Photoshop Elements is getting a serious AI upgrade, with Generative Expand, AI upscaling and a new assistant that helps you edit simply by describing what you want.

If you ask most satellite companies aside from SpaceX, they will tell you the world doesn't have enough capacity for launching payloads into orbit. This is despite the blistering launch cadence we've seen around the world in recent years, led by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. Theoretically, competition will lead to lower prices and allow the best to rise to the top. It seems like the customers buying launch services were right. SpaceX is dialing back its Falcon 9 launch program, and there is no certainty about when SpaceX's reusable next-generation super-heavy-lift rocket, Starship, will carry anything to orbit besides the company's own Starlink satellites.

So it's no surprise satellite operators are cheering the success of a new launch provider. This was especially the case a few days ago, when Germany's Isar Aerospace reached orbit for the first time with its Spectrum rocket. The launcher delivered a batch of CubeSats to low-Earth orbit from a spaceport in northern Norway, and Isar tasted success after its first test flight ended in failure last year.

Read full article

Comments

© Isar Aerospace

by Jonathan Schofield*

I want us to embrace a sustainable future but how will we get there? Do we have any idea where we are going?

Tom Murphy, an American physicist has a long running blog called Do The Math. I’ll return to that later as a touchstone to this appeal for energy transition journalists of all kinds to do the work.

This morning, I read an article by Guardian financial journalist, Jasper Jolly, about how EVs could “in fact” be part of “the solution” to the problem that the UK’s electricity grid might be overwhelmed – by acting as a kind of national battery asset.

The thing is, for us the British public to have any sense of whether “the solution” is actually a solution we need to be provided with a picture of what the scale of the challenge is.

Another partial picture

In Jasper’s article I learn that, on a given winter’s day, Great Britain’s electricity demand is “61.1GW”. Good to know, though quite why Jasper links to a PDF that is clearly at least 4 years old is unclear (the PDF makes repeated references to “by 2020”).

There are sources such as the Energy Dashboard’s historical data visualisation which have more current figures. According to them:

• The 2022/23 winter peak in December 2022 was 42.3 GW
• The following winter’s January peak was 42.9 GW.

That’s about 30% lower than the figure Jasper quotes, which seems relevant.

Perhaps more helpfully, Jasper links to the NGESO (National Grid Energy System Operator) annual guesses of what Great Britain’s electricity system will look like in 2035 and 2050. That’s a really handy source to have but Jasper doesn’t draw out any key sense of total demand from that. And that’s my problem.

It’s left for the reader to be curious enough to explore the link and try and build their own picture from sources they may not understand. Or, to assume that our institutions have got this, so don’t worry about it.

But have they?

Reading Jasper’s article here’s what I don’t know:

• Given that electricity is going to need to power all of our industrial processes and transport of all kinds as well as what we currently use it for, what in fact is the size of this “massively expanded generating capacity”? [1]
• On the coldest of winter days, how far short of meeting that demand is UK renewable generating capacity? Especially bearing in mind that meeting peak demand is the key issue but renewables PR is invariably not seasonal.
• How long will it take for renewables to robustly be meeting demand year round, and based upon what assumptions?
• And if we don’t get there, then how do millions of EVs get enough charge in order to be able to sell it back to the grid, to be “one tenth of the solution”?

In short…

Time and scale

What scale are we shooting for and is it feasible? And crucially, are we going to get there in time? And if that looks improbable or risky what should we be contemplating instead?

Time and again, we get partial pictures from mainstream environmental journalism. Whatever the headline focus is, it’s rarely put into its actual context. In my experience, I would go as far as to say never.

Instead of “here’s the scale, here’s the time frame and the levers we have, so this is what our plan needs to be” – which is what UKFIRES admirably try to do – what we get instead is something more like – hand-waving.

Yes, the challenge is fiendishly complicated, and with the best will in the world, we will get much of it wrong, but we at least need a sketch.

Tom Murphy has been doing the math to sketch out what we’re doing. It’s compelling. Let’s just say modernity’s plan is not a plan that stands up.

Please journalists, do the work. Sketch it out for us. Do it sufficiently that collectively we can have a clue.

---

* Jonathan Schofield is a web designer and concerned citizen, based in Portsmouth, where he co-created Portsmouth Climate Action. A one-time Twitter addict, he’s now transplanted his thinking out loud to @urlyman on Mastodon.

---

[1] If we are to believe the NGESO, it seems that by 2050 we’ll be generating 237% more electricity than we are now.