State of the Union Progression or Regression

I have to thank Colette a reader from Capetown South Africa for the cartoon I used above. I may not have used the F word and would rather have used the S word but the cartoon says it all and is a pretty hilarious commentary on how we have messed up the world. This week I followed an auction on Ebay for a fully restored Porsche 914 from the mid 70s. What interested me was the fact that the owner had converted the Porsche to be electric powered. He installed over 23 kilowatt hours of lithium ion batteries and removed the engine and replaced it with a large electric motor. He even installed a 2 kilowatt electric heater so the motorist would not die of exposure in the winter. The condition on the car of the body, paint, chrome, interior, wheels, and tires were flawless and was so clean that one could have eaten off the floor.

The seller had a reserve price for the car and stated that he had spent $100,000 to restore the car and change the drive to the state of the art electric system. The final offer made by a potential purchaser was $18,100 and this bid did not meet the reserve price. I also followed an auction for a stock model 914 Porsche that had not been restored but was in good working condition. This car did not meet its reserve price either and the bidding ended at just over $7,000. My guess of the price for a pristine fully restored Porsche with a stock internal combustion engine, that the bidding may have reached $11,000. Therefore the US public was willing to pay the owner of the 914 a premium of approximately $7,000 for the conversion of the propulsion system from gasoline to electric. I too think the electric conversion was worth only a few thousand dollars and I would have paid $13,000 for the electric Porsche.

I think that the results of the auction of the electric Porsche is a metaphor of the upright man walking back towards the apes and saying go back. The owner of the car thought he was pushing a worthwhile envelope of technical improvement by taking out the internal combustion engine. No doubt he spent a lot of money on the restoration and conversion and no doubt he did a fine job of engineering the system. What he did not contemplate was whether his endeavor had any real value? The auction proved the efforts of the owner had very little real value and simply throwing $100,000 and a lot of human labor at a hair brain idea still means the final product was a low valued item. I admire the owner of the Porsche for using his own money and not relying on the department of entropy for a handout. I do not admire him for his final product, it was simply dumb to spend all this money.

The President delivered his state of the Union address. He never had the guts to turn around and say to the apes in congress to back up. The Apes applauded his hollow words because the words are as American as Apple Pie. Last week the President sang some Al Green lines from Let’s Stay Together at the Apollo. Perhaps he should have belted out some Don McLean Bye Bye American Pie to the joint session of Congress. He can also tell the apes who want to ride the elephant to DC in November that a McLean is not a low calorie burger that is served under the Golden Arches. The McLean is the actual state of the Union where there are few jobs and the primates on both side of isle dole out billions to Tesla, Fisker, Nissan, and Coda who like the owner of the Porsche 914 will turn $100,000 into $10,000 on each car they sell. I do like Al Green but the song Let’s Stay Together is quite the opposite of turning around and telling the apes following you how it really is. This is from the Al Green song “Let me, be the one you come running to I'll never be untrue”. This from the Don McLean song “Bad news on the doorstep, I could not take one more step.” The political system requires the President to sell hope and sing Green (note the pun), but I want leadership that can deliver the bad news, change course and then bake a tasty pie.

On The Rebound

Several readers of my blog emailed me that Tesla stock had a rebound this week. Of course it was going to rebound after last week’s big drop and of course Elon Musk the Tesla CEO gave positive pronouncements on the status of the Mosel S. Elon opined that the company expects to sell 20,000 of these cars next year and with a gross margin of greater than 25%. Well Elon’s personal life is also on the rebound. His second wife Talulah Riley, a British actress, and Elon are separating. Elon’s first wife was a Canadian named Justine. Justine was not tight lipped about Elon and spilled a lot of beans on a show called Divorce Wars. I really do not care about the Musk Man’s marriages except to say that Telulah must have given Elon acting lessons prior to the split. 20,000 Model Ss with a gross margin in excess of 25% in 2013 will not be manufactured nor sold, and as they say in the old country if this happens I will eat my hat. Of course Mr. Musk did not say 2013 he said next year. He said this on January 16 so it sounds like next year is a lot sooner than all of 2013. Per Eric Savitz of Forbes, Elon also stated that the departure of the two lead engineers “was actually a slightly positive development”. I guess we will have to wait for Justine or Tululah to remove that positive spin and shed some light on how Elon sees positive from negative. Elon is so cross wired he may actually wrongly connect the terminals on the Model S and have the car go 130 miles per hour in reverse.

