The cheese-loving stop-motion comedy duo Wallace and Gromit have been stumbling into invention-fueled hijinks since 1989’s Oscar-nominated short A Grand Day Out. This January, the characters return in A Vengeance Most Fowl, a feature-length adventure that’s basically a full-blown action movie. At this point, there’s seemingly nothing original creator Nick Park and Aardman Animation can’t do in claymation.

So when I asked Park in early December if he would ever ditch the stop-motion for a “live-action” Wallace movie, in the style of Disney’s recent spate of hand-drawn-to-photoreal conversions, the answer was… immediate and visceral. 

“Well, it’s quite an easy answer,” he says. “NOOOOOOOO.”

The live-action redo pipeline is not slowing down, despite mixed reactions and receipts. Disney started the trend nearly a decade ago with back to back hits of The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. 2023’s The Little Mermaid struggled to reach those highs, grossing as much worldwide as The Lion King did in the states alone, and this month’s Mufasa (technically a live-action-ish reimagining prequel) is off to a slow start this holiday season. But that isn’t stopping Disney from plowing through the backlog, with Snow White, Lilo & Stitch, and Moana all arriving in the next two years. Universal will try its luck in 2025 with a live-action How to Train Your Dragon, too. 

As for Wallace and Gromit, Park hopes to stick to animation. 

“I think the movies themselves will always be clay,” he said. But Park has the ambition, along with his Vengeance Most Fowl co-director Merlin Crossingham, to bring the characters to any imaginable platform. Wallace and Gromit have done video games, they’ve done AR, and the director hopes they can do just about anything. “But I think [clay] is part of the character, it’s part of their soul to be that medium. It’s what they were born out of and it might take something away. It’s quite hard to define. ‘Thumby and funny’ is the phrase we’ve often used.”

Neither Park nor Crossingham want to see Wallace and Gromit stuck in the past. Each film is a reason to evolve the characters — technologically (as with the armatures of the modern sculptures) and emotionally. While Vengeance Most Fowl might be the most stunt-heavy Wallace and Gromit film to date, it also forces the characters to examine their friendship and, by the end, hug it out. 

 “We’ve sort of pushed them emotionally,” Crossingham said. “It’s in relative terms within the Wallace and Gromit world, but we’ve pushed them and I think it’s great to see them having a bit of a bigger arc to their emotional story.”

“But it’s very much Wallace and Gromit,” Park added. “It is not too overt, but… a British version.”

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl premieres on Netflix on Jan. 3, 2025.

I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism.

The book is partly a postmortem on #Girlboss and I had thought that the tour would become an occasion to discuss how feminism has to be, not just about shattering glass ceilings, but about changing the distance between the ceiling and the floor. Of course, the events of November 5 ensured that that is not how it went.

Instead, I have spent the last month and a half speaking with hundreds of feminists about their grief and rage—and wrestled with practical questions of how we move forward.

The last question of my launch at Brooklyn bookstore on the night after the election has stayed with me: why can’t we just give up on white women?

This question was certainly an expression of the justified anger that many women of color, and Black women in particular have been feeling—at the fact that the majority of white women once again voted for Trump. (This is not what the book is about, but it was a major thing folks wanted me to talk about in November.) But 5 bookstore events and 6 podcasts later, I have also learned to see that question as something else: the question of what kind of a future there is for feminism, understood as a movement of women across race and class lines.

To be clear, I see that question as distinct from the question of whether feminism as a set of values—as bell hooks put it commitment to ending sexist oppression—has a future. Speaking with audiences has convinced me that commitment to that value is thriving and spreading. The conversations with Gen Z women and gender expansive people I have had in the last several weeks have also made clear to me that we need that idea more than ever. After all, they are on the receiving end of a rising tide of reactionary masculinity that will no doubt shape the political years to come.

But what is less clear is that the way to achieve those values looks like the movement many of us associate with feminism. One thing I have realized in retrospect that some of the examples in the positive section of my book are actually of women and gender expansive people applying a gender lens within movements focused on racial or economic issues. In a recent piece in Teen Vogue, Olufemi Taiwo even reads Faux Feminism as a book about how to achieve feminist aims through movements that may not be legible as feminist, such as domestic worker movements.

