WE CAN’T GET RID OF DRIVERS AND COMBUSTION FAST ENOUGH:

Do electric cars pose a greater fire risk than petrol or diesel vehicles?: the first in a series exploring the myths and realities surrounding EVs (Jasper Jolly, 20 Nov 2023, The Guardian)

“All the data shows that EVs are just much, much less likely to set on fire than their petrol equivalent,” said Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank. “The many, many fires that you have for petrol or diesel cars just aren’t reported.”

Fires can start in several ways. Car batteries store energy by moving lithium ions inside a battery cell but if cells are penetrated or if impurities from manufacturing errors cause short-circuits, then unwanted chemical reactions can start “thermal runaway”, where cells heat up rapidly, releasing toxic and flammable gas. In petrol cars, fires can start via electrical faults causing sparks or if the engine overheats because of a fault in the cooling systems, potentially igniting flammable fuel.

In Norway, which has the world’s highest proportion of electric car sales, there are between four and five times more fires in petrol and diesel cars, according to the directorate for social security and emergency preparedness. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency this year found that there were 3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account. However, the latter figures include arson, making comparisons tricky.

Australia’s Department of Defence funded EV FireSafe to look into the question. It found there was a 0.0012% chance of a passenger electric vehicle battery catching fire, compared with a 0.1% chance for internal combustion engine cars. (The Home Office said it was unable to provide data for the UK.)

Elon Musk’s Tesla is the world’s biggest maker of electric cars. It says the number of fires on US roads involving Teslas from 2012 to 2021 was 11 times lower per mile than the figure for all cars, the vast majority of which have petrol or diesel engines.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

Piecing Together the Evidence: Open-Source Intelligence in Israel’s Gaza War: Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins breaks down his pioneering investigative toolkit (HENRY CARNELL, 11/24/23, MoJo)

What guidance would you give readers who are being flooded with this type of information? What does a well-investigated piece look like?

One issue over the last few weeks is, a lot of organizations that usually produce quite high-quality work on other issues have kind of tried to find answers where there may not be answers available. With the [Al-Ahli] hospital bombing, there are different versions of events, depending on which quite reputable organization you ask, and that’s a problem.

We’ve seen, for example, an analysis by one news organization that pointed towards the rocket being launched from Gaza. Another news organization analyzed the same videos and pointed to it being from Israel. Even good-quality news organizations are producing contradictory statements about the same footage. It’s not even an issue of disinformation around trolls and grifters. It’s a much bigger issue.

You’ve explained that it takes a while to get to the truth. What goes into a Bellingcat investigation?

If we’re talking about conflict incidents, like an airstrike that blows up a building, the first thing we’re trying to do is gather as much of the digital evidence that’s out there, like videos and photographs shared from the scene. Ideally, we try to find them from the original sources where they’re shared, but that’s sometimes not possible.

Once we have all that visual information, we do a process called geolocation, which confirms exactly where these images were taken. You can’t really trust an image from an incident unless you know exactly where it took place. Once you have that, you have a catalog of content of the incident. Then you put that into a timeline.

When you look at footage, you find other images of the same scene, and you start thinking, “What has changed?” You may start looking for munition debris, the shape of a crater, shrapnel spray, and other details like that. Establishing a link between that rocket fire and [an] explosion in the hospital is very important to do.

We also look at media reports and social media posts of witnesses talking about the incident—not to take them at face value, but to look at them and say, “What is consistent with what we’re seeing? What adds bits of information we can explore using visual evidence?” If someone says there was a rocket at the scene, or the remains of a rocket, then we’ll hunt for that through the imagery.

Using that process, [we’re] going back in time to the moment of the event to establish what happened—and, ideally, moments leading up to the event as well. And sometimes that’s possible. For example, we had one investigation into a supermarket hit by a missile in Ukraine. The actual missile in flight was caught by a CCTV camera just outside the building [in] two frames. From that, we’re able to identify the type of missile that was used. It’s piecing together all that evidence, understanding where it is in time and space, and using that nexus of information to start establishing facts and eliminating scenarios.

