AukeHoekstra Profile picture
Aug 18, 2019 14 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Hope German car finally stops dragging its feet and gets in on the act of building EVs before it loses out to China. I've been saying this for 5-10 years but maybe this @WSJ article is a more influential wake-up call.
It's not a done deal but I'm really worried. (short thread).
First the bad news: at the moment German carmakers like @VWGroup (VW, Porsche, Audi), @BMW and @Daimler (Mercedes) are missing in action. There are 6 carmakers you've probably never heard of that outsell all of them.
Also: the economic impact of getting this wrong will be catastrophic for Germany and the EU.
And this hasn't sunk in enough yet. A lot of CEOs are still asleep at the wheel.

Also carmakers are lobbying like crazy to delay implementation of stricter emission norms but that won't help them because by 2025-2030 BEVs will be cheaper to buy.
In the period leading up to 2025-2030, people will find the BEV is much cheaper to own (due to ~70% lower energy and maintenance cost and good resale value).
So the idea that the world will still buy 2/3rd gasoline cars in 2035 (as most predictions assume) is *ludacrous* imho.
I predict most new cars sold will be electric, latest in 2030, and much earlier in countries like my own AND IN CHINA.

Germany and the EU are going for a Kodak moment and face MASSIVE economic losses if they don't wise up to the fact that EVs will soon replace combustion cars.
So once again, so it's really impossible to misunderstand me: this is NOT going to be a GRADUAL process due to regulation but a superior technology quickly replacing an outdated one. Think film=>digital, nokia=>iPhone or incandescent=>LED.
Finally, the bad news is that historically speaking, market leaders seldom accept fundamental changes to their business model in time to avoid bankruptcy.
They consist of thousands of experts unwilling and unable to imagine their knowledge might be outdated.
But on the positive side for German car makers: the entire BEV market was less than 5% of their sales. Tesla only sold 2% of what the Volkswagen group sold.

It Tesla doubled its production every year and IF VW stayed the same, it would still take them 13 years to overtake VW.
Taking into account China could grow faster I don't think Germany has 13 years. More like 10. And since developing a new platform takes at least 7 years (and the platform currently in development is too expensive) time is running out.
Also, this platform will be more about batteries and software and less about the mechanical engineering that Germans excell at. (They really do!)
But don't count out the Germans too soon! After WWII Germany was traumatized when the awareness of the size of the atrocities they committed sunk in. They where also massively bombed so little production capacity was left. And the nation was split in two.
But instead of withering away, they created the "wirdschaftswunder" (~economic wonder: Google it!)

I hope that they can repeat that feat for the German car industry. Because the combustion engine is a dead man walking, whether you accept it or not.
Ps I misspelled "wirtschaftswunder"
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaf…

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More from @AukeHoekstra

Mar 23
How to look at our impact on life on earth in 3 graphs:

1) Humans are just 0.01% of all biomass. (The graph is gorgeous!)

2) Humans + domesticated animals have almost completely displaced wild mammals.

3) We use 45% of habitable land for agriculture.
I *love* how well this graph was designed and how well it shows how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

Fun facts:
- Life is 0.00001% of the earth by weight
- Earth is 0.0003% of the weight of the sun

So we are insignificant right?
Well...
weforum.org/agenda/2021/08…
If we look at the mammals at the top of the food chain the opposite is true: we have completely taken over.
(ht@bennettpeer - other source unknown) Image
Read 5 tweets
Mar 16
Grid congestion is THE bottleneck for economic growth and sustainability in the Netherlands.

But it doesn't have to be!

When we combine Dynamic Line Rating with Peak Shaving we could move three times more electricity with the current grid!
🧵 Image
What is Peak Shaving?

Peak shaving means that you take measures to lower the peaks in electricity usage. Peaks are what limits use of a power line. In the example graph below you can see the demand is too high a few yours per week. But there is more than enough capacity overall Image
Adjusting only the 2.5% of electricity demand that causes the biggest peaks adds 25% of capacity.

Removing 17% of energy from the peaks (e.g. with dynamic pricing, batteries, smart charging, etc. etc.) provides 50% more capacity.

But now we add dynamic line rating! Image
Read 15 tweets
Feb 28
CEO of Dutch grid operator @Stedin: shut off charge points between 16:00 and 21:00.


Let me quickly explain why this is an astonishingly dumb idea that MAKES PEAKS WORSE, and why the CEO should know better.

TL;DR: the real solution is "smart charging".nos.nl/artikel/251053…
It IS true that EVs charging without any guidance will increase the evening peak. But if you just shut charge points off from 16:00 to 21:00, you get a HUGE peak at 21:00. Because at that moment everyone who arrived between 16:00 and 21:00 will start charging.
You can see this in a paper by my colleague Peter Hogeveen.


I though all grid operators allready accepted this when I did a project at @elaadNL about 10 years ago. It was the first interesting result that I got after I started with agent-based models. doi.org/10.1016/j.sega…
Image
Read 11 tweets
Feb 22
I LOVE this new post by my friend (and sometimes foe ;-) @MLiebreich on the five superheroes that might keep climate change below 2C while making us more affluent.


My main take-aways in a short thread.about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich…
Superhero 1: Exponential Growth

I think this is the biggest superhero of all. Michael rightly points out that "saturation theory" (saying the market for e.g. wind, solar, batteries and EVs will be saturated soon) is abused to make the consequences of exponential growth go away.
Superhero 2: Systems Solutions

He rightly points out that designing the system for new tech gives loads of possibilities to address challenges like the sun don't shining, the wind don't blowing and the grid needing reinforcements.
Read 8 tweets
Dec 19, 2023
Two things are true about German electricity:

1) They temporarily increased its CO2 intensity by closing nuclear power and keeping brown coal open.

2) They are exponentially replacing coal by wind and solar as this graph shows.
And they dragged the whole world forward this way.
Politics is messy. Anti-war and anti-nuclear sentiments after the second world war made Germany strongly opposed to nuclear but eager to do good. Which favored renewables. And they had Herman Scheer.

The different experience in the US might be why nuclear is more popular there. Image
Scheers' pro PV policies increased the pace at which PV walked down the learning curve.


The effect was worldwide.

Other tech with steep learning rates is following in its wake. Batteries, inverters, electrolyzers, eFuels...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_S…
doi.org/10.1016/j.joul…
Image
Read 6 tweets
Dec 4, 2023
I would estimate that over 99.9% of scientists who actually study climate systems agree that it's a lot cheaper and easier to stop burning fossil fuels than to remove carbon dioxide.

So why is @skdh so wrong?
🧵
Let's not make it an ad-hominem by assuming she craves the attention or gets paid for it. Maybe she's just worried and doesn't know better. My go-to reply in cases like this is: "never underestimate the power of incompetency".

So what does the science say?
First of all: nobody in the literature I know off (and I actually study this at the @TUeindhoven) assumes that it will be cheaper to remove carbon from the atmosphere than to stop burning fossil fuels. Thus all would agree that what she proposes is a waste of money. Image
Read 13 tweets

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