On the other hand, some of the movements I take as examples for the feminist future in the book are movements that began as movements focused on the traditional “feminist” issues that cut across other social fault lines, such as sexual violence. One of these is Ni Una Menos in Argentina. One of the most interesting things about that particular movement is that it has created a sustained alliance with labor, partly through making claims about women as a group—most notably, the slogan “all women are workers” discussed by Luci Cavallero and Veronica Gago.

I don’t have the answers about the future of feminism as a movement—and I don’t think anyone can, because so much depends on how we organize in the coming years—but it is certainly a question of this moment.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday, whatever depraved madness you celebrate! Today, December 26, has a lot of specific holidays associated with it, from St.Stephen’s day (who seems to be the first martyr of Christianity because he got stoned, not in the fun way), to Kwanzaa to the one I want to mention specifically here because I can easily tie it into something car-related, Boxing Day.

Boxing Day has always confused me a bit, since it’s not really celebrated here, being more of a Commonwealth Country sort of deal, and here in America we pretty famously opted out of that club. The etymology of the name isn’t really clear, but most theories seem to think it comes from the presents or tips or bonuses given to employees or servants or other sorts of workers by wealthier people in a “Christmas Box.”

That’s great and all, but what I care about more is the “boxing” part because that word also refers to the sport where boxers pummel one another, and that action, in turn, became a nickname for horizontally-opposed engines, where the side-to-side motion of the cylinders is reminiscent of a boxer’s fists.

Now why the word “box” refers to a rectangular container and a sport of face-punching is especially unclear, and every entomologist I called didn’t have any answers for me, perhaps because, as they screamed into their phones, they study bugs. The etymologists I called afterwards weren’t much more help, just telling me the word “box” referring to punching was of “uncertain origin” and showed up around the 1300s. Thanks a lot, brainiacs!

Anyway, let’s get to the cars. When it comes to boxer-engined cars, there’s the big ones we always think of: Porsche, (air-cooled – and, okay, the Wasserboxer) Volkswagen, Subaru, Lloyd – you know, the big names. But let’s talk about a couple of lesser-known boxer-powered cars.

Like Buick!

Yes, Buick! One of the companies I think I associate the least with horizontally-opposed engines, Buick’s first car as an independent automaker was the 1904 Model B, which featured a 2.6-liter flat-twin making 21 hp! That engine was also the first production engine to have overhead valves, so that’s a big deal, too.

They sold the engine separately, too, so if you wanted Buick Boxer power for your, say, sausage grinder, you could achieve that dream!

By 1910 Buick had moved to four-cylinder inline engines, but had it not been for that original opposed-twin, Buick would never have gotten its start at all.

I think when it comes to relatively unsung horizontally-opposed standard-bearers, though, you can’t be Jowett. Jowett was a Yorkshire-based company that lasted from 1906 to 1955, a company that started with cycles and engines, but moved into light car production and became best known for their small, sleek, sporty cars that used boxer engines, twins at first, and then, from 1936, flat-fours.

Jowett also had some fantastic car names, including the Javelin, Jupiter, Blackbird, Kestrel, Weasel, and even the Jason. Yes, a car that shares my name!

Or maybe I share its name. One of those.

I think I’ve seen Jowetts in the metal perhaps twice in my life, both times in the UK. I suspect there must be a few here in America, collected by very discerning collectors, but I don’t think I’ve seen any here.

Which is a shame! I feel like these should be better-known. Sports cars like the Jupiter up there have a sort of shrunken-Jag feeling about them, but with an engine that, I think you could argue, is even more interesting than the larger, more powerful guts of their more famous countrymen.

Their more everyday cars, like the Javelin, feel like they could have been huge-selling people’s cars in some alternate reality, and 50 hp from that 1.5-liter flat-four back in 1947 is definitely no joke.

I hope these less-known boxers make your boxing day even punchier, or whatever adjective gets used for that!

 

The post It’s Boxing Day So Let’s Think About Some Lesser-Known Boxers: Cold Start appeared first on The Autopian.

