Solar powered plane completes cross-country flight

The Washington Post has an article on a solar powered plane flight across the US - Solar powered plane completes history-making cross-country flight, lands at JFK airport.

A solar-powered aircraft completed the final leg of a history-making cross-country flight Saturday night, gliding to a smooth stop at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The flight plan for the revolutionary plane, powered by some 11,000 solar cells on its oversized wings, had called for it to pass the Statue of Liberty before landing early Sunday at New York. But an unexpected tear discovered on the left wing of the aircraft Saturday afternoon forced officials to scuttle the fly-by and proceed directly to JFK for a landing three hours earlier than scheduled.

Pilot Andre Borschberg trumpeted the milestone of a plane capable of flying during the day and night, powered by solar energy, crossing the U.S. without the use of fuel. “It was a huge success for renewable energy,” Borschberg said while standing in front of Solar Impulse on the runway at JFK. “The only thing that failed was a piece of fabric.”

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RIP Randy Udall

Keeping on the theme of funeral week (perhaps i should start a conspiracy theory), Stuart at Early Warning sadly notes the passing of ASPO USA's Randy Udall - Randy Udall, RIP.

Randy Udall died last week while on a backpacking trip in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. His body has just been found after an extensive search.

Randy was a co-founder of ASPO-USA. I certainly didn't know him well enough to attempt a proper obituary, but I will say that he was a regular reader of this blog, and frequently emailed me with thoughts or questions or interesting links. I always felt it an honor that someone like him found my blog worth his time. I had met him a number of times at ASPO meetings and he had impressed me as one of the finer human beings I have known. He was very smart and knowledgeable about the world, but retained an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm for it. He was funny, charming, and had a knack for finding unique ways to communicate his concern for this planet we share.

I am deeply saddened at the news of his passing, too soon, at the age of 61.

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A place where the peak oil crowd gathered is no more

Platts has a nice article noting the end of The Oil Drum - A place where the peak oil crowd gathered is no more.

There used to be a website driven by a completely non-transparent metric that would rank the “importance” of various Twitter feeds similar in their areas of interest. It’s defunct now, and the name of it is forgotten.

It would look not only at the number of followers, but other things like how many followers your Twitter feed’s followers had, how often your Tweets were re-Tweeted, and so on.

The @PlattsOil feed consistently ranked second in the oil category, for whatever that was worth. It was always a harmless time-waster to check and see how we were doing. And how we were doing was that from our #2 perch we were always looking up at the Twitter feed of The Oil Drum, which was the primary website for a dialogue on Peak Oil.

And now The Oil Drum is closing up shop.

Those people in the industry who have long believed that the devotees of the peak oil movement were completely wrong have been rejoicing the last few years as North America’s output keeps rising. They see the Peak Oil movement as another bunch of failed neo-Malthusians. The demise of The Oil Drum is sure to add to that feeling of glee.

In the announcement that the site was shutting to new content, to be kept online only as an archive of old posts, The Oil Drum’s owners said nothing about any shift in beliefs regarding the world’s ability to produce more oil. The possibility of shutting the site was “a discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles.” The monetary requirements of maintaining the site also were cited.

The mission statement of The Oil Drum said it “seeks to facilitate civil, evidence-based discussions about energy and its impacts on the future of humanity, as well as serve as a leading online knowledge-base for energy-related topics.” Despite that lofty inclusive language, it still was pretty much an intellectual hangout for the Peak Oil crowd.

Andrew Leonard at Salon also notes TOD's passing - Peak oil’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

Sad news from the world of Peak Oil-awareness. On July 3, the Oil Drum, a fabulous one-stop-shop for news, analysis and discussion of energy issues, announced it was shutting down after an informative eight-year run. As of July 31, there will be no more new content published at the Oil Drum.

Back when I was covering environmental issues more regularly, the Oil Drum was one of the first places I’d go to get context on breaking news related to energy issues. The Oil Drum was also one of the best places to get educated about the threat of peak oil: the argument that the world was rapidly reaching the point — or had already reached it — of global maximum production of oil.

