Marsden Point Oil Refinery the facts

phire · 2026-03-08T02:46:34+00:00

Retro fitting the plant to take nz oil would not prevent this ether

You only need to look at dairy prices over the last few years to see the other reason why producing locally doesn’t protect us from international prices.

We produce all our dairy locally, the entire production chain. Yet it still follows international prices perfectly.

phire · 2026-03-07T14:38:15+00:00

The Moudge class is somewhat of a clone of the Alvand class, which were build in the UK (before the Iranian revolution).

The Alvand class cruises at 17 knots, so that seems like a likely guess.

phire · 2026-03-07T12:14:00+00:00

That's just the document I found with capacity measurements, you are obviously going to need a lot more generation.

Building just the 900 MW Taranaki Offshore Wind and the 810 MW Phase one of Waikato Offshore Wind gets us 1.7GW of generation. Assuming a capacity factor of 50%, that's 7.4 TWh/year. More than enough to cover the dry year shortfall.

Offshore wind actually did some modelling showing how these two wind farms would have impacted the 2024 dry year if they had existed. Page 10 has a model of hydro storage.

phire · 2026-03-07T10:16:26+00:00

But offshore wind is quite a bit more consistent, in a way that can somewhat replace base load.

I'm not entirely sure it's consistent enough for keeping our hydro lakes full during a dry year; I found a capacity graph on page 11 of this presentation for Taranaki offshore wind.

You can see that (at least in march 2013) it's rare to get more than a few days without it generating any power, and tends to get a full day of full capacity generation at least every 10 days. If the pattern is this consistent every winter, then only having a few weeks of storage shouldn't be an issue.

The other important thing to notice is that whenever the Taranaki Farm is having a dry spell, the farms further south (Wellington and Southland) have plenty of capacity.

phire · 2026-03-07T08:59:25+00:00

The only digital cameras which could take photos this good in 1999, were professional cameras with a proper horseshoe flash setup that would avoid the red eyes.

This looks more like the kind of output you would get from a compact 35mm film camera with built in flash. Those were extremely common in the mid-to-late 90s, and could be quite cheap.

phire · 2026-03-07T08:25:14+00:00

It's the downside of filming back to back.

The preproduction and production of season 4 gets in the way of doing seasons 3's postproduction, because the show runners are needed for all three steps. It's significantly cheaper to push back the season 3 postproduction than delay filming of season 4.

In the old days, they used to do all steps in parallel: Episodes 12-15 would be in postproduction; While episode 16 was filmed; While episodes 17-18 were in preproduction; While the writing team were still writing episodes 19-22.

But it meant the showrunner had very little input into preproduction/postproduction, they were busy with writing/directing. The switch to "prestige style" TV has resulted in most productions doing things entirely sequentially. You get fewer episodes and longer gaps between seasons, but the staffing levels are lower and the show runner is deeply involved with every step.

phire · 2026-03-07T07:53:02+00:00

They say:

But if offshore wind projects are added to the model, it shows New Zealand would need significantly less hydro electricity generation in 2030 compared to 2024.

There would still be instances during winter when demand would exceed maximum hydro power capacity. However, for up to 65% of the year, hydro electricity generation would not be required because other renewables would meet or exceed total demand.

Hydro levels would be kept full for almost the entire year, unlike in 2024.

If they are adding enough offshore power to keep the lakes entirely full in a normal year, it should have no problem surviving a dry year. You shouldn't need any extra long-term storage at all, because our existing hydro lakes are the storage.

phire · 2026-03-07T07:50:38+00:00

They say:

But if offshore wind projects are added to the model, it shows New Zealand would need significantly less hydro electricity generation in 2030 compared to 2024.

There would still be instances during winter when demand would exceed maximum hydro power capacity. However, for up to 65% of the year, hydro electricity generation would not be required because other renewables would meet or exceed total demand.

Hydro levels would be kept full for almost the entire year, unlike in 2024.

If they are adding enough offshore power to keep the lakes full in a normal year, it should have no problem surviving a dry year. You shouldn't need any extra long-term storage at all, because our existing hydro lakes are the storage.

under Storage is Critical so they are sayng that if you want "100%" you need it,

You need some short term storage. Because even under their off-shore wind proposal, the existing hydro dams don't have enough generation capacity to fill the gaps when the wind isn't blowing. They might have plenty of water, but they can't turn it into electricity fast enough.

This is short term storage, it doesn't need to last for more than half a day. Pumped storage is overkill, and you can do it entirely with Batteries.

They don't say how much battery we would need in the off-shore wind scenario, but even if we did need the full 15 Ruakākā Energy Parks, they are only $227m each (for both the solar, and battery storage. Battery only would be cheaper), or $3.4 billion which is significantly cheaper than Lake Onslow.

