Which budget long-tail cargo e-bike to buy?

As noted in my last article, electrification has helped make it much easier to ride cargo bikes, so they become car replacement vehicles for ordinary people who don’t have the leg power to push a heavy bike. However, just as important as adding an electric motor has been the advent of long-tailed cargo bikes, which have longer racks in the back for carrying kids, groceries, work tools, etc. The long-tail helped popularize cargo bikes and make them accessible to the general public.

The Long John or bakfeits style bike with a flat rack or box in the front of the rider is arguably the best type of cargo bike for carrying heavy weight, but those types of bikes are very expensive and they don’t have the maneuverability and balance of a normal bike, plus they are much longer than a normal bike. For people who want a cargo bike that handles like a normal bike and they don’t want to pay too much for the ability to carry around extra weight, the long-tail cargo bike is the best option.

Understanding the growth of e-bikes around the world

The revolution in electric micro-mobility is happening all over the world, but it is happening at varying speeds and in diverse ways around the globe. Although most news outlets focus on the competition between Tesla and BYD to gobble up the market of the legacy auto companies, and the latest EV startups to crash and burn, the changes in micro-mobility happening on the ground around the world are far more interesting and exciting in my opinion.

Unfortunately, it is hard to keep track of what is happening, since much of it doesn’t make headlines and is often poorly reported. I thought it was worth summarizing some of the trends in electric bicycles that I see globally and observing how I think they will translate in the future to developing countries like Bolivia where I have lived for the last 17 years. What happens in places like China, Europe and North America does reverberate in the rest of the world, but how that plays out on the ground is often unexpected and worth our attention.

Why we shouldn’t rely on space mining to solve mineral shortages

I have been seeing a lot of speculation lately about how space mining will solve the critical mineral shortages that will be coming in the future. All of the talk about mining the moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt strikes me as the ludicrous fantasies of people who don’t want to accept the resource limits that humanity faces.

It is understandable why people see space mining as a solution, as they survey the growing demand for minerals. According the US Geological Survey, the world mined 26 megatons of copper in 2022, but only has 890 megatons of copper reserves. Assuming that no more reserves are found, at the current rate of consumption, we will run out of copper in 34.2 years. Rising prices and new extraction techniques will make it possible to mine copper in more places on the planet, but we will also need massive amounts of copper to switch the world from running on fossil fuels to renewable energy. Today’s electric vehicles contain 3 times more copper than internal combustion engine vehicles, so futurists worry that lots more copper will be needed to electrify all transport.

The world won’t run out of copper in the next 3 to 4 decades, but it will get much harder to extract, as mining companies have to switch from sulfuride ores to laterite ores, which means moving a lot more earth and consuming a lot more energy to extract the same amount of copper. Mining will have to move to lower grades of ores with lower concentrations of copper and operate in more remote locations such as the ocean floor.

Why hydrogen won’t be the fuel of the future, but it will be a vital chemical input

Since the invention of the Grubb–Niedrach fuel cell in 1958, which was used in NASA’s Gemini missions, hydrogen has been touted as the fuel of the future. Advocates of hydrogen bemoan the lack of investment, but they are convinced that hydrogen vehicles are just around the corner and every electric utility will be generating hydrogen for energy storage within a decade. Despite all the hoopla, the imagined hydrogen boom never seems to arrive. Instead, it remains the perpetual domain of venture capitalists and vague long-term plans that are unlikely to ever come to fruition. It is necessary to do the math to understand why businesses aren’t investing in hydrogen in a major way despite decades of generous government subsidies and grandiose plans.

The fundamental problem with hydrogen is the amount of energy which is lost in its creation and conversion back to usable energy. If creating hydrogen from water, first between 30% and 37% of the energy is lost in the electrolysis to split H2O into H2 and O. Then roughly 10% of the energy is lost in compressing and storing the H2 and even more is lost if the H2 is liquefied by cooling it to under −253°C (−423°F). If compressed and transported via truck to a hydrogen fueling station, roughly 20% of the energy will be lost. Then, the hydrogen is passed through a fuel cell, such as a proton exchange membrane (PEM) in an automobile, an alkaline fuel cell (AFC) in a submarine, a phosphoric acid fuel cell (PAFC) in a commercial building’s generator or solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) at a power utility that also needs both electricity and heat. The fuel cell splits the H2 molecule into two hydrogen protons (H+) and two electrons (e-). Then combines them with oxygen (O₂) molecules from the air to create water and free electrons. One O₂ molecule and two H₂ molecules will generate 4 free electrons for electricity:
   2H₂ + O₂ → 2H₂O + 4e-
In this conversion from hydrogen + oxygen to water + electricity, phosphoric acid fuel cells lose 60% of the energy, molten carbonate fuel cells lose 50%, and alkaline and solid oxide fuel cells lose 40%. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells lose between 30% and 40% of the energy, so the fuel cells in automobiles are relatively efficient, but the membranes are expensive and they wear out too fast for use in a power plant.