When I first arrived in California, I bought my dream Jeep Wrangler, a 1991 YJ. Smitten by the vehicle’s lack of rust, I paid a hefty $7,800 for the 188,000 mile machine despite its ratty looking interior, rough looking hard-top, broken heater and AC, and various other issues. Concerned I may have overpaid, I asked readers: “Did I Overpay For My Completely Rust-Free Jeep Wrangler YJ?” Fast forward over a year and, after having the vehicle professionally detailed for my wedding day last week, I’m convinced: No I did not. This Jeep YJ was an absolute bargain. Just look at how this machine transformed from Larry The Cable Guy into Pierce Brosnan.

When I bought my Jeep, I had no intention of making it my wedding car. In fact, just a couple of years ago, if you’d ask me whether I was going to get married, I’d have told you it was hopeless. Seriously, I’d gone almost a decade without a girlfriend; when your parents stop asking you about whether there are any girls in your life, you know things are bad.

But about a week ago was my wedding day, and I really, really wanted to have a special vehicle waiting for my bride and me at the base of the steps. And I didn’t want to borrow anything. Looking at my fleet of machines, there was only one vehicle even close enough to “decent” to even act as a possible wedding machine: My YJ. The issue was that it smelled like gas when coasting in gear, its interior was ripped and gross, and overall it just looked a little rough.

Here’s what the Jeep started out as about two years ago.

This Thing Was Rough Just A Couple Years Back

The Jeep had been dragged around the country by an RV (you can see the towing attachment points on the bumper), the unbearable California sun had chewed through pretty much all the paint on the hood, and the top was rough. Luckily, by the time I bought the Jeep, the previous owner had re-sprayed the hood in his garage. It actually looked decent:

The tires were rough and the tan roof was a bit faded, but overall the Jeep looked ok from the outside; it was a 15-footer:

The inside was rough. The steering wheel was missing its logo, the shift balls were hideous cue-balls, the driver’s seat was torn to bits, and the whole cabin was just filthy.

Ditching The Full Doors, Adding A Bench, Getting XPEL PPF

To recoup some of those $7.800, I decided to sell my hard-top and full-doors. The truth is, driving a hard-top Jeep Wrangler is completely pointless; if you’re going to deal with the practicality and noise sacrifices associated with a Jeep Wrangler, it’s gotta be convertible — otherwise you’re better off just buying a Jeep XJ or ZJ (and I have both already).

So I sold the hard top for $950 and the doors for $1,200. This brought my overall purchase price to $5,650. I picked up some new tires for about $400 and a bench off eBay for $140 shipped:

I did have to pay $250 to have my half-doors repainted (by the seller in his garage — again, this dude has skill!):

But the real game-changing moment was when I had my YJ paint-corrected and then XPEL PPF’d. Look at how nice the exterior looked!:

Here’s the thing, though: Even though the exterior looked shiny now, the vehicle still was far from wedding-vehicle ready. The interior was horrible, and I still had that gasoline smell problem.

2 Weeks Until The Wedding, And All I’d Done Was Reupholster A Seat

And I tried everything to fix the latter issue; I dropped the fuel tank, replaced the pump and vents and hoses and filter — and yet, the dang smell remained.

I waited until just a few weeks before my wedding to really get started on prepping the Jeep for wedding duty. I’d already replaced those horrid cue ball shifters, so the next step was to pay $225 to have the driver’s seat reupholstered. Of course, that cost didn’t factor in the $160 passenger’s seat I bought off eBay (I needed its fabric). So yeah, that was nearly $400 for a seat! I also grabbed a little Jeep logo from a junkyard steering wheel, and I think those two were a big improvement:

It definitely looks better than it did before, but nothing prepared me for what a $300 professional detailing job would do to this old machine.

The Last-Second $300 Professional Detail Was Worth Every Penny

This was a mobile detailing service, and they showed up two days before my wedding in a Nissan NV200 with a big cube of water strapped into the cargo area:

They cleaned the exterior, making it looked quite fresh:

But it’s the interior detail that blew my mind. How about some before-and-afters? Here’s before (and you can look at the dark interior photos I showed above):

And here’s after:

Ho-lee-crap! That looks like an almost showroom-condition interior! It’s mint! I mean, just compare that photo above to this!:

What a transformation!

Fixing The Fuel Problem

It was two days before my wedding, and though I had a minty-fresh Jeep at this point, things still smelled too much like gas. Since I’d already replaced the fuel pump/vents/hoses, and the hard-line from those hoses to the front of the Jeep were in good shape, I basically set out to replace everything ahead of those hard lines. This meant: The flex-hoses that go to the fuel rail, and the injectors from the fuel rail into the intake.

The fuel flex-hoses may not have been leaking, but they appeared to be in horrible shape:

As I couldn’t get a local shop to make me the hoses, and I didn’t want to just use hose-clamps on fittings, I dropped $180 on nylon fuel lines made by my favorite Michigan brake line/fuel line shop, Inline-Tube:

I also dropped another $180 on new fuel injectors:

And I parted ways with $16 for a new O2 Sensor.

And I let go of $12 for a fuel pressure regulator:

I’m kind of regretting writing this article, because I know I’m going to have to add all these numbers up, and then I’ll be shocked with how much I spent on this Jeep. But alas, it’s for my wedding!

This was the first time I’d ever replaced fuel injectors on a Jeep 4.0, and it was remarkably easy. Pop off the fuel rail, yank the injectors out of the intake (this part was a bit of a bear), but otherwise just remove a few retaining clips and start yanking injectors. Then replace with new ones.

Yanking out the old O2 sensor and slapping a new one into the exhaust downpipe was also quite trivial:

The amount of black carbon buildup on both that O2 sensor and the injectors, along with a rich condition OBD1 trouble-code, has me convinced that there was something going wrong with the combustion process.

In any case, before I knew it, I had new fuel lines, a new O2 sensor, and new fuel injectors, and the Jeep was running better than ever! The fuel smell-while-coasting issue took a little while to disappear entirely, but it did! Had I thrown the kitchen sink at the problem? Sure. Was this my most sophisticated diagnose/repair job? Definitely not. But it’s my wedding, and time was of the essence!

The Night Before The Wedding

The night before the wedding, my family and Elise (not her real name)’s family had a great welcome dinner at a local Mexican place. Then my brother Mike and I set out to decorate the Jeep. I was quite tired, and wanted to get some rest before the big day, but Mike insisted we stop by a Target. There was nothing there, so he suggested we go to a Michael’s. There, we found a nice string of white fake flowers, which, along with some real flowers we’d procured from Trader Joe’s, would act as the decoration for the now-shiny and mostly smell-free YJ.

I say “mostly,” because even though the gas-smell-while-driving was gone, I did smell something while working around the rear of the Jeep. I peeked underneath and saw little splashes of moisture on the chassis. Turns out, there were a few pinholes in my fuel filler vent hose:

I luckily had a spare fuel filler hose sitting around, so I swapped that out. While I did that, my best man started decorating the Jeep.

He also scrounged up some white paint (house paint) to fix up some rusty parts of the tailgate hinge, and he re-painted a bracket.

Here you can see how it was before:

And here it is after:

The next morning, the morning of the wedding, Mike and his wife arrived at the church early and installed the real flowers onto the vehicle, tying a big bouquet onto the hood and shoving a white flower into each of the spare tire’s spokes:

I really wish I could share the smile on Elise (not her real name)’s face as our friends cheered us on as we drove off in that immaculate Jeep YJ. It was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.

That drive we took from the church to our wedding venue along the coast was unforgettable. The entire way, people cheered from the street, cars honked, and the sun shined almost as brightly as my new bride’s — Mrs. Tracy’s — smile.

 

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After spending over a grand prepping the Jeep for the wedding, I was probably back up to about the $7,800 I’d initially paid for the machine, but now the Jeep actually looked and drove like every penny of those 7,800 bucks. It was absolutely magnificent.

The post How A Junky 200,000 Mile Jeep Wrangler YJ Became My Perfect Wedding Car appeared first on The Autopian.

When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid.

But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable energy generation fell to less than 30 percent of the nation’s total, and gas-, oil- and coal-powered plants revved up to pick up the slack.

Germans call these periods Dunkelflauten, meaning “dark doldrums,” and they can last for a week or longer. They’re a major concern for doldrum-afflicted places like Germany and parts of the United States as nations increasingly push renewable-energy development. Solar and wind combined contribute 40 percent of overall energy generation in Germany and 15 percent in the US and, as of December 2024, both countries have goals of becoming 100 percent clean-energy-powered by 2035.

The challenge: how to avoid blackouts without turning to dependable but planet-warming fossil fuels.

Solving the variability problem of solar and wind energy requires reimagining how to power our world, moving from a grid where fossil fuel plants are turned on and off in step with energy needs to one that converts fluctuating energy sources into a continuous power supply. The solution lies, of course, in storing energy when it’s abundant so it’s available for use during lean times.

But the increasingly popular electricity-storage devices today—lithium-ion batteries—are only cost-effective in bridging daily fluctuations in sun and wind, not multiday doldrums. And a decades-old method that stores electricity by pumping water uphill and recouping the energy when it flows back down through a turbine generator typically works only in mountainous terrain. The more solar and wind plants the world installs to wean grids off fossil fuels, the more urgently it needs mature, cost-effective technologies that can cover many locations and store energy for at least eight hours and up to weeks at a time.

Engineers around the world are busy developing those technologies—from newer kinds of batteries to systems that harness air pressure, spinning wheels, heat or chemicals like hydrogen. It’s unclear what will end up sticking.

“The creative part … is happening now,” says Eric Hittinger, an expert on energy policy and markets at Rochester Institute of Technology who coauthored a 2020 deep dive in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources on the benefits and costs of energy storage systems. “A lot of it is going to get winnowed down as front-runners start to show themselves.”

Finding viable storage solutions will help to shape the overall course of the energy transition in the many countries striving to cut carbon emissions in the coming decades, as well as determine the costs of going renewable—a much-debated issue among experts. Some predictions imply that weaning the grid off fossil fuels will invariably save money, thanks to declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines, but those projections don’t include energy storage costs.

Other experts stress the need to do more than build out new storage, like tweaking humanity’s electricity demand. In general, “we have to be very thoughtful about how we design the grid of the future,” says materials scientist and engineer Shirley Meng of the University of Chicago.

Reinventing the battery

The fastest-growing electricity storage devices today—for grids as well as electric vehicles, phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries. Recent years have seen massive installations of these around the globe to help balance electricity supply and demand and, more recently, to offset daily fluctuations in solar and wind. One of the world’s largest battery grid storage facilities, in California’s Monterey County, reached its full capacity in 2023 at a site with a natural-gas-powered plant. It can now store 3,000 megawatt-hours and is capable of providing 750 megawatts—enough to power more than 600,000 homes every hour for up to four hours.

Lithium-ion batteries convert electrical energy into chemical energy by using electricity to fuel chemical reactions at two lithium-containing electrode surfaces, storing and releasing energy. Lithium became the material of choice because it stores a lot of energy relative to its weight. But the batteries have shortcomings, including their fire risk, their need for air-conditioning in hot climates, and a finite global supply of lithium.

Importantly, lithium-ion batteries aren’t suitable for long-duration storage, explains Meng. Despite monumental price declines in recent years, they remain costly due to their design and the price of mining and extracting lithium and other metals. The battery cost is above $100 per kilowatt-hour—meaning that a battery container supplying one megawatt (enough for about 800 homes) every hour for five hours would cost at least $500,000. Providing electricity for longer would quickly become economically unfeasible, Meng says. “I think four to eight hours is really a sweet spot for balancing cost and performance,” she says.

For longer durations, “we want energy storage that costs one tenth of what it does today—or maybe, if we could, one hundredth,” Hittinger says. “If you can’t make it extremely cheap, then you don’t have a product.”

One way of cutting costs is to switch to cheaper ingredients. Several companies in the US, Europe and Asia are working to commercialize sodium-ion batteries that replace lithium with sodium, which is more abundant and cheaper to extract and purify. Different battery architectures are also being developed—such as “redox flow” batteries, in which chemical reactions take place not at electrode surfaces but in two fluid-filled tanks that act as electrodes. With this kind of design, capacity can be enlarged by increasing tank size and electrolyte amount, which is much cheaper than increasing the expensive electrode material of lithium-ion batteries. Redox-flow batteries could supply electricity over days or weeks, Meng says.

US-based company Form Energy, meanwhile, just opened a factory in West Virginia to make “iron-air” batteries. These harness the energy released when iron reacts with air and water to form iron hydroxide—rust, in other words. “Recharging the battery is taking rust and unrusting it,” says William Woodford, Form’s chief technical officer.

Because iron and air are cheap, the batteries are inexpensive. The downside with both iron-air and redox-flow batteries is that they give back up to 60 percent less energy than is put into them, partly because they gradually discharge with no current applied. Meng thinks both battery types have yet to resolve these issues and prove their reliability and cost-effectiveness. But the efficiency loss of iron-air batteries could be dealt with by making them larger. And since long-duration batteries supply energy at times when solar and wind power is scarce and more costly, “there’s more tolerance for a little bit of loss,” Woodford says.

Credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

Spinning wheels and squished air

Other engineers are exploring mechanical storage methods. One device is the flywheel, which employs the same principle that causes a bike wheel to keep spinning once set into motion. Flywheel technology uses electricity to spin large steel discs, and magnetic bearing systems to reduce the friction that causes slowdowns, explains electrical engineering expert Seth Sanders of the University of California, Berkeley. “The energy can be stored for actually a very substantial amount of time,” he says.

Sanders’ company, Amber Kinetics, produces flywheels that can spin for weeks but are most cost-effective when used at least daily. When power is needed, a motor generator turns the movement energy back into electricity. As the wheels can switch quickly from charging to discharging, they’re ideal for covering rapid swings in energy availability, like at sunset or during cloudy periods.

Each flywheel can store 32 kilowatt-hours of energy, close to the daily electricity demand of an average American household. That’s small for grid applications, but the flywheels are already deployed in many communities, often to balance fluctuations in renewable energy. A municipal utility in Massachusetts, for instance, has installed 16 flywheels next to a solar plant; they supply energy for more than four hours, absorbing electricity during low-demand times and discharging during peak demand, Sanders says.

A different kind of mechanical facility stores electricity by using it to compress air, then stashes the air in caverns. “When the grid needs it, you release that air into an air turbine and it generates electricity again,” explains Jon Norman, president of the Canada-based company Hydrostor, which specializes in compressed-air storage. “It’s just a giant air battery underground.”

Such systems usually require natural caverns, but Hydrostor carves out cavities in hard rock. Compared to batteries or flywheels, these are large infrastructure projects with lengthy permitting and construction processes. But once those hurdles are passed, their capacity can be slowly scaled up by carving the caverns more deeply, at pretty low additional cost, Norman says.

In 2019, Hydrostor launched the first commercial compressed-air storage facility, in Goderich, Ontario, storing around 10 megawatt hours—enough to power some 2,100 homes for more than 5 hours. The company plans several much larger facilities in California and is building a 200-megawatt facility in the Australian town Broken Hill that can supply energy for up to eight hours to bridge shortfalls in solar and wind energy.

Credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

Storing energy as heat and gas

Around the world, there are efforts afoot to make use of excess renewable electricity by using it to heat up water or other heat-storing materials. This can then provide climate-friendly warmth for buildings or industrial processes, says Katja Esche of the German Energy Storage Association.

Heat can also be used to store energy, though that technology is still being developed. Energy storage and systems expert Zhiwei Ma of Durham University in the United Kingdom recently tested a pumped thermal energy storage system. Here, the main energy-storing process occurs when electricity is used to compress a gas, like argon, to a high pressure, heating it up; electricity is generated when the gas is allowed to expand through a turbine generator. Some experts are skeptical of such thermal storage systems, as they supply up to 60 percent less electricity than they store—but Ma is optimistic that with more research, such systems could help with daily storage needs.

For even longer-duration storage—over weeks—many experts put their bets on hydrogen gas. Hydrogen exists naturally in the atmosphere but can also be produced using electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored in pressurized tanks and when it reacts with oxygen in a fuel cell or turbine, this generates electricity.

Hydrogen and its derivatives are already being explored as fuel for ships, planes and industrial processes. For long-duration storage, “it looks plausible that that would be the technology of choice,” says energy expert Wolf-Peter Schill of the German Institute for Economic Research who coauthored a 2021 review on the economics of energy storage in the Annual Review of Resource Economics.

The German energy company Enertrag is building a facility that uses hydrogen in both ways. Surplus energy from the company’s 700-megawatt solar and wind plant near Berlin is used to make hydrogen gas, which is sold to various industries. In the future, about 10 percent of that hydrogen will be stashed away “as an emergency backup measure” for use during weeks without sun or wind, says mechanical engineer Tobias Bischof-Niemz, who is on Enertrag’s board.

The idea of using hydrogen for electricity storage has many critics. Similar to heat, up to two-thirds of the energy is lost during reconversion into electricity. And storing massive quantities of hydrogen over weeks isn’t cheap, although Enertrag is planning on reducing costs by storing it in natural caverns instead of the customary pressurized steel cylinders.

But Bischof-Niemz argues that these expenses don’t matter much if hydrogen is produced from cheap energy that would otherwise be wasted. And, he adds, hydrogen storage would be used only for Dunkelflauten periods. “Because you only have two or three weeks in the year that are that expensive, it works economically,” he says.

Credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

A question of cost

There are many other efforts to develop longer-duration storage methods. Cost is key for all, regardless of how much is paid for by governments or utility companies (the latter typically push such costs onto consumers). All new systems will need to prove that they’re significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, says energy expert Dirk Uwe Sauer of Germany’s RWTH Aachen University. He says he has seen many technologies stall at the demonstration stage because there’s no business case for them.

Developers, for their part, argue that some systems are approaching that of lithium-ion batteries when used to store energy for eight hours or more, and that costs will come down substantially for others when they are manufactured in large volumes. Maybe many technologies could, ultimately, compete with lithium-ion batteries, but getting there, Sauer says, “is extremely difficult.”

The challenge for developers is that the market for long-duration technologies is only beginning to take shape. Many nations, such as the US, are early in their energy transition journey and still lean heavily on fossil fuels. Most regions still have fossil-fuel-powered plants to cover multiday doldrums.

Indeed, Hittinger estimates that the real economic need for long-duration storage will only emerge once solar and wind account for 80 percent of total power generation. Right now, it can often be cheaper for utilities to build gas plants—fossil fuels, still—to ensure grid reliability.

One important way to make storage technologies more economical is a carbon tax on fossil fuels, says energy systems researcher Anne Liu of Aurora Energy Research. In European countries like Switzerland, utilities are charged up to about $130 per metric ton of carbon emitted. California grid operators, meanwhile, have spurred storage development by requiring utility companies to ensure adequate energy coverage, and helping to cover the cost.

Market incentives can also help. In the Texas energy market, where electricity prices fluctuate a lot, electricity customers are saving hundreds of millions of dollars from the build-out of lithium-ion batteries, despite their costs, as they can store energy when it’s cheap and sell it for a profit when it’s scarce. “Once those power markets have incentive, then the longer-duration batteries will be more viable,” Liu says.

But even when incentives are there, the question remains of who will foot the bill for energy storage, which isn’t considered in many cost projections for transitioning the grid off fossil fuels. “I don’t think there’s been enough time spent studying how much these decarbonization pathways are going to cost,” says Gabe Murtaugh, director of markets and technology at the nonprofit Long Duration Energy Storage Council.

Without interventions, Murtaugh estimates, California customers, for instance, could eventually see a threefold increase in utility bills. “Thinking about how states and federal governments might help pay for some of this,” Murtaugh says, “is going to be really important.”

Saving costs and resources

Cost considerations are prompting experts to also think of ways to reduce the need for storage. One way to strengthen the grid is building more consistently available forms of renewable energy, such as geothermal technologies that draw energy from the Earth’s heat. Another is to connect the grid over larger regions—such as across the US or Europe—to balance local fluctuations in solar and wind. Ensuring that storage technologies are as long-lived as possible can help to save costs and resources.

So can being smarter about when we draw electricity from the grid, says Seth Mullendore, president of the Vermont-based nonprofit Clean Energy Group. What if, rather than charging electric cars when getting home from work, we charged them at midday when the Sun is blazing? What if we adjusted building heating and cooling so the bulk would happen during windy periods?

Mullendore’s nonprofit recently helped to design a program in Massachusetts where electricity customers could sign up to get paid if they responded to signals from their utilities to use less energy—for instance, by turning their air-conditioning down or delaying electric car charging. In a smart grid of the future, such tweaks could be more widespread and fully automatic, while allowing consumers to override them if needed. Governments could encourage programs by rewarding utility companies for designing grids more efficiently, Mullendore says. “It’s much less expensive to have people not use energy than it is to build more infrastructure to deliver more energy.”

