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FORD is stepping up their game making $F LEAPs for 2023 a great investment! "Based on Ford's 1978 F-100 pickup, the all-electric all-wheel drive F-100 Eluminator has 480 horsepower and features Ford Performance Parts' Eluminator electric crate motor."

An all-electric plane capable of carrying 100 people may be available within six years, significantly accelerating the timeline for the introduction of a non-kerosene powered commercial airliner. U.S. startup Wright Electric Inc. plans to retrofit electric motors into a BAe 146 regional aircraft, replacing its four jet engines and transforming it into a zero-emissions model. The planes will have a range of about one hour or 460 miles. Zero emissions would be a game-changer for the airline industry, and this timing would make the company first to market. The converted planes would be suited to linking close city pairs such as New York and Boston, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and many European locations currently served by regional jets.

Fully electric trucks, often referred to as commercial battery electric trucks, are reaching wider-scale consideration as truck, engine, and other component makers are developing the systems that will support such vehicles. Battery and power-electronic development has progressed to make these trucks viable in certain applications. These trucks will have many benefits (more renewable energy, simpler design, etc.), but come with challenges (need for new infrastructure, development investments, etc.).

A good pair to my previous post - a nice summary of what needs to happen for electric propulsion in aviation. Four concepts are discussed: air taxis, 20-passenger commuter aircrafts, 50-passenger regional jets and 150-passenger, single-aisle 737 class aircraft.

ZeroAvia announced a development collaboration with Alaska Air Group, the parent company of Alaska Airlines, for a hydrogen-electric powertrain capable of flying 76-seat regional aircraft in excess of 500 NM. Alaska is also joining the list of top investors for the company, alongside a fellow Seattle-based Amazon Climate Pledge Fund and Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Alaska Airlines has also secured options for up to 50 kits to begin converting its regional aircraft to hydrogen-electric power through ZeroAvia's zero-emission powertrain. Zero emission would be a huge step, and nice to see Bezos and Gates both involved.

"For a snapshot of what all this points to regarding the total materials footprint of the green energy path, consider the supply chain for an electric car battery. A single battery providing a useful driving range weighs about 1,000 pounds.[15] Providing the refined minerals needed to fabricate a single EV battery requires the mining, moving, and processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet (see sidebar below).[16] That's 20 times more than the 25,000 pounds of petroleum that an internal combustion engine uses over the life of a car."

"The administration's multitrillion-dollar social spending package, widely considered the most comprehensive climate legislation ever put forward in the US, must survive razor-thin Democratic majorities in Congress...The bill includes a program of payments and penalties to ensure utilities phase out fossil fuels from America's electricity supply, a huge expansion in tax credits for clean energy and new restrictions on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is emitted from oil and gas drilling."

"It's entirely possible that this carnival barker of a CEO will continue finding crafty ways to extract tax breaks and favorable contracts from government entities for the rest of his career. But we should be alive to the ways in which Musk's reputation is built on a faulty foundation of borrowed money and worker exploitation. To Musk, the government is only useful in helping to enrich him, and he otherwise expects it to stay the hell out of his way. The problem is that he is now powerful and rich enough to get his wish. For all his supposed brilliance in developing electric vehicles and rockets, this may be his greatest talent: grifting the government. In doing so, he's creating a roadmap for reform, if politicians care to notice." Now he is reached a new level of rich. What if he gets sideways with the government. What if he picks up his toys and moves to Russia? Mars? This a great example of things to come...

Technologists in the U.S. and China, experts in Japan and researchers within the European Space Agency and the United Kingdom Space Agency are all working to make space-based solar power a reality. Over the past decade, researchers have made impressive advances that increase the likelihood that space solar power (SSP) will be realized during the next decade. "Two of the biggest hurdles to the realization of SSP have always been the cost of launch and the cost of hardware. Add flight rate, and all of a sudden you're looking at numbers always talked about for solar power satellites." The experts believe that solar power satellites at scale could be available within a decade, and envision "a world in the year 2100 where about 20% of electrical power comes from terrestrial nuclear and renewables, with 80% supplied by astroelectricity."

Companies are using Solar Power for Steel Production which in turn is being used for Oil Drilling. Author Tina Casey says, "Oh the irony, it burns! Solar power is supposed to open the door on a new era in which humans and their ecosystems exist in harmony, but for now the record is still stuck on fossil energy." "It is the largest on-site solar facility in the US dedicated to a single customer, with more than 750,000 solar panels providing nearly all the plant's annual electricity demand," bp enthused in a press release earlier this week. "This will enable the mill to produce some of the world's greenest steel and steel products."

The engineering profession won't be exempt from COVID-19 job fallout, but the effects will be temporary. More engineers will be needed than ever before when the world returns to a semblance of normalcy, said Andy Moss, president and owner of M Force Staffing, a Knoxville, Tenn., technical recruiting firm specializing in engineering and manufacturing job placement. "There was already a lack of technical talent before we went into this," Moss says. "This is a horrible situation, but when we come back from it we're going to ramp right back up into the problems we had before. We're not producing enough technical talent to fill the jobs we have." The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment growth for engineers, with nearly 140,000 new jobs expected for engineers from 2016 to 2026. Mechanical engineers were second only to civil engineers in terms of projected new jobs over that time period: civil engineers with 32,200 additional jobs projected and mechanical with 25,300. Industrial, with 25,100 jobs, and electrical, with 16,200, followed behind.

As artificial intelligence tools become more specialized, Moss has one big warning to today's students: stay away from any job AI can take. That doesn't include engineering, though, where there will probably be more jobs created due to the growth of AI, he says. "You'll still have things in engineering design and other aspects of technical work and engineering that a computer just can't do, even if they can think faster than a human."

"Ford intends to build a "megacampus" covering almost 6 square miles. There it will synthesize batteries from raw materials and build electric pickups of all sizes, the company announced. Electrifying Ford's signature truck line would have a large impact on carbon emissions because the vehicles are sales leaders and consume huge volumes of gasoline and diesel. The largest of the series, the F-750, is a commercial hauler that can weigh more than 18 tons." Is it wise to dump $TSLA and grab $F to hold until 2025 (H1)? Time will tell.