Reading List 07/19/25
Chinese shipbuilding, air quality around the world, construction equipment automation, a worldwide map of lightning strikes, 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 Chinese shipbuilding, air quality around the world, construction equipment automation, a worldwide map of lightning strikes, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
China shipbuilding reading list
This week’s essay was a history of shipbuilding in the People’s Republic of China. If you’re interested in reading more about the topic, here’s a few books I recommend. Unfortunately, there’s very little in the way of good, complete histories of Chinese shipbuilding: what you mostly have are texts that give a snapshot of what the industry looked like at a given point in time. Put enough of those together, and you start to get a more complete picture.
China as a Maritime Power by David Muller, 1983 - This is a maritime history of China that covers from the formation of the PRC up to around 1981. It’s mostly focused on naval issues, but it has some substantial portions on merchant shipping and shipbuilding as well. This was the best source I found on the early decades of PRC shipbuilding.
China in the World Market by Thomas Moore, 2002 - This is an exploration of how China entered world markets, which uses two industries, textiles and shipbuilding, as case studies. It has some good information on the early history of Chinese shipbuilding, but it’s most useful for the 1980s and a bit for the early 90s. The only real drawback here is that it’s written to explore economic issues, not as a history, which makes it a bit disorganized if you’re trying to understand the sequence of events at work.
A Comprehensive Survey of China’s Dynamic Shipbuilding Industry by Gabriel Collins and Michael Grubb, 2008 - This is a US Naval War College report about the state of China’s shipbuilding industry around the 2005-2008 period, right as it began to expand but prior to the post-financial crisis contraction.
China’s Naval Shipbuilding by Andrew Erickson, 2017 - This is another naval-focused snapshot of China’s shipbuilding capabilities circa 2015, that also has some good information on merchant shipbuilding.
Air quality rankings
IQAir, a website that seems to be sort of a clearinghouse for all things air quality related, and operates “ the world’s largest free real-time air quality monitoring platform”, has a ranking of the best and worst cities and countries around the world in terms of air quality. The list is based on the Air Quality Index (AQI), which measures concentrations of various pollutants like ozone, carbon monoxide, and particulates. The precise way AQI is calculated seems to vary from country to country, but here’s how the EPA calculates it (via Wikipedia):
IQAir has real-time rankings of various cities, but there seems to be a lot of short term variation in air quality, and so the rankings are dominated by whatever cities are having particularly good/bad air on a given day. The historical rankings, which average over months/years, seem more informative. On this ranking cities in India and Pakistan dominate the list of the worst cities. The list of best cities is dominated by a bunch of tiny cities in Hawaii.
Solar PV on ships
Here’s an idea that I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t seen tried before: installing solar panels on a cargo ship. From PV Magazine:
A PV system has gone into operation on a new cargo ship developed by HGK Shipping and Salzgitter AG, supplying power directly to the vessel’s propulsion system. A total of 192 solar modules provide electricity to both the onboard low-voltage system and the high-voltage propulsion unit.
Wattlab, a Dutch solar company, said that this is the first PV system in the world to feed solar power directly into a freighter’s electric propulsion…
Under optimal conditions, the PV array delivers up to 35 kW and is fully integrated into the propulsion system of the 135-meter-long freighter. It operates alongside four diesel generators that power the electric drive system.
This ship seems to use diesel-electric propulsion (where a diesel engine drives an electric generator, which provides electric power to an electric motor which drives the propeller), which obviously dovetails nicely with solar PV-generated electricity. But while I believe few cargo ships use diesel-electric drive, they all need to provide electrical power for onboard systems, which seems like it would still make solar PV useful on the margin. On container ships this would be tricky (since the deck is covered with containers), but on tankers and bulk carriers it seems like it could work (though the idea of solar panels on top of a crude carrier or a bulk coal carrier is very funny).
Camp Mystic FEMA flood maps
Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp in Texas that lost 27 campers and counselors following flash floods earlier this month, apparently had lobbied FEMA to remove many of its buildings from FEMA’s 100-year flood maps. Via the Associated Press:
In response to an appeal, FEMA in 2013 amended the county’s flood map to remove 15 of the camp’s buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week’s flood.
After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood.
Campers have said the cabins at Cypress Lake withstood significant damage, but those nicknamed “the flats” at the Guadalupe River camp were inundated.
Experts say Camp Mystic’s requests to amend the FEMA map could have been an attempt to avoid the requirement to carry flood insurance, to lower the camp’s insurance premiums or to pave the way for renovating or adding new structures under less costly regulations.
FEMA’s flood maps for the US are available here. If you’re ever buying property, I recommend looking to see whether it’s on or near a flood zone before you do.