The European Union lost a few things in the past week. The least of them was a couple of billion euros of loans and grants. A big one was a new supply of fresh and shiny Europe-made batteries. The biggest was a belief that anything China could do, they could … [continued]
A year ago I published an assessment of a quite remarkably bad, non-peer-reviewed paper by one of the Geological Survey of Finland’s (GTK) associate professors, Simon Michaux. The paper’s quite risible conclusions were that there wasn’t nearly enough metal in the ground to be able to electrify everything with renewables. … [continued]
Sails on ships are a romantic and idealized vision of the world. Our history as a species includes innumerable tiny vessels pushed by wind across great expanses of featureless ocean, bold explorers and traders risking all on the science of sextants and the vagaries of the weather. But in recent … [continued]
Recently I collaborated with David Cebon, head of the Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, and interested parties on a complete list of all of the abandoned hydrogen bus trials globally. There are a couple of dozen of them, and I’m pretty sure there are more transit agencies that have … [continued]
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Michael Raynor, formerly a managing director of sustainability and thought leadership for Deloitte and author of multiple books on innovation and strategy. We talked about not only an innovative approach to addressing Scope 3 emissions that Raynor has developed, but also … [continued]
It’s been over three years since I bothered to publish an article on the dead end but glitzy space of urban air mobility with their origami electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft. Instead, I focused my aviation related assessments on how aviation will actually decarbonize over the next few … [continued]
I have a lot of sympathy for Winnipeg. I’ve been there for work many times. I’ve been there in their frigid, tens of degrees Celsius below zero winters. I’ve been there in their dusty summers. I’ve even tried to get across the main intersection that pedestrians still aren’t allowed to … [continued]
British Columbia in Canada has a long history with hydrogen for transportation and its constant failures. Ballard Power, the fuel cell manufacturer that pivoted away from lithium ion batteries in 1989 to the losing technology, is based in the Vancouver area. Whistler, the famed ski and mountain biking area with … [continued]
Four weeks ago, I didn’t know the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium existed. If I’d seen mention of it, I probably would have assumed it as an innocuous little organization full of pleasant Canadians working diligently for the good of Canadian transit. But the onion keeps being peeled. … [continued]
Globally, there are almost 700,000 battery electric buses in operation and perhaps 6,000 hydrogen buses. In Europe in 2023, about 6,400 new battery electric buses were registered vs. about 140 hydrogen buses. As I noted recently, there have are more hydrogen bus trials that have been abandoned than operational hydrogen … [continued]
