Reading List 04/12/2025
Solar PV adoption in Pakistan, a sodium-ion battery startup closing up shop, Figure’s humanoid robot progress, an AI-based artillery targeting system, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at solar PV adoption in Pakistan, a sodium-ion battery startup closing up shop, Figure’s humanoid robot progress, an AI-based artillery targeting system, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Pakistan's solar adoption
Solar power is being adopted by countries around the world, but apparently adoption has suddenly accelerated in Pakistan, more than quadrupling between 2023 and 2024. From CleanTechnica:
Pakistan isn’t the first country you’d expect to crash the global solar party. But by the end of 2024, it quietly rocketed into the top tier of solar adopters, importing a jaw-dropping 22 gigawatts worth of solar panels in a single year. That’s not a typo or a spreadsheet rounding error. That’s the kind of number that turns heads at IEA meetings and makes policy analysts double-check their databases. It certainly made me sit up and take notice when I first heard about what was happening in mid-2024.
It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.
22 gigawatts is up from 2.8 gigawatts in 2022, and 5 gigawatts in 2023. 22 gigawatts is more capacity than all but a handful of large countries install annually.
Trump’s coal executive orders
On Tuesday Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at stimulating the coal industry. From AP News:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a series of executive orders aimed at boosting the struggling coal industry, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been in decline.
Under the four orders, Trump uses his emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars.
Trump also directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands.
In a related action, Trump also signed a proclamation offering coal-fired power plants a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene.
On Twitter, Rob Gramlich notes that this does little to change the economics that are driving coal plant retirement:
President’s Executive Orders on coal don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters. 1/9
Nothing here seems to change the economics, and its the economics that have held coal-fired power production down. 2/9
We have seen no evidence that any company is considering building a new coal plant or that supply chains or manufacturing could support it.4/9
Bedrock Materials shuts down
Many folks have predicted that lithium ion batteries will ultimately get replaced by some successor battery chemistry that can achieve lower costs (due to less expensive materials) or better energy density. CleanTechnica, for instance, note in this article about sodium-ion batteries that they’ve stated “the batteries that will power our electric cars and trucks in 2030 have not yet been invented” in over 100 articles.
But predicting a technological trend is hard, and in the short and medium term it seems like lithium ion will continue to dominate. Last week sodium ion battery startup Bedrock Materials stated that it was shutting down and returning money to investors due to an inability to compete with lithium ion. Via LinkedIn:
We’re not out of cash. We’re not facing internal conflict. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Bedrock Materials has years of runway, our team is intact, our lab is producing some of its best work, and our investor relationships are strong. From the outside, everything is going right.
So, what gives?
When we founded Bedrock, we were responding to a very specific moment. Lithium prices had increased more than ten-fold. EV adoption was growing at 55% per year. And the Inflation Reduction Act had just passed, ushering in the strongest federal industrial policy in a generation.
In that context, sodium-ion batteries looked like the answer to a decade of forecast lithium scarcity. They rely on abundant, domestic feedstocks. They can be made in existing gigafactories. And while they’re slightly less energy-dense than lithium-ion, that tradeoff made perfect sense in a world where lithium was scarce and demand for EVs was growing.
But the world changed.
Since then, lithium prices crashed by more than 85%. Battery pack prices are set to fall by half. And the policy tailwinds we were counting on have shifted, as federal support for electric vehicles faces growing uncertainty.
Our modeling pointed to a clear outcome: in a world where lithium remains abundant, today’s sodium-ion batteries can’t compete on cost—even at commercial scale. Independent researchers at Stanford reached the same conclusion, noting that for sodium-ion to succeed, it would need either a breakthrough in energy density or to carve out niche applications based on unique performance traits.
Chinese ship fees
The big trade story this week is obviously the tariffs, but another significant story that’s getting somewhat less attention is the proposed high port fees for Chinese ships. From Ryan Petersen on Twitter:
On April 17th the U.S. Trade Representative's office is expected to impose fees of up to $1.5M per port call for ships made in China and for $500k to $1M if the ocean carrier owns a single ship made in China or even has one on order from a Chinese shipyard.
Ocean carriers have announced that to reduce the fees they will skip the smaller ports like Seattle, Oakland, Boston, Mobile, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc.
Some carriers have said they'll just move the capacity serving the U.S. to other trade lanes altogether.
This would be horrible for jobs in and around those ports, and really bad for companies, both importers and exporters, using those ports. Huge extra costs will be incurred as trucks and trains run hundreds of extra miles to the main ports on each cost.
Apparently this proposal also includes a much more extreme version of the Jones Act, mandating US exports must be carried on US ships within seven years:
The craziest part of the original proposal is a requirement that within 7 years 15% of U.S. exports must travel on a ship that's made in America and crewed by Americans
The U.S. did not produce any container ships in 2024. And the number we produce in any given year rounds to zero. The reason is that American made container ships of 3,000 TEUs cost the same price as the modern container ships from China of 24,000 TEUs
However, unlike the tariffs, the administration is apparently considering relaxing these new rules due to widespread industry opposition. Via Reuters:
President Donald Trump's administration is considering softening its proposed fee on China-linked ships visiting U.S. ports after a flood of negative feedback from industries that said the idea could be economically devastating, according to six sources.
Among the changes under consideration are delayed implementation and new fee structures designed to reduce the overall cost to visiting Chinese vessels, according to the six sources with knowledge of the matter.