The Savor dream is so big. We’ll get so much land back from oil crop monocultures it’ll be like we discovered a new continent on planet earth. They’re the same triglyceride molecules we eat already, producible anywhere at very low cost. With virtually no land, no water, no

My book, "The Origins of Efficiency", is now officially available for preorder. construction-physics.com/p/my-book-the-…

How rich is America? US chicken producers have required air conditioning for their broilers since the mid-2000s. High rate ventilation and evaporative cooling pads reduce the death rate and improve weight gain. Chickens in the US have more AC than Europeans and many others.

Storing natural gas is nearly free, 1000x cheaper than batteries per kilowatt-hour. Solar PV needs storage that cheap. I'm leading Standard Thermal to do this. Our testing over 2 years has overcome some of the biggest barriers, so I wrote about it. austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ult…

The cheapest possible battery, literally made of dirt. An order of magnitude cheaper than any other thermal storage idea, with electricity-to-electricity cycling efficiency better than hydrogen. Can't overstate how cool this project is.

NEW at Works in Progress – Austin Vernon and Ben Southwood on the beauty of batteries, which massively reduce how much redundant energy generation & grid we have to build. But what's holding them back is the lack of a price system in electricity markets. worksinprogress.news/p/the-beauty-o…

Most battery economic calculations are a time arbitrage that assume infinite, free transmission. The potential is many times this because grid costs are fixed and higher than generation. Batteries can push wires utilization up by 3x and arbitrage bottlenecks, meaning $$$.

Writing for publications is often painful, but it was really fun writing this for Works in Progress. I sent my draft in and they made it beautiful and refined. WIP is great for non-writers, but also for writers that have good ideas and lack the time to write them fully!

I need to write a post on this, but the ?? area isn't a coherent space. It is very difficult for technologies to be disruptive unless they have reasonable capital increments and very high capital efficiency. Capitalism doesn't play in the ?? because it destroys capital.

One thing I got a bit of crap for in the hallways of the Abundance conference is my not infrequent mockery of trains on Twitter. I’m sorry, trains are not an abundance technology. I think many people in the abundance scene like trains because: 1. America’s inability to build

Aggregation in transportation and logistics imposes huge costs and it is our job as humans to invent technology that eliminates the need for it.

I love this. So many important discoveries have been brute force experimentation mixed with a little insight.

Boring Company is dangerously close to being able to provide every city dozens of miles of light rail/BRT type capacity with no public money, limited utilities interruption, and minimal new right-of-way. While offering passenger travel times that are a fraction of other transit.

The posting-to-progeny pipeline! (My answer is two.)

How Rockefeller and His Partners Built Standard Oil Most commentary has come from anti-capitalists. The story seems closer to Standard Oil being a tech company in a winner take all market, winning talent and IP, even offering proto stock compensation. austinvernon.site/blog/rockefell…

In 1872 Standard Oil consolidated the Cleveland refining industry. Pundits dubbed this the “Cleveland Massacre” where you could *checks notes* sell your decrepit refinery for Standard Oil stock and become one of the richest people in the world.

"The Origins of Efficiency" is out today! amazon.com/Origins-Effici…

We just shipped our first customer order. Two panels headed to an industrial mineral plant for a wastewater treatment system. One’s making a quick pitstop in El Segundo for @DiscipulusVC Demo Day!

A Nuclear Fission Regulatory Blank Slate It is easy to say nuclear power plants should be regulated more reasonably. Reality is often harder, even with a redo. I look at the constraints and compare two frameworks that take the question seriously. austinvernon.site/blog/nuclearre…

A crazy idea to 100x the power density of batteries: make them the way we make TNT. Put the anodic and cathodic groups onto the same molecule — just like the oxidizing and reducing groups are on the same molecule in high-test explosives. orcasciences.com/articles/shoul…