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I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Trade security has rarely been as much under threat as it is today. After an 18 month invasion of the Ukraine, we now see added sea freight problems due to the invasion of Gaza. Both have ramifications for the safe passage of sea freight. To this can be add the Chinese activity in disputed waters off the Phillipines, and the ongoing pirate activity of the northeastern African coast. This disruption to sea freight makes international trade a more expensive business. More expensive if airfreight is used instead of sea freight; and more expensive as trade insurance premiums become higher. Already two international seas freight companies have had to shut down some of their seas routes.This may lead to a further diminished marginal utility from globalisation. If sea freight is no longer a safe and cheap trade option, some of the money benefits of globalisation are lost. In particular, trade deals for heavier manufactured goods. It may become cheaper, and more reliable, to restart domestic manufacture of such items. To facilitate domestic manufacture in heavy industries, some form of subsidy may be warranted. Just as government have doled out export grants, they can instead subsidies local production. Until there is a return to safe, and relatively inexpensive sea freight options, a new direct investment focus should be established to facilitate domestic production.
Merry Christmas, from Santa’s little helper – gallium nitride!
All true, I swear it.
I just bought my brother a stocking filler, a wall charger for his prospective new phone. I paid £5 extra for a recent improvement: GaN circuitry, making the gizmo more reliable, more efficient, and longer-lived. Wikipedia:
“Gallium nitride (GaN) is a very hard […], mechanically stable, wide-bandgap semiconductor material with high heat capacity and thermal conductivity.”
It comes across as the John McClane hard guy of semiconductors.
The material has been around since 1932 as a curiosity. It did not reach wide practical use till the 1990s, with the development of LEDs for general lighting. A tiny piece of the semiconductor is actually the light source, and silicon-based semiconductors won’t do at all. Application to power electronics came later. I don’t know the true history, but expect that this second use, of which my phone plug is a harbinger, was fostered by the boom in LEDs: greater production of raw and high-purity GaN, a lower price from economies of scale, and a much larger pool of scientists and engineers familiar with it.
You may be worrying about supply constraints. Isn’t it retrograde to replace a superabundant and virtually free element, silicon, with a scarce one like gallium? (The nitrogen of course comes free.)
Wikipedia explains why not. Gallium is scarce, but not a true rare earth. Overall, it is about as abundant as cobalt, with much lower demand – currently only 375 tonnes a year. It doesn’t come in concentrated ore bodies but as a trace element, about 50 ppm, in bauxite, Ca. 250 million tons a year of this is mined to make 64 mt of aluminium in large smelters well dispersed around the globe. The gallium is extracted by running an intermediate liquid in the process through an ion-exchange filter. This only collects 15% of the gallium present, but there hasn’t been much incentive to spend money to make it more efficient. By my calculations, the current process meets annual gallium demand by tapping just 20% of the global aluminium smelter capacity. For smelter owners, the by-product is trivial. A 1 mt/yr smelter can produce 30 tonnes of gallium a year, worth $22.6m at $755/kg, The 1 mt of aluminium sells for $2.2 bn.
So gallium production could be quintupled by simply tapping more aluminium smelters. Beyond that, there is surely scope for boosting the low extraction efficiency. Recall also that the only market has a long record of making devices smaller and getting more out of less materials. Power electronics is a new use class and should create a bump in demand, but after that it should flatten out. So don’t worry about supply. I do suspect that the tiny size of individual devices will make recycling gallium from them economically impracticable, though it’s always there as a last resort.
Phone chargers are irritatingly salient in our daily lives, but their contribution to demand for electricity is minuscule. Not so for another promising application, PV inverters. Their short lives are an expensive embarrassment to the industry. The warranties on inverters from top-tier German manufacturers like SMA and Fronius only go up to 10 years including a paid extension. PV panels all have 25-year output guarantees, and their expected economic life is over 30 years. Their owners can expect to have to replace the inverters at least once in this period. GaN inverters havn’t yet reached the market, but are coming soon. They offer a real hope of much better lifetimes.
Meranwhile let us enjoy the seasonal cheer that GaN has brought us through very cheap, reliable and economical decorative LED lights. These seem to have sparked a pottlatch competition in display between municipalities, shopping malls and a fair number of private households, in a form that is simply enjoyable. Here are this year’s lights in the main pedestrian street in Malaga. I hope the image embeds, if not do follow the link.
