Category Archives: Technology

U.S. Electricity Generation by Source in 2022: Natural Gas, Coal, Nuclear, Wind, Hydro, Solar, Geothermal, Biomass, Petroleum, by Wolf Richter

Posted on February 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

If you’re curious about from whence all the electricity comes, here’s a good breakdown. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

A record year for power generation, after 14 Years of Stagnation.

Electricity generation, as measured in gigawatt-hours, has gotten hammered by a near-stagnation in demand since 2007, as efforts to make everything more efficient have produced results for electricity users who’d invested in more efficient lights, appliances, electronic equipment, industrial equipment, heating and air-conditioning, etc. and in better building insulation, shading, etc. These upfront costs by electricity users produced financial returns via reduced electricity consumption. For electric utilities, it meant that they were stuck in a demand quagmire.

But then in 2022, there was finally the breakout in demand after 14 years. EV charging and crypto mining come to mind. And electricity generation rose by 3.5% from 2021, to a new record of 4,297,000 gigawatt-hours, according to EIA data released today. But 2021 had been flat with 2007, and so in 2022, the amount of electricity generated was only up by 3.5% from 2007!

The chart shows the total amount of electricity generated each year by utility-scale power plants and by small-scale solar installations, such as rooftop solar. The green line connects 2021 and 2007:

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“Neither Easy Nor Fast”: Electric Vehicle Owners Admit To “Logistical Nightmare” Over Charging, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

Even if you find a charger, its going to take a minimum of 30 to 40 minutes to charge. Hope you’re not in a hurry. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Owners of electric vehicles are finally admitting that recharging away from home is a total “logistical nightmare,” between finding charging stations, and the fact that in the best case scenarios it takes 30 to 40 minutes, and up to two hours, to recharge.

“We’re going through the planning process of how easily Maddie can get from Albany to Gettysburg [College] and where she can charge the car,” said YouTube personality Steve Hammes, who leased a Hyunday Kona Electric SUV for his 17-year-old daughter, Maddie.

“It makes me a little nervous. We want fast chargers that take 30 to 40 minutes — it would not make sense to sit at a Level 2 charger for hours. There isn’t a good software tool that helps EV owners plan their trips,” he told ABC News.

The report comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement that Tesla would open its Supercharger network to non-Tesla owners by the end of next year – a plan which includes 3,500 Tesla fast chargers and 4,000 of the slower, Level 2 chargers.

John Voelcker, an industry expert on EVs and the former editor of Green Car Reports, said this arrangement will allow Tesla to learn a lot about U.S. drivers — “how you charge, where you drive and what car you have.” He does not expect Tesla to commit to additional charging stations.

“Tesla does not want its highly reliable and tightly integrated charging network to be clogged with people whose cars can’t charge as fast as Teslas,” he told ABC News. -ABC News

To try and cope with an increase in EVs, the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure law has a goal of installing 500,000 new chargers across the country – as well as dramatically boosting EV sales, by 2030.

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Quantifying What “Electrification” Costs, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 26, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s always a high-cost proposition when government imposes a technology rather than let the market choose what gets produced. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

How do you put a price on “electrification” – this bum’s rush to a zero-alternative future? Ask the 1,400 people at what soon won’t be Jeep’s Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois – who just paid for it.

With their jobs.

The Belvidere Plant is closing for good next week and those jobs are going away for good  because Jeep’s owner – the European automotive combine Stellantis – has decided to stop making Jeep Cherokees there in favor of making electric vehicles, elsewhere.

Specifically, the electric successor to the Dodge Charger sedan, which won’t have an engine come 2024. Another cost – to be paid by people who loved and bought the Charger (and the two-door Challenger) precisely because it did have an engine – a big one – and was thus an alternative to the zero-alternative future being forced on us with the same aggressive piety as “masks” and “vaccines.”

Everyone must be converted – and not by choice.

And no matter what it costs.

In this case, it may cost the town of Belvidere, IL everything – as the plant has been the town’s primary employer for the past half-century.  All of those people who won’t be working there anymore will have to find some other way to make ends meet, to pay their mortgages and feed their kids.

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Diversity Not, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Diversity across automobiles is on a par with “diversity” of political viewpoints among your typical college faculty. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It’s funny that, given the obsession with “diversity,” there is so much homogeneity. On the showroom floor, too.

Most of all, even.

Not only do most crossovers – there aren’t many cars left – look pretty much the same (especially since probably two-thirds of them are painted silver or white) but they are also functionally pretty much the same.

