Signs of Progress
We should be both sober and enthusiastic about the latest advance in fusion. For a brief moment, and at a very small scale, scientific breakeven energy was achieved in a fusion experiment at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in northern California. The good news: a new stopwatch has started running, marking this moment as the start point on the journey to applied fusion. The sobering thought: commercial application of fusion is probably not just far away, but exceedingly far away. The respondents to this poll (below) are therefore likely correct, in that they chose quantum computing over fusion:
The US Post Office will overweight EV in a large purchase order for new vehicles. You may recall the USPS moved initially, at the tail end of the Trump administration, to purchase mostly ICE vehicles to replace a portion of its aging fleet. The new administration headed off those plans, and now we have reports that an order package for 106,000 vehicles will fall roughly into a 60/40 configuration of EV/ICE:
If you are feeling disappointed that USPS is not ordering 100% EV, it’s worth remembering that a significant remit of the post office is to deliver to rural areas, and west of the Mississippi that means a lot of miles to cover. The likely path for the USPS vehicle fleet, which in total reaches nearly 300,000 vehicles of many types, is that electrification will unfold similarly to the broader adoption of EV: cities and suburbs first, and then rural areas later, if not much later.
We are finally seeing long needed data improvements in coverage of the US electric vehicle market. Historically, US EV sales data has largely been dependent on industry groups or independent data gatherers. Typical examples would be the California New Car Dealers Association (on which The Gregor Letter has depended for years), or myriad blogs that scrape automaker reports to estimate sales. Now, things are changing.
The State of California now maintains both ongoing sales data, and aggregate sales data, for EV within the state. Soon, The Gregor Letter will switch reporting to this data series. More importantly, the DOE’s Argonne Lab, an excellent resource for energy analysis already, is now providing very extensive EV sales data for the entire US market, and has also produced historical data going back as far as the year 2010.
News Briefs • Redwood Materials, run by former Tesla exec J.B. Straubel, has announced it will construct a $3.5 billion battery recycling plant in South Carolina. • Market rent increases may have started slowing before the Fed’s hiking cycle, and are losing their momentum further as the rate of job growth, still positive, decelerates. • Researchers at the Cleveland Fed have released a new housing data tracking index, one that attempts to improve upon very outdated methodology historically used to gauge inflation. Economy watchers are excited about the new data series. • Grand Central Madison, a new terminal adjacent to the original Grand Central, will now handle traffic from the Long Island Railroad. The largest new station built in the US in the past 67 years will allow for faster timetables, and fewer delays, as the new capacity will partly untangle service from Metro North trains. • Air pollution has fallen 30% in Barcelona over a period when the city has aggressively pared back the travel freedoms of the personal automobile. • Michael Liebreich, formerly of BNEF, has released his latest long essay on hydrogen. • Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor quick off the mark to deploy Open AI’s ChatGPT in his classroom, released a white paper offering guidance on how best to use ChatGPT as a kind of companion, or work helper. Elsewhere, Mollick summed up his views in a HBR essay. •
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The hand-wringing over the buildout of needed EV chargers never quits. And that’s a shame, a real waste of time. Of all the challenges associated with the electrification of transport, building out charging infrastructure is anything but herculean. General rule: charging follows EV penetration. In the chart above, which shows EV chargers per 1000 people of population by California county, you can see that counties like Santa Clara and Alameda in the Bay area, and also Orange and Los Angeles, are unsurprisingly well ahead of the curve. The ten counties highlighted here are the most populous, in the state.
What would be a good benchmark, though, to project the number of chargers ultimately needed? That’s a trickier question. A couple of things: first, chargers are not charging stations. Data is new and emerging here, and some of the chargers in this data do have multiple outlets, but probably many do not. Again, the survey here is for chargers, not charging stations. Conversely, a petrol station with just two pumps can no doubt fulfill the needs of more cars in any 24 hour period than a charging station could with two chargers, for the obvious reason that gasoline pump-time is around 5 minutes or so, and charging time is much longer. Bottom line, we are going to need more charging stations than petrol stations.
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