My disdain for Tesla is only matched by my disdain for academic chemical engineers who are at the pig trough of department of energy funding for pure junk science. We still have fools teaching in California state universities who are converting SUVs to run on hydrogen and only getting a 60 mile range but claiming zero emissions and we still have the department of entropy funding this junk. Talking of California, governor Moonbeam just fired the head of the high speed rail project that is supposed to whisk passenger from San Francisco to Los Angeles before the 22nd century arrives. This project is now estimated to cost $98.5 billion. Hey Jerry why not heat it up a smidgen to 98.6 so we can reach body temperature and keep the project alive? This puppy is so cold its temperature is that of Anchorage in mid February. For my overseas readers 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is about 37 degrees Celsius. If the Chinese were to build the California High Speed Rail it would cost $37 billion but heaven forbid we have two trains on the line at once, we would all experience a Chinese Fire Drill.

The good news in these Ignited States is that we have 240.5 million private vehicles with an average age of almost 11 years. The way things are going for the economy, I predict by the time Tesla produces 20,000 vehicles a year and enjoys a gross margin of more than 25% there will be 11 million private vehicles registered to the inhabitants of the US with an average age of 240.5 years. Of course TSLA stock will rebound in 240.5 years and when this happens and folks who paid $26 a share on January 16, 2012 will be able to say the rebound was real and their belief in Elon paid off.

Friday the 13th

A partly good and partly bad day. The bad part first. The drain to my bathroom sink clogged and the instant hot water heater for my tea leaked. It took a couple of pretty expensive visits to the old homestead by two plumbers who turned my body into a torso by taking an arm and a leg. The good part of the day is my best friend Sam turned 60 today. Sam and I became best friends in second grade back in Joburg when we were 6. We have a friendship that spans from six to six oh. As much as I love Sam and his becoming a sexagenarian had me thinking is life better or worse after sixty? If the first part of age group holds then of course life is better after sixty. Sam, I wish you a happy birthday and wishing you many more years of health and happiness.

If my friend Sam had it good who had it bad this Friday the 13th? Well I have to say my old enemy Teslacle had it real bad. They trade on the NASDAQ as TSLA and for most of Friday the 13th their stock was a flat line. Then with thirty minutes to the close of trading the news hit that their VP and chief engineer and the head of their vehicle and chassis engineering have left the company and the stock dropped. See the chart above. This is just months prior to the launch of the government funded pile of junk that transfers wealth and the pursuit of happiness from the 99% to the 1%. It is kind of like the ball has dropped at Teslacle. Prior to this happening today the want to be auto company had suffered from cryptorchidism. No doubt that Secretary Chu Chu is not happy that his wonder child no longer suffers from cryptorchidism and had wished that the two high level engineers could have stayed till after the November election.