That’s not to say that if a claim is wrong, the opposite is true. That’s just to say that [the] scenario has been eliminated and we can move to looking at other potential scenarios, hoping that through that process of elimination, you come to one likely scenario—which isn’t always possible.

With the hospital bombing, there was a claim [that] it was a large Israeli bomb. The crater that was left was not from one of those kinds of bombs; it was from a different kind of smaller munition. I personally still don’t know if it was an Israeli missile or rocket or a misfired rocket from Gaza. But I can at least eliminate some of the scenarios. And as more information emerges, you can integrate that into your understanding of the events.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

NEW STUDY REVEALS ONE MAJOR REASON YOU MAY BE MORE LIKELY TO BUY AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE (Wes Stenzel, November 21, 2023, The Cool Down)

Based on “geographic patterns for EV ownership” within the DMAs, the study’s researchers concluded that peer influence is a significant factor in the rising number of EV purchases.

New York City exhibited the strongest example of this peer pressure, dubbed the “neighborhood effect,” as the researchers were able to narrow the study down to specific ZIP codes that showed disproportionate EV registration growth.

The study concluded with several policy suggestions that could help expand EV adoption. Increased word of mouth about EV incentives, greater opportunities for interaction with EVs, and bundling EVs with other clean energy practices could all catalyze further EV growth.

Drive one, buy one.

HATING GREENS WON’T STOP THE FUTURE:

Four ways AI is making the power grid faster and more resilient: From predicting EV charge times to pinpointing areas of high wildfire risk, AI is transforming our energy network. (June Kim, November 22, 2023, MIT Technology Review)

AI’s ability to learn from large amounts of data and respond to complex scenarios makes it particularly well suited to the task of keeping the grid stable, and a growing number of software companies are bringing AI products to the notoriously slow-moving energy industry.

The US Department of Energy has recognized this trend, recently awarding $3 billion in grants to various “smart grid” projects that include AI-related initiatives.

The excitement about AI in the energy sector is palpable. Some are already speculating about the possibility of a fully automated grid where, in theory, no humans would be needed to make everyday decisions.

AUTOMATICALLY ABOVE AVERAGE:

DARPA seeks AI-powered ‘autonomous scientist’ to help researchers: The agency wants to do for scientists what AI code generators have done for programmers. (ALEXANDRA KELLEY, NOVEMBER 20, 2023, Defense One)

“What we’re trying to do is replicate the success that we’ve seen for automatic code generation,” Alvaro Velasquez, DARPA’s program manager for Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery, told Nextgov/FCW, a Defense One sister publication. “Right now, software engineers and coders enjoy these tools from OpenAI and Microsoft that help automate the generation of code. We would like to come up with a tool that helps automate the process of scientific discovery.”

Ideally, DARPA’s autonomous scientist will be creative and learn to generate unique scientific hypotheses that take into account advanced aspects of experiments — like scaling and trimming costs — as well as providing skeptical reasoning. In its offer, which was released earlier this month, DARPA officials say that the final product should be “at least 10X better in scalability (problem size, data size etc.) and also in time efficiency.”

HATING GREENS DOESN’T STOP THE WIND AND THE SUN:

Offshore wind is at a crossroads. Here’s what you need to know. (Heather Richards, 11/13/2023, E&E News)

[B]oth analysts and developers remain confident that this period of instability could also reset the offshore wind sector and refocus policy priorities on building an industry and supply chain that’s sustainable.

“We need to slow down a little bit in our growth,” Jan Matthiesen, director of offshore wind for the research and consultancy group Carbon Trust, said at the Turn Forward press briefing. “Give the supply chain some room to actually breathe and catch up.”

With U.S. offshore wind at a crossroads, here’s four questions answered.

Why are only some projects in trouble?
While it’s clear the entire offshore wind industry is facing significant headwinds, the impacts haven’t been equally felt.