Why net zero GHG emissions by mid-century is an achievable goal and we shouldn’t give up

Climate science demands that the planet gets to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avoid over 2 degrees C of global warming. The Conference of Parties negotiations at the UN still maintain that global warming can be limited to 1.5°C, but that is a fantasy considering that 2023 is now expected to be 1.40°C over the historical average between 1850 and 1900. James Hansen now says that 2°C of global warming is inevitable and 3°C is likely, and I trust his math far more than the IPCC AR6 report, which was edited for political considerations and the need for scientific consensus.

Even at current agricultural production levels, we are going to have trouble feeding the expected global population of 12 billion by 2050. Production of the principal caloric crops (wheat, rice, corn and soybeans) is expected to drop significantly over 2°C of warming and collapse over 4°C, so we are looking at a very dire future with widespread famine and the breakdown of global trade when the principal grain producers (US, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, etc.) start restricting exports in order to feed their own populations.

Installing PureOS in the Purism Librem 5 and Mobian in the PinePhone

The software in my Librem 5 USA and PinePhone were out-of-date, and I decided to simply do a new install of PureOS and Mobian, respectively, in the two phones. In both cases, I found the instructions to do the installation confusing, so I decided to document how I did it, in case other people have the same problem. I also find it interesting to compare the difficulty of installing the two phones.

Installing PureOS on the Librem 5

On my PC, I use PluriOS, which is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS created by my friend Jared López of OpenIT. I have been helping Jared add the Aymara language to PluriOS. I tried following the instructions from Purism for installing PureOS in the Librem 5, but I had to alter them for PluriOS.

Charla “La necesidad de una transición energética en Bolivia” en el Congreso Nacional Crisis Climática

El día 5 de mayo de 2023, he dado una charla en el Congreso Nacional Crisis Climática en La Paz para explicar por qué Bolivia necesita un plan nacional para llegar a 100% energía renovable en 10 años. Si Bolivia deja de exportar gas, puede extender esta cronograma a 20 años, pero las reservas de gas se agotarán. Bolivia debería planear la transición para evitar una crisis energética.

Acá esta la presentación en PDF y DOCX:

• Transicion_Energetica_Bolivia-2023.pdf
• Transicion_Energetica_Bolivia-2023.pptx

Mi hoja de cálculo con los gráficos también está disponible:
BoliviaEmisiones2023.ods

Estos archivos tiene una licencia de Creative Commons-Atribución 4.0 si alguien quiere reutilizar los datos y gráficos.

Tracking the rise of the Chinese offshore wind industry

The Chinese wind industry is developing so fast, it is hard to keep track of its progress. Mingyang’s recent announcement of its MySE 18.X-28X turbine with 140 meter blades surprised many with the enormous size of the rotor and scale of its planned power capacity. Few in the wind industry expected to see an offshore turbine which aims to reach 28MW this decade. A survey of 140 foremost experts in the wind industry published in May 2022 found that they expected offshore turbines in 2035 to have 17.1 MW of capacity and rotor diameters of 250 meters in Europe, 15.6 MW and 248 m rotors in North America and 15.0 MW and 220 m rotors in Asia. Less than 10% of the respondents in the survey expected to see offshore turbines 24MW or larger in 2035 and less than 25% expected to see offshore rotor diameters 280 meters or larger in 2035. To say that the announcement of the MySE 18.X-28X took the Western wind industry by surprise is an understatement.

When I started looking into the Chinese turbine manufacturers, I was surprised to discover that the MySE 18.X-28X was just the latest of a whole series of gigantic turbines being planned in China that have gotten little news coverage in the West. I started compiling a list of the biggest offshore wind turbines, and was astounded by how many Chinese models I found which are planned to have higher power capacities and larger rotors than the largest offshore turbines planned by Siemens Gamesa, Vestas and GE. There are a number of web sites that provide listings of the different offshore wind turbine models, such as wind-turbine-models.com, thewindpower.net and c4offshore.com, but I kept finding offshore models which weren’t listed in their databases. In frustration, I started compiled my own list of all the offshore wind turbines that have been announced since the first offshore wind turbine was installed in Sweden in 1990.