Tesla continues to prevaricate on their website as to the range of the Model S. They fib about the pile of junk attaining a range of 160 miles when traveling at 55 miles per hour. Yeah this may be the case on a perfectly level and straight road at night when the prevailing temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit. With no heater or air conditioning and no braking or acceleration the pile of junk will yield a range of 160 miles using its 40 kilowatt hours of stored energy. I opined a while back that a motorist in upstate New York dealing with an outside temperature of only 14 degrees Farenheit and driving an electric car, they had better be wearing some Northface clothing to not die of exposure when their cab does not warm up over freezing point. But don’t fret for this person from the 1% in a Teslacle, they can fork over $80,000 and get an upgraded battery pack with 85 kilowatt hours of stored electricity. Now the pile of junk weighs in at over 5,000 pounds and many more of the 99% will be deprived of their share of the lithium. The 85 kilowatt hour battery will support a larger heater that brings the cab temperature up to the perfect 68 degrees Fahrenheit. But wait the added 900 pounds for the larger battery and the added draw for the heater now make the $80,000 behemoth only go 200 miles on a single charge. The driver will be not be able to go from Buffalo to Albany he will however be able to reach Utica where he can have a urologist check on the condition of his urethra. He had better hope the urologist has two things. Skinny fingers and a spare 40 amp 220 volt circuit. Of course the motorist will have to recharge in Utica for 10 hours before making the trip to Time Square in order to really see the ball drop. I have no idea how to spend 10 hours in Utica.

How Stupid Can We Be?

Albert Einstein once said “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” Well we now know that universe is expanding and at even a faster speed than previously thought and no doubt human stupidity is doing likewise so is there a number beyond infinity? Let me shed a little light on what I think is the most stupid government policy in these Ignited States. If you buy a Chev Volt, a Nissan Leaf, or some other plug in vehicle you receive a $7,500 gift from the Treasury of the United States. This is a supposed noble idea to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Of course the EPA gives the plug in car a green star and lets the manufacturer claim that the electricity was produced with 100% efficiency when calculating the equivalent gas mileage for the vehicle. So not only does the US government give the purchaser of the heap of junk a gift, they allow the manufacturer to make claims that disobey the laws of thermodynamics. Of course Steve Chu Chu is the engineer steering this runaway train of fake out and payola.

Now that I have got my disdain for old Steve out of my system, let’s investigate just how much money was spent by Uncle Sam in 2011 to subsidize the sales of Volts and Leaves. 9,674 Leaves were sold in 2011 in the US and 7,671 Volts were likewise sold. By my estimate, had consumers bought a Chev Cruze instead and drive 15,000 miles a year the quantity of CO2 emissions that are saved by the Volts and Leaves sold in 2011 amounts to a paltry 17,216 tons a year. The Treasury of the US spent just over $130 million in 2011 to affect those savings in CO2 emissions. Had Dr. Chu Chu provided one of the electric utilities in the Midwest such as Ameren or Duke with a $130 million gift to build a 144 megawatt combined cycle natural gas fired power station to retire a similar old coal fired power station, we could have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 578,166 tons a year. Because old Chu Chu is beyond infinitely dumb we wrongly spent the $130 million and actually will have 560,950 more tons a year of CO2 emissions continue indefinitely.

But this is not where the stupidity ends. Had the money been spent on the natural gas combined cycle generation station, GE would have supplied US made equipment for the project. Instead the Japanese supplied the batteries for the Leaves and the Koreans supplied the batteries for the Volts and GE was left scratching its butt for something to do. Of course Chu Chu is instructed by the Commander In Chief engineer who runs the administration on what is best policy for these Ignited States. Heaven forbid the man with a Noble Prize in low temperature physics actually tell the Nobel Peace Prize winner that we are flatulating in the wind when it comes to reducing carbon emissions with Volts, Leaves, Karmas, and Codas. An update on the Karma batteries there were only 239 recalled cars and of those only 50 had been delivered to customers. Yippee after over $500 million of government subsidy the Fisker motor company got 50 Karmas into the hands of customers like Leonardo De Crapio (intentionally misspelled). This week the morons on Wall Street have upped A 123’s stock price on news that they will supply batteries to Via for trucks. Who is Via one might ask? Via is the remnant of Raser the famous firm that had the other side of the isle, in the form of Senator Hatch, excited about the “100 MPG Hummer” that he drove around the US Capitol. Now tell me with all the stupidity in DC is it not time for a third party? DC is owned by Wall Street and Wall Street is owned by who knows who but stupidity like greed is universal and is growing and actually may reach a value that is larger than infinite. Perhaps old Eistein should have postulated the largest number that is post infinite and is called superinfinity. We have super PACS that can pay for negative ads in the presidential elections. These super PACs can make Gnats out of Newt so perhaps the super infinite number can make Chu Chu understand that shift happens and that DC like Exergy is being destroyed by changes in temperature. I will explain Exergy sometime in the future but for now think of Exergy as the maximum useful work in a system. Exergy is about zero in the department of entropy.

