Tom Raftery's Weekly Tech for Good Newsletter - Issue #23

I'm an idiot. I am taking a couple of days off this weekend for Día de Andalucia and in my rush to get everything done before I'm out of the (home) office, I forgot to send this newsletter out yesterday 🤦🏼‍♂️ And so this week's Wednesday newsletter comes to you on Thursday. Apologies for thatAnyway, there are lots of interesting stories this week...

February 25, 2021

I'm an idiot. I am taking a couple of days off this weekend for Día de Andalucia and in my rush to get everything done before I'm out of the (home) office, I forgot to send this newsletter out yesterday 🤦🏼‍♂️

And so this week's Wednesday newsletter comes to you on Thursday. Apologies for that

Anyway, there are lots of interesting stories this week...

Tech for Good stories of the week

There were plenty of good news stories from the world of tech this week - many of which we covered in the Tech for Good weekly livestream on Tuesday (you can catch the replay of that here)

And this week's stories -

This was amazing to watch. Not just did Nasa release the video of the Perseverance rover touching down on Mars, but they also released audio recorded from the planet. The first audio ever recorded on Mars. Inspiring stuff for sure

Excellent news from Israel. The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine, which is being rolled out in a national immunization program that began Dec. 20, was 89.4% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed infections and 99% effective at preventing deaths from the virus

Danish wind energy giant Vestas, through its corporate venture capital arm Vestas Ventures, has invested in Swedish wood technology company Modvion, which specialises in making wooden wind turbine towers that it claims are “stronger than steel” and reduce the emissions associated with manufacturing the towers for wind turbines by about 80%

Wind power gets a lot of crap from people. Most of it is lies. Trump said they cause cancer, Greg Abbott says that they caused the recent problems in Texas, and there are garbage articles and videos all over the internet spreading lies about turbines. One criticism of wind turbines is true though - wind turbine blades are difficult to recycle. A new consortium of ten wind power companies aims to fix that

This is fantastic. British Gas - a fossil fuel company is going to switch its fleet of vehicles to electric vehicles in the next four years - British Gas commits to electrify its commercial fleet, the 3rd largest in the country, by 2025, five years earlier than its previous commitment and well ahead of the 2030 deadline set by the Government British Gas is ordering 2,000 of the new all-electric Vivaro-e vans from Vauxhall for its engineers. This represents the largest electric vehicle order for a commercial fleet in the UK, and adds to 1,000 purchased last Summer

An entirely electrified passenger vehicle sector would substantially reduce Australia’s emissions even if the electricity grid was entirely powered by coal, according to recent research published by Transport Energy/Emission Research. The study finds that, even with Australia’s 2018 energy mix of around 80 per cent fuel (mostly coal) and 20 per cent renewables, transport emissions would fall by between 16 and 40 per cent if the fleet was fully electric, and the emissions fall quickly as more renewables are brought onto the grid

One criticism of electric vehicles is that they their initial purchase price is higher than a fossil fuel powered car. Volkswagen is the latest auto manufacturer to address this with the introduction of the smallest member of its electric ID family of cars, the ID.1, a Polo-sized supermini to take on the Peugeot e-208, Vauxhall Corsa-e and Honda e. The small EV space is getting crowded!

I was amazed at Tesla's audacity back in 2013 when it announced that it was going to build its own battery production facility for its EVs. Now Tesla is going even further with its vertical integration - Tesla is going to build a lithium hydroxide chemical plant in Texas in what is the first move by an automotive company into lithium chemical production. Tesla reckons this will reduce their lithium costs 33%. That would make it extremely difficult for other automotive companies to compete with them

Digital Supply Chain (DSC) podcast

On the DSC podcast this week I talked to

  • SAP's Martin Barkman about the need for post-covid supply chains to be resilient and sustainable. This was a great follow-up to the last podcast I recorded with Martin shortly after the pandemic started where things were not looking as good. Now with the vaccine being rolled out, there is an end in sight. Listen in on our chat here

  • Then Monday of this week I spoke to Joseph Grobler. We had a fascinating conversation about supply chain optimisation. He mentioned a recent example of where he saved one company US$27 million in four months by removing excess inventory. Check it out here

Climate 21 podcast

My Climate 21 podcast this week also went out late to some subscribers. Not my fault this time (!). Several podcast hosting companies, including the one I use, were the targets of a DDoS attack. They were offline briefly early this week, and Apple Podcasts didn't list Wednesday's episode until Wednesday evening whereas it normally goes live before 7am CET

  • In this week's episode I had a very cool chat with Mark Korzilius. Mark is the founder and CSO of a company called &ever - one of the world's first at-scale indoor vertical farm companies. &ever grows plant food for salads. Their Kuwait facility produces 500kg per day and they are building a larger plant in Singapore, and several scaled down ones in Germany to be associated with hotels and grocery outlets. &ever indoor vertical farms produce food without pesticides, using 80-90% less water, and 95% less land than traditional farms. Check out this superb episode here

Livestreams

This is another week of two livestreams - my own Tech for Good one, and the SAP Design to Operate: Live series.

  • I put out my regular weekly Tech for Good - live show on Tuesday, as ever this week's show went really well, apart from my co-host having to drop off in the last 10 minutes. The stories were engaging, there was lots of audience participation and we had 82 comments left by viewers live . You can check out the replay here

  • And next Wednesday, March 3rd I will be hosting an SAP livestream on the topic of Manufacturing as a critical component of resilient, sustainable supply chains with my colleague Mike Lackey. This is the third of a series of five we're running and the last two have been amazing - each has had between 2-3,000 views and hundreds of comments. The engagement levels are off the charts which makes them great fun to host. The livestream will be at 5pm CET, 11am ET, 8am PT on March 3rd and you can join it here - if you click that link now you can set a reminder to notify you when the livestream commences. This link will also work after the livestream to catch the replay if you can't join in live (or if you just want to watch us again 😆)

And finally...

Thanks for your interest and attention. If you like this newsletter, tell a friend. Heck tell all your friends!

And, if you have any comments/questions/suggestions on how to make it better, feel free to let me know :)

Have a great rest of your week

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