And Feliz Navidad to you all from me.
Great news, James – thank you!! And what a lovely photo!!
We do not have solar power yet – [and just for fun, insert anti-Cali government rant here – they just shaved the incentives, claiming a cost-shift to low income, which, I am not convinced of … ] but I am beginning to enjoy using LED lights. (At first we accidentally bought cold white ones.)
I am even scheming of ways to improve the multi-color LED strings – I have 2 strings where I just don’t like 1 of the 5 colors. So, maybe I can replace those globes. (I am perhaps too picky.)
It *is* very nice not to have to worry about fire as much. Who needs that?
I am soooo behind with the holidays. Sad! (Ha, couldn’t resist.)
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah (belated), Happy Solstice, and Happy other holiday to all!!
And to you also, James
There is a new news site and it’s focus is on good news, which makes for a relief.
https://futurecrunch.com/
It’s a curious feature of humanity, to be focussed on loss to the detriment of gain.
I took a look at futurecrunch. nice site!
Energy insurance – a new start up idea !
My sister sent me a copy of “Irresistible force meets immovable object” dated 22 December 2023, by John Quiggin. I responded, and she suggested I post my response here.
Something cheery for Christmas. It points to the availability of new data on the scale of the renewable energy equipment industries.
It makes me wonder: Are we on track to having enough production by 2030 to be installing 6.5 times the capacity that was being installed in 2020 (including “appropriate levels” of storage)?
The article contains good news, but it looks like storage capacity will be the problem. We need to be able to supply energy to random regions of the Earth which might experience “energy droughts” lasting 20 days or more.
It is necessary to be able to move energy around, so that every location does not need its own 20 days of local storage – a requirement which is impossible to do with batteries due to the scale of resources involved. Transmission lines help but are also expensive in terms of resources. Maybe “inefficient” hydrogen will be useful for such emergencies.
Huge mobile fuel-cell ships or ammonia tankers could be operated by energy insurance firms…
Best wishes,
Richard
Will the +2.0 °C daily global 2m surface temperature anomaly be breached again before the end of 2023? Per a tweet by Prof Eliot Jacobson, the latest data for Dec 23 shows “a cool 1.92°C above the pre-industrial baseline.”
And the North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature anomaly continues at record high levels.
Per Berkeley Earth’s November 2023 Temperature Update, by Robert Rohde, published on 19 Dec 2023, included:
What will 2024 bring?
An interesting analysis of the Voice referendum https://www.scienceandfreedom.org/articles/tolerance-trust-and-truth-what-students-can-learn-from-australias-voice-referendum-debates/
I think that the lessons learnt could be applied to other situations eg climate change and the decarbonisation of economies. Once the debate included name calling eg “racist” “stupid” the game was lost. The same could be said for Clinton’s deplorables comments. When the heat is in people get defensive and lose objectivity.
“A sad irony of what became a very partisan referendum debate is that on key aspects there was no fundamental disagreement. ”
It seems another few days wait to get the remaining 3 days of surface temperature data for the full year for 2023.
Will the +2.0 °C daily global 2m surface temperature anomaly be breached again before the end of 2023?
Will the +1.5 °C full year average global 2m surface temperature anomaly be breached in 2023?
We’ll see soon…
And how hot will 2024 be? Leon Simons suggests perhaps about +1.66 °C, if the year-on-year increase of 2023 to 2024 is equal to the increase during the 2015-2016 El Niño.
Military experts are annoying. You cannot read anything about the war in Ukraine (stupid idea in the first place, but I am stupid), without the person doing the military analysis adding in some obviously absurd logical fallacy why Nato should spend even more money on one type of gun or another in the past.
While one can and should strongly doubt spending priorities within western military budgets as well, it seems to me 99% of the lesson of that stupid war is to reconfirm rather strongly that we just spend far too much as Nato against no threat whatsoever that can be stopped with more weapons. And it’s not like they ever suggest cutting something.
Note this has nothing to do with building up supplies Ukraine needs at the moment – I’d very much like to see that done with lots of central planning, effort and coordination. But that is a one-off to deliver to one side engaged in an ongoing war. It’s also a nuisance, both compared to Nato GDP and military budgets in financial terms.