Tom Raftery's newsletter - Issue #14

Welcome all to issue 14 of my newsletter - given the week of bad news we have had, I've tried to go with good news stories here as much as possible. There are good things happening in the world too, and we need to be reminded of that from time to time. 

And this week more than ever 

The Internet of Things (IoT)

Apple held their annual World Wide Developers conference this week, and among the many, many announcements, they talked about a new app called Home which will ship in iOS 10. Home will be an app to control smart home devices, making them easier to use, and allowing them to be used together

Apple Announces New HomeKit-Enabled 'Home' App in iOS 10 — www.macrumors.com Apple today revealed an all-new HomeKit-centric app called "Home," which will make its debut in iOS 10 this fall. The app will act as a hub...

While Nokia has released its IMPACT platform for the Internet of Things. IMPACT is aimed at the B2B market, not consumers, and according to Nokia, it's big USP seems to be around end-to-end security

Nokia hopes its new IoT platform, Impact, will be a hit — www.pcworld.com Nokia hopes it will have a hit on its hands with Impact, an all-encompassing new Internet-of-Things management platform that brings together several existing products.

Energy

The Bloomberg New Energy Outlook 2016 report came out this week and it is full of good news. Renewables are not just here to stay, but with continually falling prices, solar and wind will be the cheapest form of electricity generation from around 2025 onwards, so their future looks bright

Coal and gas to stay cheap, but renewables still win race on costs — about.bnef.com This year’s edition of BNEF’s long-term forecast sees $11.4 trillion investment in global power generation capacity over 25 years, with electric vehicles boosting electricity demand by 8% in 2040.

In what has to be good news for Tesla, and other EV manufacturers, transportation is now the biggest source of emissions in the US. The amount of coal in the US energy mix is falling, bringing down electricity generation emissions, so now emphasis will need to shift to moving transportation away from fossil fuels. EVs here we come :)

Power plants are no longer America’s biggest climate problem. Transportation is — www.vox.com The US has made huge progress in cleaning up its electricity sector. Now onto a bigger challenge.

CleanTech/Misc

And speaking of Tesla, they announced this week that they have managed to ramp up their car production rate to around 2,000 cars a week. This is up from 400 a week 3 years ago. Tesla needs to further increase its production if it wants to meet the demand for its coming Model 3 which already has orders for around 373,000 cars

Tesla confirms achieving a production rate of 2,000 cars/week and releases new details about its production — electrek.co Tesla Model 3 exclusive leaked specs: 0-60 under 4 sec fast and 300+ mile range options (Update: Base 6 sec 0-60 and 215 mile range)

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times this week on the possibility of there having been intelligent species on other planets at some time in the history of the universe. The article is written by an astrophysicist, and is the summary of a recent paper he had published on the topic, and (spoiler alert) it turns out that the chances of there having been intelligent species on other planets is almost a complete certainty

Yes, There Have Been Aliens — www.nytimes.com They may not exist now. But new discoveries imply that they once did.

Climate

Yay Scotland - powering ahead (bad pun - sorry) with its climate targets...

Scotland beats climate emissions reductions target six years early

Scotland’s climate emissions have broken through a landmark reductions target six years early after a warm winter helped drive down energy use

And lastly, the one bad news story which snuck through. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is now in excess of 400ppm for the first time in millions of years - and it is highly unlikely to go below that number ever again in our lifetimes without some massive breakthrough in ways to sequester CO2. This was something I predicted last year in several of the talks I gave, though it gives me no pleasure at all to be right on this one

The atmosphere has hit a grim milestone — and scientists say we’ll never go back ‘within our lifetimes’ — www.washingtonpost.com Scientists predict that we'll never again live in an under 400 ppm world.

Finally

Thanks for taking the time to read this newsletter. I hope you found it interesting. If you did, you should also check out my blog

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