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They look like a weapon. They work like a weapon. But they could save countless lives.
I confess that when I first heard about flamethrowing drones, I did not think they sounded like a good idea.
Being an American sometimes means learning that flamethrowers can get marked down for Black Friday (25% off! Bitcoin accepted!) and that a device that shoots literal fire is “not considered a firearm” in the United States. These discoveries did not leave me with the best first impression; drones struck me as untrustworthy enough before I learned they were being rigged to ignite things.
But for all that they sounds like they belong in a supervillain’s arsenal, fire-starting drones could also save countless lives. That’s because unmanned vehicles — especially ones that fly — just might be the next frontier in wildland firefighting.
“It’s still pretty new technology and there’s a long way to go before it’s being used everywhere,” Carrick Detweiler, the CEO and co-founder of Drone Amplified, stressed to me. He and his team of computer science and engineering professors and alums from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are focused on supplying major fire agencies with devices that can be used to safely conduct backburns and prescribed burns. They already have “hundreds” of such drones out in the field, with clients including the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, as well as comparable fire agencies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Rather than mount a whole flamethrower to a drone, the Drone Amplified device works by dropping small potassium permanganate shells that had been injected with anti-freeze, causing the shells to ignite, over a landscape. (The shells are known as “dragon eggs.”) This allows fire agencies to conduct controlled low-intensity burns in hard-to-reach locations to limit the available fuel for future wildfires. It also allows firefighters to start what are known as backburns, defensive “counter-fires” of last resort that block an advancing wildfire from moving into a new landscape, and that are traditionally started by hand with dip torches.
IGNIS 2.0 Introductionyoutu.be
Most important of all, though, Drone Amplified’s invention keeps the skies above wildfires in the domain of unmanned aircraft. Already this month in Australia, where wildfire season is just beginning, a fire-mapping plane crashed, killing all three people on board, including a 22-year-old New Yorker. In the U.S. this summer, a helicopter collision in California killed an additional three who’d been attending to a grass fire. By the CDC’s measure, about a quarter of all firefighting deaths are aviation-related; according to High Country News, 37 firefighters died in aerial accidents between 2005 and 2015, meaning “more than 200 ground firefighters would die every year” if earthbound casualty rates were the same.
“A bushfire creates its own weather system, right?” Adrian Hollis of the Perth-based digital technology company Remsense, which is developing an aerial ignition system to rival Drone Amplified’s in Australia, explained to me. The heat from a wildfire creates an updraft, which in addition to natural weather conditions, can result in “a lot of wind shear,” Hollis went on. “And because you are fighting a fire, you’re so low [in a plane or helicopter] that you’ve got no recovery altitude. So if you go into a stall or something happens, you’ve got no height to get out of trouble. That’s why it’s so dangerous.”
With wildfires being so unpredictable and deadly, you’d think there would have already been more advances in firefighting drones and robotics. But what makes fires so complicated for humans to fight also makes them difficult for the equipment. “The environment of fighting fires is probably one of the most challenging environments for any technology,” Carlos Viegas, a mechanical engineer at Portugal’s University of Coimbra and the head of the school’s Field Tech Lab, told me.
Viegas’ specialty when it comes to drone payload isn’t fire; it’s water. In Portugal, where backburning is less common, he’s helped to invent a drone that will drag a fire hose to douse hard-to-reach or dangerous fires, the design of which required overcoming the same obstacles of high heat, low visibility, ashy air, and unpredictable weather conditions that a fire-dropping drone might encounter. “This is why we are still fighting fires the way we used to fight for the last 50 or 100 years, almost,” he said of the tough conditions engineers have to overcome in drone design. “The progress, in this case, it’s very slow.”
Beyond safety concerns, there are, of course, financial and logistical considerations compelling the advancements, too. Wildfires aren’t always cooperative, for one thing; they often start in areas where it’s hard — or expensive — to shuttle people to the site. In Hollis’ line of work, in Australia, responding to a wildfire might require transporting fuel, a helicopter, and staff hundreds of miles into remote or roadless terrain, all of which makes a drone that weighs only about as much as a small golden retriever when fully loaded far more appealing.
A drone is also cheaper. One of Drone Amplified’s Alta X’s, outfitted with the Ignis fire-starting system, runs around $80,000, which might sound expensive if you’re an, um, home flame-throwing enthusiast, but for a fire agency, “the alternative is a helicopter that costs $10,000 to $20,000 a day to operate,” Detweiler said. “And then the added risk of the people who are up in helicopters.” The price tag has the further benefit of deterring pyromaniacs; though anyone can technically buy one of Drone Amplified’s products, which the FAA has carved out a dangerous weapon exemption for, Detweiler reassuringly pointed out that “few people have $80,000 just to spend” and “we do have pretty in-depth discussions, and we do trainings, with users.”
Besides, the people the drone really needs to win over are the firefighters, who are understandably distrustful of newfangled gadgets that could quit on them in a life-or-death situation. But according to Detweiler, they are coming around: “It’s been really exciting to see just how the fire community has started to embrace these new technologies because historically, they’re putting their lives on the line and they trust their shovel and their chainsaw,” he said. “New technology really needs to work to get them to start adopting it.”