All of them – all of the crossovers, at least – come only with automatic transmissions. The last one that doesn’t is Subaru’s Crosstrek, which won’t anymore after the end of the 2023 model year (and you may not be able to get one before the model year ends, as production of them has probably already stopped). This makes driving them largely the same, too. You push the one pedal and it goes. You push down on the other and it slows. When there was a third pedal, you had something more to do – and something different. It made driving such a car a different – a diverse – experience.

Engines are now almost all the same, too – and not just in crossovers. In the under $50,000 price range, almost everything comes standard with a 2.0 liter turbocharged four cylinder engine. Some produce more power than others but they are all basically the same. There are no air-cooled engines or two stroke engines or rotary engines – and very few diesel engines. These were very “diverse” kinds of engines. Cooling fins instead of coolant. A sound unlike any other sound.

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Lab-Grown Meat Is Made of Cancer Cells. Would You Like It Rare or Medium? By Igor Chudov

Posted on February 25, 2023 | 1 comment

This information may be the only thing that makes eating bugs look good. From Igor Chudov at igorchudov.substack.com:

USDA does not allow animal tumors to enter food chain. But lab-grown meat is made of tumor cells

According to Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum, ongoing global warming threatens to destroy humanity. Methane, coming from the belches and farts of cows, is a greenhouse gas (GHG). So, cows are a problem!

Fortunately, Bill Gates has a solution for us, explained in this video. We need to stop growing cattle and switch to lab-grown synthetic beef.

The World Economic Forum expects we will eat “synthetic meat” in 16 years. (the article below was written 4 years ago)

Bill Gates made sizable investments in “synthetic meat” manufacturers, expecting to turn a nice profit.

The CNBC article explains that “lab-grown meat,” that is, cell cultures grown in giant stainless vats, is not the same as “fake meat” made of soy or pea protein:

Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups.

Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from “fake meat,” like the soy protein “chicken” you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal.

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Pentagon Secretly Working To Unleash Massive Swarms of Autonomous Multi-Domain Drones to Dominate Enemy Defenses, from The Debrief

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The military will soon have incredible drone and drone swarm technologies. It takes no imagination at all to see how they could be used against the citizens they were nominally meant to protect. From The Debrief at thedebrief.org:

(This Article was updated on February 6, 2023, to include statements from DARPA officials.) 

The U.S. Department of Defense has quietly launched a new program to develop the ability to unleash thousands of autonomous land, sea, and air drones capable of overwhelming and dominating an enemy’s area defenses. 

Details of the project are largely shrouded in secrecy. However, language in recently updated pre-solicitation documents suggests the development of massive autonomous vehicle swarms likely has a specific focus on deterring or defeating a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. 

According to documents, the effort will be managed by the Strategic Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

And while DARPA has yet to formally announce the new program, DARPA confirmed to The Debrief that the project will be operating under the moniker “Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms” program, or “AMASS.”

“DARPA’s singular and enduring mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” said a DARPA spokesperson via email.

“The DARPA AMASS program is exploring the use of swarms-of-swarms to conduct military operations in highly contested environments that pose great risk to our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. It is meant to inform future military programs of record and not to be a military program of record itself.” 

AMASS is hardly the first, or only, DARPA project currently underway leveraging autonomous drone swarm technology to give the U.S. military an advantage on future battlefields. 

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Anatomy of a Cover-up: The January 6 Tapes, by Julie Kelly

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Let’s just see what 41,000 hours of videotape reveal. From Julie Kelly at amgreatness.com:

Like all good political scandals, the path to the truth begins with the tapes.

Tucker Carlson now has the equivalent of nearly five years of surveillance footage captured by U.S. Capitol Police security cameras on January 6, 2021. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) turned over the tapes to the Fox News host  earlier this month, according to Axios. Carlson’s producers and researchers are already distilling the footage; the first round of clips is expected to air in a few weeks.

While some grumble that McCarthy did not fulfill his promise to publicly release the footage—arguably a valid complaint—Carlson’s team undoubtedly will give the massive trove much-needed context and maximum impact. Carlson released a three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” in November 2021 that explained how the events of January 6 helped launch a second “war on terror” against American citizens out of step with the Biden regime.

Since early 2021, Carlson has used his nightly show to expose the cruel treatment of Trump supporters suffering pretrial detention orders; raised questions about the use of undercover assets including FBI informants and the mysterious role of Ray Epps; asked why the case of the January 5 “pipe bomber” remains unsolved; and demanded the release of the surveillance video as late as last month.

Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

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What Corvette Was – and Should Be, Again . . . by Eric Peters

Posted on February 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Corvette was a sporty, really cool car that wasn’t priced so high that the average Joe couldn’t aspire to it. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

A 2023 Corvette costs almost twice as much – in real terms – as a 1969 Corvette cost. The latter listed for $4,781 when it was new – a sum equivalent to just over $37,000 in today’s hyperinflated (that is, devalued) currency. The former stickers for $64,200 – not counting the also-hyperinflated costs of insurance, taxes and tags.

This is why the 2023 Corvette is an exotic car while the ’69 was America’s sports car. By which was meant Americans could afford the car. Today, only rich Americans can afford a Corvette, of which there are fewer.

Back in ’69, 38,762 Americans bought a new Corvette. In 2022, 34,510 did. It sounds almost the same but it’s actually quite different, because in 1969 there were only about 200 million Americans whereas today there are at least 330 million – not counting the uncounted  millions of “immigrants” who’ve entered the country since the Biden Thing opened the border.

Proportionately, then, something on the order of 60,000 Americans should have bought have bought a new Corvette last year.

They didn’t – because they couldn’t.

This is a trend that will continue as Americans become less able to spend $60,000-plus on a car – or anything, for that matter. It’s a shame to see what had been a car Americans could aspire to transition into a car that’s more Ferrari than Corvette. Indeed it’s hard to tell the two apart – whereas back in ’69, it wasn’t.

The Corvette used to look like nothing else – and most Americans thought it looked pretty sensational. Even if you didn’t, there was no mistaking the silhouette – or the  iconic four round tail-lights. It was a car like the original Beetle in that everyone knew one when they saw one, even if all they saw was a glimpse of one.

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“Late to the Party”, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

The last thing some car executives want to do is build a vehicle people actually want to buy. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

A measure of just how divorced from reality the car industry is can be gleaned from a news story making the rounds about General Motors electing not to build a rival to the massively successful Ford Bronco and Jeep Wrangler 4x4s.

At least, not one with an engine.

GM’s president, Mark Reuss, stated the other day that “I’m not gonna do a Bronco” because he doesn’t want to be “late to the party.” This is logic akin to GM deciding not to build the Camaro back in 1967 because Ford had already built the Mustang – which was selling in the hundreds of thousands annually. GM, of course, ended up selling millions of Camaros (and sister car, Pontiac Firebird) over the next couple of decades – because there was a market for cars like the Mustang.

Just as, today, there is clearly a market for 4x4s with engines like the Bronco – which is the most successful vehicle Ford has launched in a decade, at least. Sales of this model were up 234 percent in 2022.

That’s not a typo.

117,057 were sold. That is a huge number in absolute terms but when put in context, it is even huger. The Bronco is not a mass-market vehicle. Unlike, say, the F-150 pickup – which is Ford’s best-selling vehicle.

Except for the electric version of it.

Ford sells about half-a-million non-electric F-150s every year, to people who need a practical vehicle. Ford has only sold about 15,000 electric F-150s, because they are not practical. 

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Electric Vehicles Are Anti-Market and Anti-Environment, by Daniel Șturbuleac

Posted on February 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

Daniel Șturbuleac sums it up pretty well: EVs are a scam. Especially in less affluent countries that can’t afford this nonsense. From Șturbuleac at lewrockwell.com:

On the perfection of the free-market

While I was doing my biweekly commute I couldn’t help myself notice, from time to time, a stranded car leaning on the side of the road. It usually was an older (about twenty-year-old) German car, but sometimes newer cars also.

Although I carry with myself in the trunk of my coupe a set of basic tools for quick repairs (just in case), all that is needed for a tire change (never used them on road) and some fluids, I needn’t stop to help those folks. Because, as I drove some additional miles, I almost always noticed a vividly-colored ramp truck going to the site of the intervention, to either carry the stranded ones and their car to the nearest service (where proper tools and specialists may diagnose and fix the problems) or, for simpler problems, solving them on-site for a small charge (small, as in comparison to having to call a friend from far away or stop incoming traffic and ask for help).

In my country, there are a large number of second-hand cars imported from various European countries, mostly for their affordable prices and reliability. In a developing country, having access to cheap means of transportation is a primary factor for development. People do not care of pollution, and why would they, when their car allows them going to the market or a distant supermarket or hardware store to purchase or unload bread, vegetables, construction materials and other commodities, in order to make a profit. Or to safely embark on a driving trip, or to just drive the kids to school. For a lack of regulations allow the progress of a society.

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