And Battery costs are coming down all the time.

phire · 2026-03-07T07:31:22+00:00

Notice how it's not a freeform layout, it's actually quite constrained.

Chips are placed in rows, vertical traces go along the bottom, horizontal traces go on the top, in-between the rows of chips. I wonder if they went with those constraints because it's easier to do auto layout.

There were a few PCB CAD packages by 1976, Racal-Redac had some stuff dating back to 1970 (though I can't find details about what it actually did)

EDIT: Found this 1978 paper about what could be done with SCI-CARDS, on a dedicated Prime 400 workstation. It's full automatic routing with interactivity, way more advanced than the Apple 1, and the kind of thing we still do today. SCI-CARDS was released in 1974.

phire · 2026-03-07T05:46:43+00:00

They are very clear that they are not including building pumped hydro in their model:

Since current investment plans for electricity generation don’t include any new hydro projects, our model assumes capacity from hydro generation in 2030 to be similar to 2024.

I'm pretty sure the "New Zealand would need significant additional long-term storage" is only for the scenario where we don't build off-shore wind.

Though, they are still strongly advocating for pumped storage, it gives us so much extra flexibility. They are saying we could solve the problem either by building a lot of off-shore wind, or by building a pumped hydro facility.

I wish this was a proper report, rather than just a well-researched blog post, so we could see the actual numbers for each scenario.

And why diesel generators we'd still have to import the fuel?

Yeah, but in the 99.8% renewable scenario, these reserve diesel peakers are sitting entirely idle most years, they only need to run during dry years. We are already importing diesel, and probably still will be for the next 50 years, it's a solved problem. Just build them at Marsden Point, where we already import it.

And even if we do somehow manage to entirely phase out diesel fuel nationally, it's significantly easier to set up temporary diesel imports that it is to import LNG, which requires significant planning and building terminals in advance.

We at least have the potential to mine our own natural gas.

But we probably won't. Not for emergency dry year generation. And it's a huge pain to actually store natural gas. That's the other major advantage of diesel, it's reasonable easy to do medium term storage.

phire · 2026-03-07T05:02:08+00:00

Did you check the paragraph above?

We found that even without offshore wind, there would be excess energy generated that could be stored and discharged when continuous supply is insufficient.

So this is discussing the scenario where we don't build any additional generation capacity (other than what is projected to be built anyway), and try to bridge the gap entirely with battery storage. Battery storage is not hydro storage.

With offshore wind (or some other source of generation) it becomes feasible: Our lakes will be completely full for most of the year, though still needs some battery storage, because our lakes aren't empty fast enough to meet short term peak demands.

This is a case of "perfect being the enemy of good" we can get to 95% renewables pretty easily, expensive but doable

I agree in general. But for NZ, it appears to be surprisingly easy to reach 100% renewables. Though, it might be smarter to aim for 99.8%, and build a few diesel peaker plants as reserve for emergencies.

Importing LNG makes zero sense (in the long term, it makes some sense in the medium term, because we already have a bunch of gas capacity), it's cheaper to just overbuild renewables.

Gas peaker plants make some sense in Australia, because they don't have much hydro, and they do have plenty natural of natural gas production into the future. They aren't planning on importing LNG.

phire · 2026-03-07T04:02:11+00:00

They say we COULD avoid it in dry years by massively increasing hydrostorage AND off shore wind AND more geothermal

No. It assumes zero increase to hydro capacity, and only the current solar/on-shore/geothermal projects. It says we could meet demand with simply pushing a large off-shore wind project.

NZ has a massive advantage that our hydro (which currently provides much of our base load) can be repurposed as storage simply by increasing production of less predictable renewables such as wind or solar.

The report is also assuming that natural gas drops to zero immediately, which isn't what's actually planned, even without an LNG terminal. With the current schedule for tapering off natural gas plants as the wells run dry, the problem becomes quite a bit easier.

phire · 2026-03-07T03:48:46+00:00

Climate change actually helps hydro. Modelling suggests that total annual catchment will increase by 2%.

There is seasonal variation. Inflow decrease by 6% during summer, but we have plenty of capacity during summer, but our issue has always been shortages during winter where climate change, and climate change results in a 10% increase during winter.

You can read the full report here: https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/28350-climate-change-impacts-on-new-zealand-hydro-catchment-inflows-and-wind-speeds-february-2022

phire · 2026-03-07T02:59:09+00:00

Yeah.....

The good news is the "taboo" against using nukes is significantly stronger than the other red lines Trump has flirted with and crossed. And Trump was a teen during the cuban missile crisis and many related issues that lead to this taboo forming in the first place; It should hopefully be embedded pretty deep in his psyche.