It might also, one day, make them obsolete. Already, drones are being used for fire surveillance and mapping, and Viegas, the Portuguese mechanical engineer, showed me videos of other autonomous systems the Field Tech Lab is pioneering, including a mini bulldozer that can dig a fireline and drones equipped with remote sensors that can tell when a landscape is becoming overgrown, and thus more fire-prone, long before people on the ground can.
On the one hand, it’s incredible to be on the cusp of this moment, where a technology shift could save hundreds of firefighters’ lives by taking them out of difficult, dangerous landscapes in the decades to come. On the other — and as the existence of an online flamethrower retailer perhaps implies — these are powerful tools in the wrong hands, too. Armchair drone enthusiasts have already scuttled wildfire suppression efforts by flying cameras over burns, grounding official aerial fire missions in the process, not to mention that some 89% of wildfires are started by people. I don’t have an enormous amount of trust that someone, somewhere, won’t do something dumb with an expensive toy.
But the upsides certainly outweigh any edge cases my overactive imagination can dream up. Viegas, for one, sees only upsides: “I firmly believe that we are working towards a solution where we won’t need any firefighters in the terrain — we will just fight fires with unmanned means,” he said.
And while the “dangerous weapon” parallel is never too far away from something like a fire-starting drone, he suggested the embrace of the technology requires a simple reframe of the enemy. “In the war, you are seeing already everything is done by drones,” Viegas said. “I believe that in the war against fires, it’s going to be the same as well.”
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On prepurchase agreements, Al Gore, and Norway’s EVs
Current conditions: Ecuador’s government-enforced blackouts will begin tomorrow night as drought threatens hydroelectric plants • Storm Boris is causing flooding in parts of Italy • Montana could see very heavy rainfall and flash flooding today.
Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers, announced this morning a fourth round of prepurchase agreements, worth $4.5 million. The coalition facilitated agreements with nine suppliers to remove carbon from the atmosphere on behalf of five of Frontier’s buyers: Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, H&M Group, and Match. The removal projects are located across six countries and utilize a range of techniques, including rock weathering, direct air capture, and ocean alkalinity enhancement. In a press release, Frontier said “a significant number of companies in this purchase cycle are integrating carbon removal into existing large-scale industries. This strategy can reduce costs and accelerate scale-up relative to standalone carbon removal projects.”
Frontier
Brazil’s worst drought on record, now in its second year, has caused water levels in the rivers that run through the Amazon to fall to historic lows, and some have even dried up entirely. One key tributary that supplies the mighty Amazon River, the Solimoes, has water levels that are 14 feet below average for the first half of September. The drought is fueling numerous large fires, many of which were started by humans but have plenty of dry vegetation to keep them going.
Plumes of wildfire smoke hang over South America.NASA
According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, almost half of the Amazon fires are burning pristine forest. This is unusual, The New York Timesreported, and “means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires.” The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s most important carbon sinks. If it collapses, it could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis. Researchers with World Weather Attribution say climate change is the main driver of the Amazon’s ongoing drought. “Climate change is no longer something to worry about in the future, 10 or 20 years from now,” Greenpeace spokesperson Romulo Batista toldReuters. “It’s here and it’s here with much more force than we expected.”
A coalition of some of the world’s most prominent shipping and carrier companies is piloting the “first-ever U.S. over-the-road electrified corridor.” Participants include AIT Worldwide Logistics, DB Schenker, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo, who will drive their long-haul heavy-duty electric trucks along the I-10 corridor between L.A. and El Paso to identify pain points and share learnings in an effort to hasten the decarbonization of land freight. Terawatt Infrastructure will provide the charging infrastructure for the corridor with six of its own charging hubs. Terawatt’s website says it has 14 sites under development, four of which are expected to come online this year. Heavy-duty vehicles account for a quarter of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The new coalition is supported by the global nonprofit Smart Freight Centre.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s green asset management business, Generation Investment Management, put out its eighth annual Sustainability Trends Report this week. The paper is packed full of interesting insights (both uplifting and depressing), but one stands out. It says upgrading the power grid is “the critical issue to get the energy transition moving faster in the big, developed economies.” It includes this graphic showing the cumulative backlog of renewable-energy projects wanting to connect to the grid in the U.S.:
Generation Investment Management
Gore has been doing the media rounds this week. He told the Financial Times that a Trump victory in November “would be very bad.” “Most climate activists that I know in the United States believe that the single most important near-term decision America can make with regard to climate is who is the next president. It’s a bit of a Manichaean choice.” But, he added that the energy transition was, at this point, “unstoppable.”
In case you missed it: Norway has become the first country in the world to have more electric vehicles on the road than gas-powered cars. Diesel still reigns supreme in terms of registered vehicles, but the share of fully electric cars registered is now larger than the share of cars that run on gasoline. The director of the Norwegian road federation said he expects EVs will overtake diesel cars, too, by 2026. EVs already make up the vast majority (94%!) of new vehicle sales in Norway, and could very well approach 100% sometime next year.
A recent study finds that most people have a tendency to grossly underestimate the average carbon footprint of the richest individuals in society, while overestimating the carbon footprint of the poorest individuals.
Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.