Reading List for 11/23/24
Shipping disruption costs, roofing robots, fusion fundraising, sheet metal forming, and more.
Welcome to this week’s news and links roundup! This is a new format of the previous reading lists I’ve been doing, where I give a weekly roundup of news and links related to construction, housing, infrastructure, and building things. My plan is to paywall roughly 2/3rds of the content in each roundup, so for full access you can become a paid subscriber.
Shipping disruption costs
A new paper estimates the costs from the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal in 2021: $89 million to Maersk alone.
The model is applied to Maersk Line's East-West network, with 69 vessels (0.84m TEUs) affected by the blockage, either by having to reroute via the Cape of Good Hope or by the delays caused during and after the blockage. The results point to an additional 44,574 tonnes of CO2 produced by the extended trips and extra waiting times of the Maersk ships. The total losses incurred amount to $88.79m, comprising ship costs of $8.04m, environmental costs of $4.46m and, most strikingly of all, inventory-carrying costs of $76.29m, stemming from the high value of goods onboard ($26.5bn). Ship deviations also resulted in revenue losses for the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) of $5.86m, from Maersk crossings alone.
It only gives costs for Maersk, but if you do a straightforward scaling based on Maersk’s market share (around 14.6% of global container shipping), you get around $600 million worldwide costs.
Related, it’s estimated that the Houthis are making on the order of $2 billion a year by extorting shipping companies to allow ships to pass through the Red Sea without being attacked. This doesn’t include the estimated million dollars per voyage incurred by ships which instead divert around the horn of Africa.
Single-task construction robots
Renovate Robotics is a startup developing an automated roofing robot that can install shingles, joining the ranks of companies like Dusty and Canvas which are also automating very narrow portions of the construction process (wall layouts and drywall finishing, respectively). It will be interesting to see how progress in narrow-task automation compares to progress in more flexible solutions: things like humanoids, but also stuff like Physical Intelligence’s efforts to bring “general purpose AI into the real world”.
SolarAPP+
In other construction automation news, SolarAPP, a rooftop solar permitting software that can automatically issue a permit, has now been adopted by 181 jurisdictions, who have collectively issued 46,500 permits using it. This is significant, but the time savings here is less than I expected, about 1 hour per permit issued.
Fusion fundraising
According to Fusion Energy Base, fusion energy investments in 2024 are over $2.5 billion, the second-highest year on record. Interesting to see how China has stepped up its fusion investments over the last several years. (I wrote about long-term progress in fusion energy here.)
Prison air conditioning
Apparently 2/3rds of Texas prisons don’t have air conditioning:
Every summer, Texas prisoners and officers live and work in temperatures that regularly soar well into triple digits. More than two-thirds of the state’s 100 prisons don’t have air conditioning in most living areas, putting tens of thousands of men and women under the state’s care in increasingly dangerous conditions. Climate change is expected to bring even hotter summers.
The heat has killed prisoners and cost millions of taxpayer dollars in wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits, with a recent fatal heat stroke reported in 2018. In 2011 — a blisteringly hot summer that the state climatologist has compared to the current one — at least 10 Texas prisoners died of heat stroke, according to court reports. The death count is likely higher since scientists have found extreme heat is often overlooked as a cause of death.