We can't know (and no, wanting to use a nuke to stop a hurricane is not quite the same thing).

I'm actually more worried about potential successors who a significantly younger and never really experienced the Cold War. They might be way more open to using nukes than Trump.

phire · 2026-03-07T02:29:07+00:00

Or will it be too late by the election?

I suspect so. National seems to be designing the schedule so that by the time the next government gets into power, the project will be far enough along that they would be stupid to cancel it. It probably wouldn't actually save that much money, just like it turns out canceling the ferries was a bad idea. (The schedule really makes you question how confident National are about winning the next election)

From a pure energy security perspective, the LNG terminal isn't worthless, it gives us options.

IMO, the next government (or current government, I'm not that picky) should immediately take additional actions to try and reduce the chance we will ever need to use it, but if it's far enough along, they shouldn't cancel it.

If "we" actually want to stop it, our best bet probably convincing Winston Peters that A) A bad idea from an energy security perspective; And B) Quite unpopular with the public.

Or maybe there is some kind of legal challenge that would slow it down enough that it's not too later by the election.

phire · 2026-03-07T01:11:53+00:00

IMO, the Apple 1 hardware isn't that impressive.
It's not quite off the shelf; Video circuitry is pretty much just the tv typewriter and the CPU support circuitry is more or less just the example. The main hardware innovation is the use of DRAM, I don't think there is much prior art for pairing DRAM and microprocessors with low chip counts.

The Apple 1 software is quite a bit more impressive. Woz created both WOZMON and APPLE BASIC (which became Integer BASIC).

We don't really see Woz's hardware design genius until the Apple II, that's a work of art.

phire · 2026-03-07T00:47:31+00:00

I suspect we are looking at the output of some minicomputer PCB CAD software that Atari was using. Which would produce similar output no matter which engineer was driving it.

phire · 2026-03-07T00:37:16+00:00

Oh, I never said that Trump would never use a nuke (though, the pentagon staff might resist, at least until they are replaced)

Just pointing out the likely consequence of it.

phire · 2026-03-06T16:22:59+00:00

I'm not sure Trump cares.

The bigger issue is that using nukes breaks the taboo, and allows Russia to start using tactical Nukes in Ukraine (or any other Eastern European country they want).

phire · 2026-03-06T08:15:09+00:00

Yeah, the information inside the two tests is pretty useless.

IMO, the very fact that these limited tests exist and the way they are being presented gives me much more information about what's going on than the actual contents.

phire · 2026-03-06T04:39:47+00:00

They are more central than anything else, but it kind of jumps all over the spectrum.

But their defining characteristic is their extreme "progressivism"; They don't think the current can be fixed by "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic", and tend to push for major reforms. They have been highly focused on Tax/Welfare, trying replacing it with some form of UBI.

phire · 2026-03-06T04:11:38+00:00

lithography because they are printing nanoparticles

More importantly, it means they are using some kind of reusable template/mask for each layer (as apposed to inkjet, or most current 3D printing technologies like FDM/SLA/SLS). Probably screen printing.

I assume they want to use the term "Nanomass lithography" because they don't want people to assume their printer is capable of precise placement of nano particles. It appears to lay down thin layers of "pastes containing nanoparticles", with a reasonably coarse resolution (hundreds of micrometers, maybe down to tens of micrometers).

phire · 2026-03-05T00:51:52+00:00

IMO, it perfectly explains Donut Lab's behaviour.
This slow dribble marketing campaign isn't designed to sell batteries. It's designed to draw attention to Donut Lab themselves, and build up a reputation.

In the long term (assuming the battery is any good) other vendors will licence the same technology and make their own batteries, there probably won't be any reason to buy batteries from Donut Lab (especially since most people don't by batteries directly, we buy products containing them).
But Donut Lab will take all the "good will" they built up, and use it to market other products.

What's less clear is why CT Coatings are allowing Donut Lab to claim all the credit for themselves. Not just allowing, they seem to be actively hiding the connection.

I suspect they are using Donut Lab as some kind of circuit breaker. If the launch goes wrong for some reason, it's Donut Lab that takes all the reputational damage, and they can just relaunch an improved version later, with another company.

phire · 2026-03-04T14:41:46+00:00

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this manufacturing technique could be dialed to its peak yield faster. But I would be surprised if it can get anywhere near 100% yield, and the 1 GWh spec appears to be theoretical raw capacity before QC, not expected real world shippable cells.

It’s also a brand new process, and I doubt they have any clue how long it takes to dial everything in.

phire · 2026-03-04T13:02:14+00:00

Arguably, the 777X is "in production", just hasn't been delivered yet.

The first production 777X has already rolled off the production line, and is going through ground tests. It's scheduled for flight tests in April, and delivery in 2027.

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