My frustration with the misinformation in the right-wing echo chamber

I made the mistake of hopping on YouTube and watching a video where Jordan Peterson interviews Dr. Judith Curry about how climate change models are unreliable. There are areas of climate science where the science is in debate, such as the formation of clouds, but many of the things that Curry stated in the interview are not accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists. A normal person who doesn’t have a clue about the science would watch that interview and conclude that there is no real consensus on anthropogenic climate change, that variations in solar radiance may be causing the majority of climate change and there are such large uncertainties in climate modelling that we may have global cooling in the future rather than global warming.

Should Americans be worried that their offshore wind will be controlled by European companies?

The coastal waters of the United States have huge potential to provide wind energy for the East and West Coasts, the Great Lakes, the Western Gulf Coast and Western Hawaii, which are populated regions that often lack good sources of renewable energy. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that there is potentially 2058 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind that can be exploited in American coastal waters, which would yield 7203 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year. The U.S. consumed 3930 TWh in 2021, so offshore wind could generate nearly twice as much electricity as Americans currently consume. That is a conservative estimate considering that it assumes a capacity factor of 40%, but the average capacity factor for the UK’s offshore wind farms is 42.2% and many of the recent farms with 6MW or larger turbines like Hornsea One, Dudgeon, Galloper and Highwind Scotland are seeing capacity factors over 45%.

Despite the enormous potential to develop wind energy in American coastal waters, the US only has two small offshore wind farms currently in operation. The US has so many excellent sources of terrestrial wind, that power companies and energy developers focused on easier spots to place wind farms like the central wind corridor running from the Dakotas down to Northwest Texas. Of the 135,886 MW of wind capacity installed in the US at the end of 2021, only 42 MW of that total came from offshore wind.

Why the Tesla Semi will transform the trucking industry in North America

Back in November 2017, when Tesla first announced its all-electric class 8 semi-truck, many in the industry expressed doubt that Tesla could achieve the announced specs of its “Semi”. An electric class 8 truck with 500 miles of range that could go from 0 to 60 mph in 20 seconds when fully loaded seemed like bombastic claims at the time. Even more outlandish was the claim that the Tesla Semi would be able to charge 400 miles or 80% of its battery capacity in 30 minutes, meaning that there wouldn’t be much downtime while waiting for the truck to recharge.

A number of experts in the trucking industry expressed skepticism that Tesla could truly build a truck that could match the range of the class 8 diesel trucks that haul the majority of goods to market in North America, where distances are longer than in more populated parts of the world. Daimler’s head of trucks, Martin Daum, told Bloomberg in February 2018 that he has doubts about Tesla achieving the announced specs of the Semi:

Charla en Rurrenabaque: Riesgos de deforestación y cambio climático

riesgosdeforestacioncambioclimaticorurre_2022-10-14Download

riesgosdeforestacioncambioclimaticorurre_2022-10-14.pdfDownload

Cambio climático y los compromisos de Bolivia rumbo a la COP27 ¿Cuales son los hechos?

Para ver un video del evento:
https://www.facebook.com/events/482728363734047

Si alguien quiere la presentación:

http://illaa.org/…/CharlaBoliviaCambioClimatico_2022-09…

http://illaa.org/…/CharlaBoliviaCambioClimatico_2022-09…

Y la hoja de calculo con los datos:

http://illaa.org/reaccionclimatica/BoliviaINDCCalculos9.ods

Presentación de cambio climático en Bolivia

He dado una presentación acerca de los datos de cambio climático en Bolivia. Acá está mi presentación en formatos de PDF y ODP (para LibreOffice):
CharlaBoliviaCambioClimatico_2022-05.pdf
CharlaBoliviaCambioClimatico_2022-05.odp

Observaciones acerca del traductor de quechua, aymara y guaraní de Google Translate

Hay que reconocer el nuevo traductor de quechua, aymara y guaraní de Google Translate (https://translate.google.com) por valorar las lenguas indígenas. Sin embargo, el traductor tiene varios problemas todavía y es necesario mejorarlo para que sea útil para el público boliviano.