We don’t hear so much about peak oil these days. The most obvious reason: the deployment of technological advances that have increased production from old wells or made possible the extraction of fossil fuels from previously uneconomic sources, i.e., fracking. One commenter on the Oil Drum’s announcement went so far as to claim that “fracking had killed The Oil Drum.” Another posted a Google Trends documenting the sharp decline in searches for the phrase “peak oil” as contrasted to the sharp rise in searches for the word “fracking.”

I asked the Oil Drum whether the fracking-killed-the-Oil-Drum theory had any merit. Here is what “Joules Burn” told me (emphasis mine):

I think it is more the case that the majority of contributors (and editors and tech staff) are just burned out (sorry for that pun…). It takes a lot of effort to research and write quality articles, have reviewers whack at them for awhile, and then deal with the comments that come in (some useful, some not). I can think of many examples where folks just ran out of things they were passionate to write about. Even a regular (until recently) guest contributor stopped publishing on his own blog for this reason. Some have been pulled in different directions (including myself) with jobs and family and such. In short, there is probably no single reason. But as this is a collaborative effort of many individuals (and indeed with some differences of opinion on some issues), we just decided we no longer had critical mass and wanted to end at this still somewhat high point rather than let it morph into something unrecognizable.

I think TOD slowly died for a variety of reasons and editor and contributor burnout (or simply moving on to other things) was a major one.

Writing about the same topic (or set of topics) for free year after year (and having to deal with the local community while doing so, many of whom could be incredibly abrasive) can't be sustained forever - especially as people find new interests or have career and family demands take more of their time.

TOD also suffered from editorial divisions on topics such as global warming which resulted in some contributors moving on (in my view this was a prime reason for Stuart Staniford moving on, which was a major blow to the quality of the site) or taking a lower profile. This was always an annoyance to me - how we could (as a group) discuss peak oil as an example of "The Limits to Growth" while studiously ignoring (after a year of debate) or occasionally deriding another limit never made any sense to me.

The often heated division between traditional peak oil doomers and more rational peak oil observers was another large fault line that could never be adequately addressed. Abuse from the doomer community resulted in other contributors (Robert Rapier being the best example of this in my view) either moving on or taking a much lower profile. In retrospect, this was one of a number of reasons I drifted away - endlessly debating people who will illogically declare that civilisation will end soon as a result of peak oil or that nuclear power will solve all our problems or that global warming is a left wing conspiracy becomes incredibly tiresome after a while and you find yourself having to choose between letting people use your articles as a soapbox for their nutty views or wasting vast amounts of time debating the same topics endlessly with them.

I think the straw that broke the camel's back though was the ill-fated "Moving Forward - Towards A Kinder Gentler (Smaller) Oil Drum" declaration, which sapped energy from the site and demotivated contributors such as myself who wanted to look at a wider range of topics than simple oil depletion. Admittedly this was always going to be something of a turning point - Gail's editorial decisions were often baffling to me (as were her endless series of postings warning of financial doom), the Campfire posts, though wildly popular, simply fed the prevailing doomer mentality, and leading figures such as Prof Goose and Nate Hagens had drifted away from making regular contributions. The choice to downsize and become more tightly focused on a limited group of topics was the catalyst for things ending where they did in my view.

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FT: Oil Futures

The FT is running an in-depth series of articles on the oil industry (you need to be a subscriber to read them, but Google News might be able to help you if you aren't) - Oil Futures.

Some interesting articles in the series :

• Texas heartland leads the US oil revival - on the shale oil boom - noting it needs US$80+ per barrel to keep going
• Canada boosts slice of global oil exports - on the growing flood of oil from the tar sands
• Saudi Arabia still vital to oil supply - on Saudi production
• Kashagan dream lures unlikely bedfellows - on oil from Kazahkstan
• Storm clouds threaten Iraq’s oil revival - on oil from Iraq
• Petrobras faces test to tap pre-salt oil - the oil from Brazil

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RIP Wizard Power

While I'm folding funeral services for projects I've covered in the past, Tristan Edis at the Climate Spectator has a series of articles (one, two and three) covering the demise of Wizard's solar power project in Whyalla - Why did Whyalla solar fall over ?.

