It’s New Year's Eve; as always — it’s time to remember what happened and think about what might happen in the future.
Review of 2023
2023 was another year in which the Russo-Ukrainian war dominated other discussions. I also remember seeing the occasional weird news about Donald Trump facing criminal charges and still having a big chance of winning the next US election.
We discuss the federal budget in Germany: Germany's debt brake is written into the constitution and prevents investing in the future. A dominating majority is still behind it, but occasional voices in the news want to reform it — some even want to get rid of it completely. While the US is heavily investing, politicians in Germany (CDU/CSU and FDP) are discussing how to cut social expenditures.
Net Climate Neutrality: Breakthroughs in Energy Production and Electrification
Renewable energy combined with electrification enables countries like Germany to become independent of other countries like Russia.
It seems to me that wind turbines will not change much. It’s now mainly about making them easy to install and reducing production costs.
Photovoltaics, on the other hand, still have a lot of research and development leading to interesting new results. Combining different “layers” leads to higher efficiencies. New materials lead to lower weight. Integration into normal windows, reducing the weight and thus making them easier to install seem to be the big changes.
Water and biomass are stagnant: In Germany, we have no meaningful remaining possibilities to install more water turbines or build more dams. Also, biomass will not bring big changes in the overall picture as it cannot scale sustainably.
-
Offshore Wind: The Vestas V236 wind turbine produced 363 MWh in a single day (source). That is 74081× what my 2-person household uses! So in that day, this single wind turbine could power a medium-sized city. Remarkable. A similar number was achieved in Germany (source). China can install such an offshore turbine in less than 24 hours (source).
-
Onshore Wind: Plans for building a 380-meter-high onshore wind turbine are discussed in Germany (source). The hub height would be 300 meters, the rotors would have a length of 80 meters. The higher, the more energy can be generated and the more reliable the wind becomes. Just for comparison: The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters high.
-
Photovoltaics: Organic solar cells achieved an efficiency of 15.8% (source), 26.7% is the mono-crystalline lab record, high concentration multi-junction solar cells achieve an efficiency of up to 47.1% today in the lab (source). Perovskite-silicon “tandem” cells reach 28.9% (source).
Battery technology is a key ingredient for the green energy transition:
-
Installed Capacity: A new 275 MWh large-scale battery storage facility will be built in Alfeld (Germany) by Kyon Energy (source). That is enough to power 56122 households with my daily energy consumption. The world record was set in 2020 in Moss Landing (USA) with 1600 MWh. See List of energy storage power plants for more. It’s estimated that 897000 battery storage units are installed in Germany in 2023 (source). Only 15% of the battery storage capacity of Germany is in central facilities (source).
-
Technological breakthroughs: Toyota claims it can build a solid-state battery by 2027 with a range of 1200km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less (source, source).
-
Current state: Smartphones currently have 5000mAh (at 3.6V, so 18Wh). The Škoda Enyaq and Tesla Model 3 have a battery capacity of 55–82 kWh. House battery storage seems to go from 2.5 kWh to 180 kWh (source). Lithium-ion is by far the most popular type of battery, but please be reminded that this is a huge group of battery chemistries as the anode/cathode materials can be changed.
Electrification is a crucial step in the energy transition:
-
Mobility: Electric vehicles are becoming more popular, but still only 2.2% of all vehicles in Germany are battery-electric (source). About 2300 buses are electric in 2023 (source), but Germany has about 75.5k buses (source). Hence only 3% are electric so far. The German government wants to increase that to 50% by 2023.
-
Heating: In 2021, 2.6% of households were heating directly with electricity (infrared heaters or convection heaters) and 2.8% indirectly with heat pumps; 14.1% are heating with district heating (source). Hence we have 19.5% heating with electricity or at least something that can be upgraded easily to climate change alternatives. Germany needs to get from those 19.5% to about 95% until 2045 (German Law: Klimaschutzgesetz).
-
Climate offsets: Some processes cannot be electrified, e.g. traveling by plane or producing cement. Avoiding those is one option and removing CO2 from the air is another one to compensate. Carbon capture and storage and planting trees are two options. Both are extremely expensive. Removing 1000kg CO2 from the air costs about 600€ (source). A single flight from Germany to New York City and back is about 3650kg CO2 per passenger (source). If you simply wanted to offset the CO2 emissions, you would need to pay an additional 2190€ per passenger for that flight. Hence it would not cost 400€ per person but 2600€ per person.
Hydrogen, by the way, is mostly a red herring in this topic. It’s a distraction. The clean hydrogen ladder shows pretty well where we have to use it. The same goes for synthetic fuels (e-fuels).
