Our new video podcast Smart Energy People launches with a couple of great episodes.

EV

We love a good show. Let us know if you'd like to meet up at any of these: Everything EV (London, 24 Feb), EV infrastructure Expo (Silverstone, 12 May), Fully Charged Live (Farnborough, 29 Apr - 1st May), Cenex (Millbrook, 7-8 Sep), EV World Congress (25-26 Oct) or the London EV Show (Dec?).

DevicePilot customers can now precisely calculate CO2 emissions and savings when using electricity for any purpose, including for EV charging, by ingesting a live feed from the UK grid carbon API, or in other countries including European and US states, ElectricityMap. By my calculations, for an EV to be as dirty as a modern ICE car, grid carbon intensity would need to be around 640 gCO₂/kWh, whereas the UK grid today varies between 10% and 50% of that figure, as the UK is now sometimes more than 50% powered by wind.

• Chargesafe initiative aims to improve those dark, unsafe charging locations.
• BP say that EV chargers have overtaken fuel pumps in profitability.
• Analysts Delta-EE think there is still plenty of room for innovative new business models for EV charging.
• Ernst and Young have opined upon “How to turn EV charging from a grid liability into an asset” [see also our 2021 panel session]
• ev.energy and Equiwatt are some of the players doing exactly that, defining a new market segment of "Smart EV charging".  
• ev.energy also gets £295k govt funding to expand its EV-based virtual power plant
• BritishVolt has secured £1.7bn in funding for a UK battery Gigafactory in Northumberland, and has also teamed-up with Glencore to build a battery recycling plant in Kent.
• Take part in what NewMotion claim is the largest EV driver survey in Europe
• Electrify America narrowly pipped Chargepoint in Charge Electric Vehicles magazine’s EV fast charging benchmark
• France and Norway join The Netherlands in allowing non-Tesla Supercharging.

Smart Energy

Smart Energy People: Harriet Allman-Carter of Lightsource Labs introduces what they’re doing in Home Energy Management

• UK grid regulator Ofgem plans to make smart meters do half-hourly billing unless you opt-out (whereas today you have to opt-in).
• Folks are starting seriously to consider the costs of moving Smart Meters away from 2G & 3G networks. 
• TaDo the German Smart Energy company will go public at a €450m valuation.
• ClimateScope is a useful tool for comparing the cleanliness of each country’s energy.
• Customer consent, interoperability, data catalogues… lots of good ideas in the latest report by the UK Energy Digitalisation taskforce (EDiT).
• It can take time for a government’s energy legacy to become clear. While UK PM Tony Blair (1997-2007) kick-started our journey to what we now call Net Zero, his successor David Cameron (2010-2016) - who famously “cut the green crap” - burdened consumers with an additional £2.5bn on today’s UK energy bills.
• To address very steep energy price rises, the UK government looks set to use a combination of loans and direct support to the less well off, eschewing windfall tax and the abolition of green levies. There’s increasing attention to the unfairness that the vulnerable pay more for energy via pre-pay meters.
• In just the last year China built more offshore wind than all other countries combined in the last 5 years - giving it now 50% of the global total. Wow.
• 10 years ago I briefly considered using potential energy for home electricity storage (a motor, a heavy weight and a large drop) - but quickly gave-up after a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Seems like I’m not the only one to have a downer on the idea.
• Putting solar panels over canals increases efficiency of both water transport and PV, neat.
• Last week JET achieved fusion for 5 seconds, generating 16kWh (equivalent to 11MW sustained). With a Q factor of only 0.3 overall this is not yet net-energy-positive, but perhaps we're nearing the tipping point between a science project and exponential engineering? I'm reminded of futurist Ray Kurzweil’s comment upon hearing that after billions and decades invested, the Human Genome Project had only sequenced 1% of the genome: “So, they’re about half way there”.

IoT

• Sigfox, pioneer in low-cost nationwide IoT networking, is going into administration.
• Lots going on in machine learning at the edge. Silicon Labs, a leader in IoT silicon, has launched its BG24 (Bluetooth) and MG24 (Matter) chips with an ML accelerator built-in which delivers 4x the performance at 1/6th of the power.
• Nice to see Design for Repair climbing the agenda.
• This month's "shooting yourself in the foot" award goes to Canon, who because of chip shortages are shipping ink cartridges that their own printers report as fake. 
• Mazda cars get bricked by a local radio station.
• A geomagnetic storm may have knocked 40 freshly-launched SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit.
• As NVidia gives-up on acquiring ARM, Intel belatedly aims to compete with ARM by going all-in on RISC-V.
• A toothbrush now contains more computing power than all of NASA's Apollo-era mainframes (the young partner of a friend literally fell off her chair laughing when I told her I can vaguely remember the first moon landing).
• A robot vacuum cleaner escaped from a hotel near me - who knows what it got up to?
• The Apple Drone - not from, you know, that company, but for picking them. Loving that octopus action: Tevel Aerobotics 
• Speaking of drones, how do you save a dog from drowning on mud flats? Simply attach a sausage to your drone.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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