On Friday Climate Spectator reported that a government agency (ARENA) had withdrawn $60 million in funding for a solar thermal mirror dish project planned for Whyalla in South Australia called Solar Oasis. This project planned to employ a technology held by a small company called Wizard Power, which is now in administration.

According to the government, they withdrew funding because the proponent had failed to demonstrate timely progress on a range of measures necessary for the project to proceed to construction.

The story that has run in the media to date is that government was, to a large degree, responsible for many of the delays besetting the project. And that this is yet another example of the Australian government abandoning a promising solar technology which will probably be commercialised overseas....

Still it is a tale well worth telling because it holds important lessons for Australian politicians, public servants and the energy industry. It provides an insightful example of a broader, long-running saga of failure in Australian government attempts to support renewable energy via one-off grant programs that select projects via tenders.

It is a story of:

-- Politicians seeking big bang announcements and dramatic breakthrough technologies, in defiance of decades of experience that energy technology progresses through incremental improvement;

-- Technological proponents desperate for funding who have mutated their plans and projects to fit what politicians wanted, but with little demonstrated evidence that they could deliver;

-- Risk averse bureaucrats asked to evaluate and manage projects for which they had little technical expertise and experience; and

-- Precious little in the way of on the ground changes.

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RIP Better Place

While I'm conducting funeral services, I've been lax in noting the demise of electric car company Better Place, which has gone out of business - Better Place's Failure Is Blow to Renault. Tesla motors appears to be adopting some of their business model - Building an EV Ecosystem: Why Tesla Will Likely Succeed Where Better Place Failed.

The financial collapse of electric-car venture Better Place Ltd., which filed for liquidation over the weekend, is a blow for French automotive group Renault SA, RNO.FR +2.37% which helped the Israeli company develop its novel battery-switching system for electric cars.

Founded by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi in 2007, Better Place developed a system where electric-car owners could drive their vehicles into a network of stations around Israel ILCO.TV +0.05% and replace the car's battery with a new one in about the same amount of time it takes to fill a gasoline tank on a regular car.

The "quick drop" system was supposed to remove one of the main obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles, namely the several hours it takes to recharge a flat battery.

Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn had championed Better Place's technology as one of the pillars of the French auto maker's ambitious €4 billion ($5.17 billion) electric-vehicle strategy. The first cars equipped with Better Place technology were Renault Fluence Z.E. sedans.

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RIP The Oil Drum

The Oil Drum has announced it will be closing it's doors after 8 years of operation - An End to Eight Years of The Oil Drum.

While it has been a number of years since I contributed anything to the site (or even regularly checked what has been posted there), I'm sorry to see it go. I really enjoyed the years where I was actively posting there - the comments (even though frequently blighted by trolls and doomers) could be enlightening and entertaining and the audience reach I had there was far greater than anything I ever achieved at Peak Energy alone, with tens of thousands of readers for some posts.

I'll be writing a farewell post for TOD at some post at over the next month.

Dear Readers of The Oil Drum,

A few weeks ago the ISEOF board (The Institute for Energy and Our Future that facilitates The Oil Drum), Euan, Super G, JoulesBurn, and Myself, met to discuss the future of The Oil Drum. A discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles.

Because of this and the high expense of running the site, the board has unanimously decided that the best course of action is to convert the site to a static archive of previously published material as of 31st July 2013. We will continue to post articles up to this date. Afterwards any articles will be held as a public archive into the foreseeable future, so that others can continue to learn from the breadth and depth of knowledge published by our many authors, over the 8+ history of this remarkable volunteer effort.

We sincerely thank everyone who has been part of the TOD community - authors, staff and especially commenter's and readers - for contributing to the success of the site. It is unusual for a site which is based primarily on volunteer effort to continue this long.

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