingsails.
The Ocean bird will become the largest vessel driven by sails. Well, sails, they are rigid, just like airplane wings.
Checking the last years, we see that more developments are implemented now. The progress is perhaps slow in this early first adaption, but there is progress.
When you make a run on Europe’s largest trade show Boat Dusseldorf, you can feel it, and when you just count, you see it: the number of electric outboard engines is way bigger than the fossil ones.
And there is more. the electric engine has so many advantages, that there is plenty more to invent. Here a run through some features.
And, from this year, Yamaha, one of the largest outboard engine companies in the world, is sellling the electric Torqueedo outboards.
Yamaha is the first fossil company who does it. Please understand, for the fossil retail it is very difficult to convert to electric engines, because the maintenance time is 6 times less. That is great for us consumers, but bad for business. But the conversion to electric can not be stopped, because the other advantages are plentyful: the silence, staying free of smells, the growing regulations on fossils, and, last but not least, less pollution and less damage to our next generations.
At the Moss Landing Power Plant in California, on of the largest battery plants, a huge fire broke out.
Did it spread fast? Yes, very fast.
At the Moss Landing Power Plant in California, on of the largest battery plants, a huge fire broke out.
Did it spread fast? Yes, very fast.
How to stop it? It is hardly possible. It will burn till all energy has been burnt away.
The plant produces generally Lithium Ion batteries.
Let us see what they do when we test even a small battery.
these two things typically happen with car batteries. Here two examples from the field (the street, if you want)
You see that even when it was extinguished, it pops up again (and again, and again).
2. a bigger EV:
Now check different sorts of batteries, the Lithium polymer, LTO and LFP.
A test:
The LFP doesnot want to flame. But finally somebody managed it to make it create a soft flame by punctioning it.
However, it is self retarding pretty quick.
As shown before, the non LTO, Lithium Polymer and LFP batteries are self retarding. So you just wait.
For the Lithium Ion there are different methods.
The blanket is the simplest:
The water (cooling) is a difficult one. You would need to spray about 1 ½ day to get an EV fire extinguished and it would need many thousands of liters.
When it gets to firefighting, we allways discuss Lithium Ion. Because it is inherently not safe. It just keeps on igniting, even when you think it is.
Lithium Ferro Phosphate and Lithium Polymer are relatively safe. If you take the source away (the charging current), it stops and is self retarding.
Why not preventing the problems, so what about banning Lithium Ion and go for LFP?