A slew of projects have broadcast their vulnerability. In addition to the now-canceled Ocean Wind project, New York’s Beacon Wind, Empire Wind 1 and 2, and Sunrise Wind are on the ropes. Two Massachusetts projects, SouthCoast Wind and Commonwealth Wind, are paying million-dollar penalties to break contracts with utilities with plans to rebid in future state solicitations.

“It’s largely an issue of timing,” explained Tim Fox, a research analyst with ClearView Energy Partners. “Projects that bid into solicitations before macroeconomic factors arrived, but then had to secure contracts amid high interest rates and inflation, face serious headwinds.”

Some projects are barreling forward — like Vineyard Wind, a joint project of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners off the coast of Massachusetts. The first large project permitted in the U.S., Vineyard is under construction with full operations beginning by next year. South Fork Wind, an Ørsted project off the coast of Rhode Island that will power New York, may go live even sooner.

A similar spirit of confidence is occurring in Virginia, where the utility Dominion Energy said last week that its 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is on schedule. Monopile foundations have already been delivered.

The troubles thrashing some offshore wind projects highlight some of the benefits that Virginia’s project uniquely enjoys.

It is the only project being developed in the U.S. solely by a regulated utility. Richmond-based Dominion is a monopoly in Virginia, though it also has customers across 14 other states.

That means its investments are paid for by electric consumers, with utility regulators approving a return on the investment as profit. Dominion has already fought, and won, for its right to proceed with a project that is costing roughly $2 billion more than it had planned.

“Dominion’s smart strategy has helped it avoid the same issues faced by its competitors. They are the off taker — they are able to pass on cost increases to consumers,” said Atin Jain, wind analyst at BloombergNEF.

He noted that Dominion secured supply deals with turbine manufacturers in 2021, before inflation drove up costs. The Coastal Virginia project will also be “huge,” with a capacity of 2.6 GW, enabling the company to benefit from economies of scale.

The project, which got final approval from the Interior Department last month, is also building its own ship, the Charybdis, to install its turbines.

Expected to be complete by early 2025, the $650 million vessel means the utility won’t have to fight with other developers over a limited number of installation vessels, said Søren Lassen, head of offshore wind research at Wood Mackenzie. Plus, Dominion will be able to pay off some of its investment in the ship by leasing the vessel out to other U.S. projects, he said.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

Scientists 3D print a robotic hand with human-like bones and tendons (RUPENDRA BRAHAMBHATT, 11/18/2023, Ars Technica)

In a VCJ system, along with a 3D printer, there is a 3D laser scanner that visually inspects each layer for surface irregularities as it’s deposited. “This visual inspection makes the print process fully contactless, allowing for a wider range of possible polymers to be deposited. We, for example, printed with thiol-based polymers because it enabled us to create UV-light and humidity-resistant structures,” Katzschmann told Ars Technica.

After the scanning, there is no mechanical planarization of the deposited layer. Instead, the next layer is printed in such a way that it makes up for all the irregularities in the previous layer. “A feedback mechanism compensates for these irregularities when printing the next layer by calculating any necessary adjustments to the amount of material to be printed in real-time and with pinpoint accuracy,” said Wojciech Matusik, one of the study authors and a professor of computer science at MIT.

Moreover, the researchers claim that this closed-loop controlled system allows them to print the complete structure of a robot at once. “Our robotic hand can be printed in one go, no assembly is needed. This speeds up the engineering design process immensely—one can go directly from an idea to a functional and lasting prototype. You avoid expensive intermediate tooling and assembly,” Katzschmann added.

Using the VCJ technique, the researchers successfully printed a robotic hand that has internal structures similar to those of a human hand. Equipped with touch pads and pressure sensors, the robotic hand has 19 tendon-like structures (in humans, tendons are the fibrous connective tissues that connect bones and muscles) that allow it to move the wrist and fingers. The hand can sense touch, grab things, and stop fingers when they touch something. (The researchers used MRI data from a real human hand to model its construction.)

In addition to the hand, they also printed a robotic heart, a six-legged robot, and a metamaterial capable of absorbing vibrations in its surroundings.