The year is gone

The stock market here in the US as measured by the Standard and Poor’s 500 basically did nothing from beginning to end of year but certainly had some wild swings during the year. The US moved to become a net exporter of refined petroleum products for the first time in 60 years. The price of natural gas in the US dropped by 30% during the year thanks to the shale gas, while the cost of oil was up just over 10% for the year. The economy here in the San Francisco Bay area had some real winners as well as losers. Apple and Google are humming while Solyndra is dead as a door nail. I drove down interstate 880 yesterday and went past the closed Solyndra facility in Fremont. This large imposing billion dollar facility is shut and the lights are off. About a mile north of Solyndra is the Tesla assembly facility that previously was owned jointly by Toyota and GM. There are massive Tesla signs on the walls of this large facility and my bet is in about a year it too will be half empty as the Tesla Model S does not deliver as promised.

My least favorite auto company Fisker just recalled all the 250 cars they have delivered so far. Looks like A 123 who supplied the lithium ion batteries did not clamp coolant lines properly to the battery packs and the battery packs might catch alight if they get too hot. No doubt A 123 was a dog this year as the stock dropped (as predicted by the Green Machine) to $1.61 at year end after starting the year as a ten buck share. I think A 123 will be gone by the end of 2012 and Fisker will also be a history major. Advanced Battery and Ener 1 are goners and delisted from the NASDAQ. Valence Technology will soon be put out of its misery and a discharged lithium ion stock. The question is how much longer can Tesla (TSLA) and Nissan lie about their costs of producing cars with lithium ion batteries. Tesla uses Panasonic batteries and Nissan uses NEC ones. Panasonic got its clock cleaned in 2011 in the TV space and recently admitted to a yearly loss of over $5 billion. Yeah 5 billion big boys! Panasonic cannot continue to pretend to produce lithium ion batteries at low cost and give these to Tesla to sell at an even lower cost. The charade will end in 2012. GM has priced its Volt at its cost and has not subsidized sales of the vehicle hence its puny market share. My expectation is that GM may sell 15 to 20 thousand volts in the US next year and will be happy to sell twenty times as many of their Cruze which is doing really well without any plug from a plug in. GM will also do really well with their E Assist vehicles and the US auto fleet will be greener.

Auto sales in 2011 in the US totaled 12.8 million new vehicles and this was about one million more than in 2010. I do believe we may see 13.5 million vehicle sold in 2012. The great news is that we scrap approximately 14 million vehicles a year so the total fleet continues to shrink and so does our appetite for gasoline. We used 1.9% less gasoline in 2011 than we did in 2010 and we are now using 8,944,000 barrels a day of gasoline on average. My prognostication is that we will use 1% less gasoline in 2012 than we did in 2011 and will continue to drop by this much each year going forward. We of course used more natural gas in 2011 than we did in 2011 and will continue to use more each year going forward. I have often stated that President Obama should declare victory in natural gas and say it was his idea to frack our way forward. Coal is another declining fuel in the US with 17 million less tons consumed in 2011 versus 2010. The US did produce half a percent more coal in 2011, but exported its surplus.