El traductor quechua es basado en el quechua chanka de Ayacucho. El traductor debería indicar que la lengua es “quechua chanka” en lugar de solo “quechua”, porque quechua es una familia de lenguas que contiene mucha variación. Para un quechua-hablante de Cuzco, Huancayo, Ancash, Bolivia, Ecuador o Argentina, el traductor de Google esta produciendo algo como catalán o gallego para un castellano-hablante. El traductor no es muy útil para los quechua-hablantes de Bolivia, que tienen 10 letras adicionales en su alfabeto (CH’, CHH, K’, KH, P’, PH, Q’, QH, T’, TH) que no existen en el quechua chanka. El traductor castellano→quechua produce texto en el dialecto chanka sin las letras glotalizadas y aspiradas del quechua boliviano, entonces no distingue palabras como tanta (juntos), t’anta (pan) y thanta (usado/viejo), porque todas esta palabras son representadas como tanta por el traductor.

Comparando celulares de Linux (y como ellos pueden enfrentar los problemas de la industria móvil)

Aca es una presentación que hice con el Nucleo Linux Bolivia (telegram: NucleoLinuxBolivia) el día 3 de marzo de 2022:

La presentación incluye varios fotos de mi artículo “Comparing the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone Beta” y aca son los dispositivos en ODP (LibreOffice) y PDF de esta presentación:

comparandocelularesdelinuxDownload

American imperialism in Ukraine should be condemned just like Russian imperialism

I get disgusted reading the news coverage about the war in the Ukraine. I fully agree with the media’s talking heads that the actions of Russia are reprehensible. Vladimir Putin’s aggression and his long-term goal of expanding Russia’s borders should be condemned, but I believe that the imperialist actions of the US also should be condemned in similar terms, and the repression of minority (i.e. Russian) rights inside of Ukraine also needs to be condemned. Russia, the US and Ukraine all had a role in provoking the current crisis, and anyone who truly cares about human rights and democracy should be criticizing all three countries, and not be pretending that this is just a war of Russian aggression, because that is only part of the story.

Amount of code developed by Purism for the Librem 5 phone

I was curious how much code Purism has developed for the Librem 5 phone, so I wrote a little Python script that downloads the source code from the projects that Purism started, runs the code through cloc to count lines of code, and then sums the total.

Here is what I get:

$ python3 locPurism.py
Lines of code in Purism projects for the Librem 5:
	libhandy: 47730
	libadwaita: 51270
	calls: 20745
	chatty: 49661
	squeekboard: 17993
	libcall-ui: 4426
	phoc: 15277
	phosh: 48301
	feedbackd: 5970
	feedbackd-device-themes: 603
	gtherm: 1734
	haegtesse: 2105
	wys: 2442
Total lines of code: 268257

Comparing the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone Beta

Contents:
Look and feel, Branding and custom design, Extra accessories and box, Protection of hardware, Hardware kill switches, Extension ports, Flashlight / Flash, Charging, Display, Performance, Heat, Power Management, Haptics, Audio, Disassembly, Longevity, Tech support and community

I have been avidly following the development of the Librem 5 and PinePhone since they were first announced in August 2017 and in October 2018, respectively. One of the reasons why I’m so excited by these Linux phones is the fact that I can look at their schematics. The Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA are the first phones with free/open source schematics for its printed circuit boards, since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2012. PINE64 also releases the PinePhone schematics to the public, but they are proprietary so no one can reuse or modify them.

At one point last year, I got so obsessed by these two phones, that I went through the schematics of both models, and looked up the manufacturer and documentation for every named component with a model number in the phones and posted that information on the wiki for the Librem 5 and PinePhone. I also wrote a script to count the number of each type of component in the two phones’ schematics, in order to find out how many resistors, transistors, inductors, crystal oscillators, ICs, etc. were in each phone. My only excuse for this nerdy fascination with the two phones is that I had a lot of free time last year to obsess over the two phones due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tutorial to get started using Github

I got tripped up the first time I tried to publish my own code on Github, so I thought I would write up a short tutorial for other newbies like me. I am going to explain how I use Github from the command line of your computer, and I recommend sticking to this method, since using the graphical interface through the Github web site or the Github app will hobble your abilities. In contrast, learning how to use git from the command line will empower you

The first thing to do is to follow these instructions to create your account on Github. After you have an account, go to https://github.com and login. Then, click on the green “New” button in the upper left hand corner of the screen to create a new repository: