If you only read one thing about energy and electrification and climate this year...

Its all about the electrification stack and spoiler: i didn't write it but I will introduce it.

Sometimes you read something that you should have written yourself. Or you stumble across a great way of summarizing a lot of things you are thinking about it. Both happened to me a few weeks ago, but before i share it with you, I want to give it some context.

Go-Karts as pain relief

For a number of years I messed around with a few mates making stoopid fast, stooopid fun go karts. I have lots of genetic arthritis, and an endorphin rush is a guaranteed method of pain relief, only it is usually to short. To make the endorphin rush last longer, you can take a drug called an endorphinase inhibitor that stops your body readsorbing the endorphins. If you take the endorphinase inhibitor before go-karting, you smile for hours afterwards and feel no pain. At least that was my excuse for spending a lot of time in CAD making the design and then making the parts.

At my 50th birthday we raced them at an old air-traffic control tower on Alameda runway. Best photo of the night is this one of my daughter Bronte lining up to race my friend Maddie. The theme of the party was "Fast and Furious", because if you know me (or my wife) you'll know one of our guilty pleasures is the Fast and Furious franchise, a highly misunderstood franchise of car chase films that is really about family and belonging. My friends dressed up.

Now that is a Dominic Toretto impersonation (though a little less smile next time).

Karts as Curriculum

Because I had the parts to build the karts from my birthday I ran a go-kart building workshop this year at my daughter's 5th grade public school, Austinmer Public. With 6 volunteers and 60 kids we built 4 go-karts over 8 weeks to teach the kids about all of the things that you need to understand our unfolding electric future.

We started with a class to make your own battery out of Gatorade (an electrolyte!) with copper coins and iron nails for electrodes. My charming dad but some nickel plate he had “stored away just in case” so we could try different metals. The kids measured the voltages and tested different colors of gatorade for higher potential. In case you are wondering blue is the highest voltage gatorade!. The kids put batteries in series and measured voltages again, then put enough batteries in series to turn to get a voltage that could turn on a light emitting diode (LED).

In the second class we hand—wound tiny electric motors, built a circuit to drive them, and used various battery combinations to spin them. We measured voltages again, as well as the revolutions per minute (RPM). We measured them spinning faster at higher voltages. One motor spun at over 20,000 rpm. If I teach the class again I'd show how different numbers of windings change the speed. We took apart an electric skateboard motor and compared our hand wound motor to the (also hound wound but by professionals) skateboard motor, and compared our crappy iron magnets to the incredible neodymniums in the professional motor. We spun the motor and measured the motor and current coming off it. A motor is a generator ! With a turbine on it, it can make electricity, even make a light turn on.

The motors reminded me of a project I used to do with the now renowned comic book artist Nick Dragotta and his wife Ingrid. We wrote comic books that taught kids how to make things. They were published by Harper Collins, then Make Magazine, and for a hot minute we made kits for parents to do with their kids. Nick has gone on to be famous including batman covers.

In the third class we made gear-boxes with lego and talked about chain drives versus worm drives versus belt drives and even about bevel gears. We did some math about ratios and fractions. We even built and contemplated a lego version of a fabulous Arthur Ganson work of art.

In a fourth class I showed the kids what CAD tools look like and how they can be used to design a mechanism, and we looked at how levers and bearings work and how they could could be arranged to make ackerman steering, and that in fact an ackerman is a version of a variable gearbox.

My dad (proud grandfather, ex-engineer) came in for a class and helped the kids build the chassis out of plywood and aluminium extrusions.

My mum came in for a class while I was travelling and helped the kids paint and decorate the karts. I learned from one of my favorite professors at MIT (Mitch Resnick) that ownership of projects is important to kids and that the chance to decorate engages them in ownership of what they are learning. Also my mother is a practising artist and former art teacher and is magnificently didactic, so the kids learned to paint with proper technique. Or else.

In two more classes the kids assembled the 4 karts in teams using allen wrenches and ratchets and screw drivers and even some power tools to take all of the fundamental components we had prototyped (battery, motor, circuit, gearboxes, mechanisms, chassis) and assembled them into karts.

We then spent a class programming the motor controllers and learning the 11-year old kid version of how motor controllers and micro-controllers work. We span the wheels up, measured their RPM, connected them all via a CAN-Bus, learned about Analog to Digital measurements (the throttles) and how you can turn movements into signals into controls, and to their great dismary how to speed limit a go-kart that can do 60mph/100km/h to 10km/h, the speed deemed safe by us adults. The kids learned that the electricity came from the battery and went into the “brain” or motor controller that turned it into pulses of electricity that would make the electromagnets in the motor turn on and off and push and pull the permanent magnets to make them spin around. The potentiometer made a voltage that could be turned into a signal from the throttle that would tell the master-miind (the microcontroller) to orchestrate the “brains” attached to each motor using a language called “CAN”. Phenomenologically they “got” it.

With 4 running go karts the last class was outside on the basketball courts, we arranged cones, wore helmets and fluoro safety vests, and had a series of races. Every kid had a drive. It was the best day of my 2024. Statistics would suggest only a few of the kids will grow up to do science or engineering, but I believe they all left with a better intuition of how the world works, of how to use tools, the fact that you don't need to be afraid of taking things apart and putting them back together, hopefully better. They understood they had built their first electric car, and there is no real difference between what they had put together, and a real electric car. All the same components, just different scales. They were a bit thrilled that in a (very short) drag race to say 60km/hour their hand painted and brightly coloured go-karts would beat nearly all modern EVs.

But even better, I had indoctrinated them with the idea that a tiny number of foundational technologies are the core to solving climate change, this electrifying energy transition thing I'm always harping on about. Its about magnets, motors, conductors, generators, motor controllers and inverters, digital control of an analog world, batteries, and the myriad ways they can all be combined to make all the things we need for a zero emission future, whether its a wind turbine or an electric vehicle.

This year I've been (very slowly with too many professional distractions) trying to refine the go-karts with a beautifully illustrated instruction manual so that in some maybe future world I'll sell kits and instructions to schools and parents and scouting groups so they can get started in their own electric education. I was in the perfect headspace to receive a substack post about "the electric slide". This is a remarkable piece of writing that talks about the fundamental technological developments of the past few centuries that all add up to the "electric stack" of technologies upon which the future is forged. This is the article I wished I had written myself, because it is awesome. I want you to read it. Warning : its very long.

If you can only read one thing about electrification this year, read “The Electric Slide” at Not Boring by Packy McCormick

How did we get batteries and with better material science, better batteries? Why is lithium fundamentally dominant? What had to happen in the development of magnets to get to the extraordinary power density of modern electric power plants? What happened to happen with silicon and transistors to enable the finely tuned digital control of these motors at extraordinary levels of power?

McCormick sets up the article with this challenging thought for those who have red-pilled on AI…

America is, implicitly or explicitly, making a bet that whoever wins intelligence, in the form of AI, wins the future.

China is making a different bet: that for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action.

He defines the electric stack :

It also dominates the technologies that turn electricity into action: the Electric Stack.

• Lithium-Ion Batteries

• Magnets and Electric Motors

• Power Electronics

• Embedded Compute

He tells the story of this stack using a drone as the embodiment and forces you to consider the power and importance of the full stack. Drones, which have revolutionized vanity as well as war, are only possible when all of these things come together. This is why I was teach with a go-kart, a literal vehicle for explaining the revolution underfoot. My only criticism of both drone and kart here is that it doesn't include what we happened in solar cell innovation (and scale) and incorporate it into the final vehicle. The solar cell is of course related to embedded compute (silicon, semiconductor), but probably deserves a special shoutout.

This chart shows the incredible cost curves we are on, and they are still coming down :

I love the detail, I love the history and the story telling. It is a very long thing to ask you to read, but I promise you it will be worth it, and even if you think you know the history you will learn a ton, and if you don't you'll have a new appreciation of the modern world.

As well as covering the science I also appreciate the attempt to tie all of the electric stack to geopolitics, and to point out that it was a large number of migrants working in American Universities under the now undermined post WW2 US science establishment, to invent all of these things. Except also in partnership with people in Japan and Germany and Britain and elsewhere who were also building these fundamental building blocks of modernity, and contemplating what it means that it is all being taken to extraordinary manufacturing scale in China, not America.

In the 8 point summary McCormack says some great things about this and says them well :

Lesson 4: talent is destiny, and that talent can come from anywhere.

Lesson 5: American innovation in the Electric Stack consistently came through partnerships with other countries.

China has bet on the fundamental physicality of electrification, robotics, drones, clean energy, just as America is pulling back from those things, and investing in burning fossil fuels and artificial intelligence. As anyone in software will acknowledge, eventually software will be free, (but not the energy to run it) so I doubt there is much long term advantage to “winning” this race. I find the “we must get it first, it’s existential” narrative disingenuous and politlcally motivated.

I buy the argument that owning and manufacturing the electric stack is fundamental to prosperity, and unlike software, supply chains do not tend towards "free". I don't think the framing of one versus the other is very helpful. The best of all worlds of course is using all this artificial intelligence (I still STRONGLY PREFER THE TERM MACHINE LEARNING) to further empower the electric stack. Its not impossible to imagine China and America both doing well here, if only we could dial the temperature down.

In my “go-kart as electric stack” I was thinking battery, electric motors, motor controllers, sensors, and precision mechanisms as the stack. Its not that different to McCormack’s architecture of Batteries, Motors, Power Electronics, and Compute. Sensors are a subcategory of compute, and precision mechanisms are only really enabled by CNC machine which is the accuracy enabled when compute meets manufacturing with servo motors sensors and control. All of these things feedback and develop on eachother.

I really can’t criticize the piece, but I think both McCormack and I miss in our breakdowns another important thing that is happening in the stack. Electrochemistry. With precision and compute and electricity we are also fundamentally changing the basics of industrial chemistry. These are the ways we are going to make metals and even things like cement in the future. This is how we will decarbonize industry. A lot of industrial chemistry is driven by redox reactions, which are nothing if not reactions designed for moving electrons around. Oxidation is the loss of electrons. Reduction is the gaining of electrons. We are electrifying everything, including our mining and metal making and most important industrial processes.

In other news :

I'm at climate week in NY this week. I may miss a post or two. If you are in NY contact me!. If you know an event I should go to at climate week contact me!

If you think you would like to buy a go kart for your kid or their school, or just for a school, or even just for the arthritic pain relief, let me know. If I should do some pre-order thing, shout out.

I read "Stuck" this week by Yoni Applebaum. Its an awesome dive into the diminished mobility of Americans in terms of their geographic location, and how this is an important underlying cause for stagnation. As an explanation for why we have over-regulation and land use practices that is stymying the housing market (and the electricity grid buildout by the way) I found it better than both "Abundance" and "Why Nothing Works" (though you should read all those anyway, because they are also good).

I'm going to get back to the topic of how to make electricity cheap. I'm getting a lot of feedback from my American audience that they would like that.

Climate change is going to be bad in Australia, and this is a remarkably not sugar coated report “National Climate Assessment”. A week later the labor government released new targets. They aren’t good enough for capping us at 2 degrees. This was a good analysis of Australia’s new goals. At least Australia didn’t pull out of the UN (Paris) targets like the US has, but we aren’t trying very hard considering that it will save us money not cost us. The problem is that even though many people and companies and industries will win, there are some existing big players who would lose. As I learned in the Quarterly essay this week they are sneaky, duplicitous, and very powerful.