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- #17. 🥵 Urban heat islands | 🚄 French solar trains | 🚗 Tesla FSD Beta v11
#17. 🥵 Urban heat islands | 🚄 French solar trains | 🚗 Tesla FSD Beta v11
🌡 CLIMATE CHANGE
The European Climate Change Service, Copernicus, is predicting with 50-60% probability a warmer winter with less precipitation than normal.
While exceeding 1.5°C in global temperature increase is now inevitable, there may be ways to limit the overshoot by at least several decades. A set of 27 different scenarios have been modeled to forecast how and when countries’ can meet sufficient emissions reductions to bring the world back to, and eventually below, 1.5°C of increased temperature. The most extreme model allows for net-zero carbon emissions by 2057.
The addition of urban greenery such as parks and trees can reduce surface temperatures by 2-9°C; when plants are added to building roofs, the surface temperature drop can be as much as 17°C while also providing better thermal insulation for the buildings.
🔋 CLEAN ENERGY
Home-scale microgrids — solar > battery > house — are easy enough. But linking multiple homes’ microgrids to power a city are extraordinarily challenging not just technologically but financially. Xendee, a microgrid development platform, has produced a financing tool to design optimized microgrid solutions.
First solar parking lots, and now trains: the French National Railway Company SNCF now aims to have 40-50% of its rail network powered entirely by solar power by 2026.
In California, the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles will be banned from 2035 and privately-owned gas stations will suffer the hardest. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) predicts that the number of registered gasoline-powered vehicles will drop from 24 million today to 16 million by 2035. While larger stations can afford the $200K or so to purchase and install an EV charger, smaller stations likely cannot afford the cost; on the other hand, gas stations tend to sit on prime real estate, so if they own the land, they should be able to cash out nicely.
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đźš— AUTONOMOUS & ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Following fast behind the likes of Cruise in San Francisco, and Waymo’s own services in San Francisco, anybody can now summon a driverless Waymo taxi ride, for a fee, along the streets of Phoenix, Arizona.
The biggest update to Tesla’s infamous and inaccurately named ADAS merges the software stacks of Tesla’s highway and surface street functionality, presumably to provide improved performance.
In partnership with Holoride, Audi vehicles will now provide a VR headset gaming system that synchronizes with the vehicle’s motion to reduce motion sickness.
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