The New Year will be full of surprises and who knows we may actually get some real leadership in Washington come November. What won’t change are the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of motion. As much as the VCs have hyped alternate energy we will likely see them pretend like they did not bring us Solyndra, A 123, Kior, Fisker, Solazyme, Coda, and a dozen other thermodynamically challenged startups. The VCs will find the next bandwagon to hang their hat on and maybe just maybe Vinod Kholsla will end his reign as the king of alternate energy. I think we will also see a lot less of Al Gore. I hope that by December 31, 2012, our Secretary of Energy will be long gone and forgotten. I hope I am proved wrong next year and the Brady Bunch lifestyle is endless for all of mankind and free and abundant energy will flow from heaven and that Bright Source and their partner Bechtel dispatches electricity that is too cheap to measure. But for now I see the entropy on our planet simply increasing as it has done since the dawn of time. Steve Hawking had it right that entropy increase with time because we choose to measure time in the direction entropy increases. I wonder if I spell all my words backwards and if my blogs were written backwards whether this will change the direction of time or will it be yet another futile attempt to refute Josiah Willard Gibbs. Brother Gibbs is perhaps the man I admire most from the 19th Century. Gibbs spent his whole adult life at Yale. Those who refute him and break his second law should spend their adult life in Thermodynamic Jail.

2012 A New Year’s Message

Many readers of the Green Machine blogs have asked me to be more optimistic and provide a solution to our energy and ecology problems. I know the limitations of the laws of thermodynamics and Newton’s laws of motion so most of my writing is that we have to have smaller lighter vehicles with hybridization of the power train and that we also have to change our way of living with smaller homes closer to work and use public transport, walk or ride bicycles that can be electrified. I do think there is a political solution that should be explored and this is my New Year’s sermon.

I have hinted that the cost of membership of countries to belong to the UN should be in direct proportion to their carbon emissions. While I think the UN is a broken organization I do believe the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a thriving organization and is the cornerstone of economic development for all countries that belong to this global organization. My suggestion is therefore that the cost of membership in the WTO be in direct proportion to the country’s CO2 emissions. This would start in 2012 at $10 per ton of CO2 emissions and will increase by $1 per ton each year going forward. You may ask what will the WTO do with $300 billion that falls into its lap in 2012? My suggestion is that the WTO take over the operation of the WHO (World Health Organization) as well as create a World Children's Organization (WCO) to replace UNESCO. The WTO should also take over the World Bank for the funding of development projects and concentrate on small projects that actually assist the extremely poor in rural areas of the developing world. This new bank will be called the WBO (World Banking Organization)

Let’s look a little more deeply at my idea for the WHO. It should concentrate on preventable diseases and work to stop the spread of infectious diseases. The WCO needs to deal with basic education (non-religious and non-biased) of the children of the world and assure that children everywhere are adequately nourished, housed, educated, and respectfully treated. UNESCO was supposed to do this but has failed as the parent organization (UN) is compromised politically. The World Bank is also a politically incompetent organization and simply has not delivered projects that bring improvement to the lives of the extremely poor around the globe. Instead of large power projects that simply make money for the likes of GE to supply expensive equipment and large engineering contractors to install this expensive equipment, I suggest the new WBO look at three immediate aspects of improving the lives of the very poor. The first is clean and safe drinking water, the second is lighting, and the third is cooking fuel for folks in remote villages. I can solve all three to improve the lives of 500 million people with 50 billion dollars of investment and rapidly lower the carbon intensity and despoliation of the land that surrounds these rural poor. The first step is to deploy PV cells or small wind turbines to create a small amount of electricity in each little village. A portion of the electric power can be used to produce ozone (from the air) or bleach (if salt is available) to render the water drinkable and safe. Some of the electricity will be stored in lead acid, nickel metal hydride, or lithium ion batteries and then used in LED lighting at night. The lighting could even be via portable lanterns. I suggest for cooking fuel that the WBO provide systems to anaerobically digest sewage and animal dung or even help set up the infrastructure to bring in propane or kerosene for cooking fuel. Wood fires should be avoided and subsidies should be given to substitute the above fuels for wood that primarily come from deforestation of the surrounding areas.