Statistics
Walking and Cycling
I have doubts about the following statistics. Since I always buy groceries by bike, I don't believe I was cycling only 8km in May 2023. One trip to the supermarket is 4.5km already. I typically go once per week to the supermarket.
| Month | Walking 2022 (km) | Cycling 2022 (km) | Walking 2023 (km) | Cycling 2023 (km) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 21 | 51 | 36 | 58 |
| February | 41 | 55 | 27 | 42 |
| March | 42 | 115 | 27 | 56 |
| April | 72 | 91 | 13 | 35 |
| May | 37 | 40 | 17 | 8 |
| June | 14 | 74 | 25 | 65 |
| July | 6 | 76 | 18 | 58 |
| August | 24 | 46 | 40 | 57 |
| September | 25 | 68 | 35 | 28 |
| October | 33 | 57 | 45 | 42 |
| November | 20 | 46 | 14 | 34 |
| December | 25 | 47 | 17 | 42 |
Blog
| Month | Views 2022 | Reads 2022 | Views 2023 | Reads 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 17.8k | 8.7k | 9.1k | 3.2k |
| February | 22k | 8.5k | 12.2k | 4.6k |
| March | 25k | 8.7k | 7.8k | 2.7k |
| April | 17.8k | 7.5k | 8.7k | 3.5k |
| May | 15.1k | 7k | 6.4k | 1.9k |
| June | 14.2k | 6.5k | 5.0k | 1.5k |
| July | 13.8k | 5.5k | 4.9k | 1.6k |
| August | 13.8k | 4.8k | 4.0k | 1.3k |
| September | 11.8k | 4.2k | 3.6k | 1.2k |
| October | 11.3k | 3.9k | 3.0k | 1.0k |
| November | 10.2k | 3.7k | 2.5k | 867 |
| December | 8.5k | 3.0k | 3.5k | 847 |
Old Year Predictions
The Bigger Picture: Politics, Nature and the World
- ❌ Bavarian state elections: I was about right with the conservatives and the Green Party, but the social democratic party (SPD) was way weaker and the right-wing AfD was much stronger.
- ✅ Greece and Turkey: No update on their conflict.
- ✅ Price increases and shortages continued. COVID is not a big topic anymore, but China now has other infection issues (as people were not exposed due to the strict measures).
Technology
- ✅ Medicine: mRNA-based vaccination did give another great piece of news — vaccination against cancer! (source)
- ✅ AI can use tools: You can now upload documents to ChatGPT, and connect ChatGPT to WolframAlpha and many other services.
- 🤷♂️ Battery and Solar: I was expecting gradual improvements, but I’m uncertain how to verify that.
About Me
- ✅ Blogging: I've published 30 articles. The 3 that took the most time to write were The Python PDF Ecosystem in 2023, What's Hot and what not in Python, August 2023, GPT-4: Playing with Word Arithmetic.
- ❌ Side hustle: I didn’t create a side hustle. I did write a service that was live for a month, but I didn’t see a chance of it becoming profitable.
- ✅ Home: I bought a house 🎉
New Year Predictions
The Bigger Picture: Politics, Nature and the World
- The right-wing party AfD gets stronger in Germany: There is the EU election and 13 regional elections in Germany in 2024. I expect AfD, a right-wing party, to become way stronger in those overall.
- Ukraine: Still no peace. Putin just said that Russia will never move back (source). I think that the support of the west will continue to be strong enough that the area is in war, but not strong enough to push Russia away.
- Renewables and electrification: A massive boost in installed renewable energy and a steady increase in electrification in transport and heating.
Technology
LLMs will become better: I don’t think that ChatGPT / GPT4 is the end of it. I expect Amazon / Microsoft / Google to release new software that makes use of similar stuff. We do have Google Bard already which feels worse than ChatGPT. Bing Image Creator is pretty awesome, but the ChatGPT-like addendum to Bing feels … ok. Not as exciting as ChatGPT. Amazon Q is in preview, but I haven’t tried it so far and I haven’t seen any reviews.
- We will see a first game with free-form chat interactions with NPCs.
- Solid-State Batteries will still not be a mass-produced thing.
- Nuclear Fusion: It is unclear if nuclear fusion will be economically viable.
About Me
- Side Hustle: I’ll finally start one. If I don’t have any better ideas, I’ll just continue with the PDF text extraction part.
- Blogging: I've published 30 articles. I hope I can finish my security series 😃
- Fitness: I will walk and cycle more in each month of 2024 than in the same months of 2023.