It will take careful thought and a worldwide push by engineers, companies and policymakers to adapt the global grid to a solar- and wind-powered future. Tomorrow’s grids may be studded with lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries for short-term energy needs and newer varieties for longer-term storage. There may be many more flywheels, while underground caverns may be stuffed with compressed air or hydrogen to survive the dreaded Dunkelflauten. Grids may have smart, built-in ways of adjusting demand and making the very most of excess energy, rather than wasting it.

“The grid,” Meng says, “is probably the most complicated machine ever being built.”

Knowable Magazine, 2024 DOI: 10.1146/knowable-121824-2 (About DOIs.)

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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At this point, any serious retro gamer knows that a bulky cathode ray tube (CRT) TV provides the most authentic, lag-free experience for game consoles that predate the era of flat-panel HDTVs (i.e,. before the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era). But modern gamers used to massive flat panel HD displays might balk at the display size of the most common CRTs, which tend to average in the 20- to 30-inch range (depending on the era they were made).

For those who want the absolute largest CRT experience possible, Sony's KX-45ED1 model (aka PVM-4300) has become the stuff of legends. The massive 45-inch CRT was sold in the late '80s for a whopping $40,000 (over $100,000 in today's dollars), according to contemporary reports.

That price means it wasn't exactly a mass-market product, and the limited supply has made it something of a white whale for CRT enthusiasts to this day. While a few pictures have emerged of the PVM-4300 in the wild and in marketing materials, no collector has stepped forward with detailed footage of a working unit.

The PVM-4300, seen dwarfing the tables and chairs at an Osaka noodle restaurant. Credit: Shank Mods

Enter Shank Mods, a retro gaming enthusiast and renowned maker of portable versions of non-portable consoles. In a fascinating 35-minute video posted this weekend, he details his years-long effort to find and secure a PVM-4300 from a soon-to-be-demolished restaurant in Japan and preserve it for years to come.

A confirmed white whale sighting

Shank Mods' quest started in earnest in October 2022, when the moderator of the Console Modding wiki, Derf, reached out with a tip on a PVM-4300 sighting in the wild. A 7-year-old Japanese blog post included a photo of the massive TV that could be sourced to a waiting room of the Chikuma Soba noodle restaurant and factory in Osaka, Japan.

The find came just in time, as Chikuma Soba's website said the restaurant was scheduled to move to a new location in mere days, after which the old location would be demolished. Shank Mods took to Twitter looking to recruit an Osaka local in a last-ditch effort to save the TV from destruction. Local game developer Bebe Tinari responded to the call and managed to visit the site, confirming that the TV still existed and even turned on.

Quite possibly the world's largest game of <em>Duck Hunt</em> (which doesn't work on stock flat-panel TVs). Credit: Shank Mods

After a nerve-wracking quest to contact the restaurant's owner, Shank Mods confirmed that he could take possession of the TV if he could manage to handle the shipping himself. That left Shank Mods with two weeks to figure out how to get a 440-pound TV (and its specially designed, reinforced 171-pound stand) down from the second floor of an Osaka restaurant and to a safe location.

Luckily, Tinari had a friend who worked for a company that regularly shipped large-scale industrial equipment internationally that would be able to help. Shank Mods wouldn't detail the precise cost they quoted to get the TV down the stairs, to a warehouse, crated up for air shipment to the US, and then shipped via truck to the garage of his (very tolerant) parents. But he did say that the "used car amount of money" that he was quoted was fronted by a video sponsor, helping him save this piece of television history from the bottom of a Japanese landfill.

It belongs in a museum

The full video includes lots of footage and details of the shipping and unboxing process, and confirmation that the TV still works after its incredible journey. Shank Mods also includes a breakdown of the internal design and processing hardware that went into such a uniquely large CRT and an extended discussion of the intricate process of calibrating and tuning the tube to deliver a sharp, color-corrected picture after years of magnetic and electron beam drift.

Shank Mods mentions multiple times in the video that this gigantic CRT looks much better in person than on a YouTube video. We can only hope he can raise the funds to turn his parents' garage into a public museum for classic gaming enthusiasts eager to make a pilgrimage to see the one-of-a-kind find for themselves. Or maybe an old-fashioned whistle-stop tour of the countryside can be arranged, hopefully on a specially designed train car with a reinforced floor. Let's make it happen, people!

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