Construction Physics

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Construction Physics
Construction Physics
Reading List 07/26/25

Reading List 07/26/25

An important FAA rule change, construction microfactories, recycling data center waste heat, the rise and fall of MATLAB, and more.

Brian Potter
Jul 26, 2025
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Construction Physics
Construction Physics
Reading List 07/26/25
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Central control building for Kalyon Karapinar solar farm, Turkey, via @sci_fi_infra.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at an important FAA rule change, construction microfactories, recycling data center waste heat, the rise and fall of MATLAB, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

FAA MOSAIC rule change

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulates aircraft in the US, and those regulations exist on a continuum of strictness depending on the type of aircraft and the passengers it will carry. On the ultra-strict end, you have regulations for commercial airliners (Part 25 of Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations), which are designed to be strict enough to limit catastrophic events to 1 every billion flight hours. On the less-strict end, you have things like experimental aircraft and ultralights, which don’t need to be built to any particular set of standards (and in the case of ultralights don’t even require a pilots license to fly).

In the middle of the regulation continuum is a category called Light Sport Aircraft. Aircraft in this category have more regulation than experimental aircraft (they must be built to consensus standards), but less than commercial aircraft or general aviation aircraft. The FAA recently updated its rules around light sport aircraft (known as Modernization Of Special Airworthiness Certification or MOSAIC) to greatly expand what sorts of aircraft fall under this category. Eli Dourado, in a post on the proposed rule change from 2023, explains why this is a big deal:

After World War II, expectations for general aviation were sky high. The war had driven significant advancements in aeronautics, navigation, and communication technologies. There were a large number of military surplus planes and a lot of trained pilots returning from the war. For someone alive in 1945, who had perhaps witnessed the social transformation wrought by the automobile, it would seem only natural that general aviation would be the next step in personal transportation.

Of course, it didn’t play out that way. The government significantly tightened certification requirements for general aviation in 1945 and 1965. With the market flooded with cheap, surplus military aircraft, it was hard for manufacturers to make money investing in new, more advanced models. And, of course, piloting an airplane using conventional flight controls is not as simple as driving a car, requiring significantly more skill, with lapses in attention more catastrophic.

If general aviation is to make a comeback, something like the MOSAIC rule is a prerequisite. By making a category of aircraft that doesn’t require type certification, is actually useful for transportation (250 knots and 4 seats), and can be flown with less skill via simplified flight controls, FAA is opening the door to a bigger market and vastly more innovation.

Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.

Meanwhile, simplified flight controls and making LSAs actually useful could greatly increase demand for these aircraft as transportation. That increased demand feeds directly into manufacturing investment and the pace of iteration. The more progress there is in making these small planes really great, the more the demand for them will increase, creating a flywheel effect.

If we can get LSAs into mass manufacturing, production costs of the airframe could go down further…

See also Eli on Twitter about the new rule.

World’s biggest dam

Today the world’s biggest dam by hydroelectric capacity, and the biggest power station in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China, which can generate 22.5 GW of electric power. (By comparison, a large nuclear reactor can generate around 1 GW of electric power, and the Hoover Dam has around 2 GW of generation capacity.) Now China has started construction on an even bigger hydroelectric dam in Tibet, the Motuo Hydropower Station. When complete, it will have an estimated capacity of 60 GW of electric power. Via the BBC:

Chinese authorities have begun constructing what will be the world's largest hydropower dam in Tibetan territory, in a project that has sparked concerns from India and Bangladesh.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang presided over a ceremony marking the start of construction on the Yarlung Tsangpo river on Saturday, according to local media.

The river flows through the Tibetan plateau. The project has attracted criticism for its potential impact on millions of Indians and Bangladeshis living downriver, as well as the surrounding environment and local Tibetans.

Beijing says the scheme, costing an estimated 1.2tn yuan ($167bn; £125bn), will prioritise ecological protection and boost local prosperity.

When completed, the project - also known as the Motuo Hydropower Station - will overtake the Three Gorges dam as the world's largest, and could generate three times more energy.

Construction microfactories

An idea that is becoming more and more popular with construction startups is the use of microfactories. The idea is, rather than using a large, expensive, conventional factory to produce buildings, you can use flexible manufacturing technology (robots, CNC machines, etc.) within a small footprint factory that can be quickly setup and torn down near the jobsite. The hope is that this will let you get many of the benefits of factory production (automation and improved efficiency of previously labor-intensive operations), without many of the drawbacks (transportation costs, expensive factory overheads). On Thesis Driven, Nick Durham gives an overview of the companies that are experimenting with microfactories:

A shippable microfactory is a compact, self-contained production unit designed for deployment on or near the site of building construction. It combines automation, modular equipment, and digital coordination to enable localized, on-demand manufacturing. It can perform tasks like cutting, framing, and assembling parts using software-driven automation.

Each project’s digital design feeds directly into the microfactory’s machines, enabling components to be custom-fabricated on demand. The key distinction from a traditional prefab plant is scale and mobility: a conventional facility is large, stationary, and optimized for high throughput (but comes with high overhead), whereas a microfactory is small, movable, and deployed per project.

By trading size for agility, microfactories deliver many of the same benefits – precision, speed, controlled environment—in a temporary, on-site setting. Once a project is finished, the microfactory can be packed up and shipped out for the next job. Portability is the real breakthrough. In a sense, the factory itself becomes a productized tool that a builder can deploy as needed, rather than a permanent asset that must be kept busy at all times.

Wood Mackenzie on Big Beautiful Bill energy impacts

Energy consulting company Wood Mackenzie has an analysis of how the tax credit changes in the Big Beautiful Bill will affect energy infrastructure construction. Wind and solar buildout is projected to be reduced, as is energy storage due to rules about foreign sourcing. Oil, gas, and coal all benefit:

The balance of incentives in the US tax system was tilted strongly in favour of low-carbon energy by the IRA. It has now been levelled out.

Wood Mackenzie analysts have published a detailed assessment of the impact of the new legislation on every energy sector. The big picture is that we expect investment in wind and solar power to fall well short of what it would have been if the IRA incentives had remained in place.

It will not collapse completely. Investment in renewables will be supported by growing electricity demand, state and corporate policies, challenges to the growth of gas-fired generation, and a levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) that is highly competitive in many places.

But over 2025-2030, wind and solar installations will be about 100 gigawatts lower than if the IRA incentives had remained in place, Wood Mackenzie analysts predict. That would lead to total installed wind and solar capacity growing by about 25% over that period, instead of a projected 55% growth under the IRA framework.

The impact will vary widely across technologies and across sectors. For solar, we expect a surge in installations in 2025-2026, as developers rush to remain eligible for tax credits. But on a 10-year view, we expect installations to be 17% lower than in our previous base case forecast.

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