My blogs are limited to short crisp message so I will end here and continue the thoughts in further blogs. The real problem with my solution is to make sure the WTO does not become another bloated and incapable organization. For that I propose I become the Head of the WGO and the WGO will run the WTO. The WGO stands for the World’s Greenest Organization. If I am not given the post and it is given to Donald Trump instead the WGO will be the World’s Greediest Organization. In the case of Donald at the helm of the WGO the WTO will then become the World’s Trumpiest Organization, the WCO will be the World’s Costliest Organization, The WHO will be the World’s Hugest Organization, and the WBO will become the World’s Boastiest Organization. “Be Green Vote Leveen” will be on bumper stickers in 2012. Actually on a very serious note if Donald chooses to run as an independent for President I have my “Take a Dump, Vote For Trump” bumper sticker printed and ready for action.

To you all Seasons Greeting and a Happy Healthy and Prosperous New Year

A Lump Of Coal For Christmas

In days of old if a child misbehaved they got a lump of coal as their Christmas gift. I say we institute the practice of giving a lump of coal to the most gangrene folks of the year. Bechtel may be a winner with all of their failed “clean coal” projects. One of their customers got wise and managed to get out of Bechtel’s grip this year. That customer is American Municipal Power (AMP) a not for profit association of Ohio municipalities that had engaged Bechtel three years ago to build a 1,000 megawatt power station. When Bechtel admitted the power station would cost $4.1 billion and not $3.1 billion as originally budgeted AMP told Bechtel to get lost and actually sued Bechtel in Federal court for misleading them on the project. AMP decided to buy a combined cycle natural gas generation station instead. I guess the management at AMP must read my blog or must have studied thermodynamics as young Buckeyes. Here is what the Athens Ohio news reported in February 2011 when the suit was filed:

The company said at the time that the contractor had increased its cost estimate by 37 percent between May and November 2009, making it economically unfeasible to proceed.
AMP was partnering with Bechtel Power Corporation on that coal-fired facility, and Bechtel was the contractor that AMP said increased its cost estimate. On Friday, AMP filed a federal lawsuit against Bechtel Power alleging breach of contract, gross negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
AMP, in the court filing, is asking for actual damages not less than $97 million plus punitive damages and court costs.
In the lawsuit, AMP alleges that Bechtel repeatedly misrepresented to AMP the various costs associated with the project as well as Bechtel’s previous experience in developing similar projects.
AMP attorneys wrote that by November 2009 Bechtel’s presentation to AMP indicated that the cost of the project would be $1.06 billion more than what Bechtel had said it would cost in August 2008 and May 2009.
AMP attorneys wrote that Bechtel’s “enormous surprise increase of more than a billion dollars” in the cost of the project rendered it “economically unfeasible.” The attorneys wrote that had AMP known that the project would cost over $1 billion more than what it was originally projected to cost, the company would not have made various purchases with relation to the plant that totaled over $97 million.
These costs would not have been incurred, the lawsuit states, if it were not for Bechtel’s “wrongful conduct.”
AMP alleged that Bechtel repeatedly failed to “withdraw, correct or amend” its price projections “in any sort of honest, forthright, proper, timely, diligent, careful or reasonable manner.”
As a result, AMP is asking for upward of $97 million in damages due to Bechtel’s allegedly “willful, wanton, reckless and/or grossly negligent misconduct.”

The AMP management gets a green star from the Green Machine while Bechtel gets a lump of coal. Who else deserves a lump of coal for Christmas? One recipient has to be Al Gore for his hypocrisy on Fisker that he colored green. Secretary Chu gets his lump of coal for selling out thermodynamics for hope. Elon Musk gets his sack of coal for the Tesla fake out. The UN gets a train load for the nonsense they resolved in Durban. The Chinese get a cargo ship full for being the world’s biggest polluters. Tokyo Electric Power Company gets a coal mine for the Fukashima disaster. Russia gets all of the Powder River Basin coal reserves as it is estimated that 1% of the oil produced each year in that country is spilled and never delivered. The spilled oil equals 5 million tons each year. This leakage equals 6 times as much as the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. I guess Toxic Tony has been overtaken by Toxic Trotsky as the winner of the Green Machine’s annual global gangrene award.