Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Electric Viking" channel.

  1. You have one of the few smart answers I can see here. Clearly a lot of people here have NEVER worked in the mining industry or have NO IDEA about manufacturing, but then most of these idiots spouting nonsense have NO IDEA because they have never been involved in manufacturing or been involved in mining and I'VE DONE BOTH. I used to work in the Australian automotive sector before it shut down and have since worked in the Australian mining sector in control systems and automation. 1: There's a giant difference between finding a deposit, getting it properly assessed and then being able to mine it. Circa 2006 I worked on the construction of the Ravensthorpe Nickel project. BHP spent $3.5 Billion on the project. It was laterite nickel which is a bitch to process, but it was justified by the quality of the deposit and the value of Nickel. BHP did NOT complete a full drilling test pattern and the deposit was found to be NOWHERE near as good as the PR claimed. The mine was closed after about 18months and sold for less than 1/7th ($500 Million) its. The Lesson: Don't believe the PR hype even when its from a major player. 2: You absolutely do need Nickel for batteries, just as you need copper for the electrical cabling in an EV just as you need all the other metals, glass and plastics. Go and look at your car and see how much stuff is actually in one. If you have ever been in the plants where they make all those bits that go into a car you'll quickly understand that it takes a whole range of raw materials and lots of energy to make the bits that make a car and all of that uses lots of energy. The quickest way we can reduce emissions is to reduce how much energy we consume as a society. THE AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING SECTOR is one of the largest energy consumers because it not only uses a lot of energy making the cars it uses a lot of energy getting the raw materials out of the ground and processing that into the raw feed stock to make the parts the cars are made from. The best thing we can do is NOT replace old cars with new cars but replace the drive systems in old cars with EV and Hybrid systems. It will save huge amounts of energy and resources while keeping millions of people employed. BUILDING EFFICIENCY: The other great (and inefficient) user of energy are BIG BUILDINGS. Mark Blyth the political economist from Brown U. pointed out this a couple of years ago. Some engineer worked out that just triple glazing all of America's buildings would employ 1000's and 1000's of people for well over a decade and reduce America's emissions so much that meeting the Paris goals is easy because you can then turn off a bunch of dirty old coal fired power stations. All those big giant glass boxes are designed by architects to look pretty NOT by engineers to be efficient. Not only would it creat employment but raise the asset values of all those buildings as well as reduce the power costs all the tenants have making them more profitable. I'd like to hear an economist claim that's not a good idea.
    4
  2. Clearly a lot of people here have NEVER worked in the mining industry or have NO IDEA about manufacturing, but then most of these idiots spouting nonsense have NO IDEA because they have never been involved in manufacturing or been involved in mining and I'VE DONE BOTH. I used to work in the Australian automotive sector before it shut down and have since worked in the Australian mining sector in control systems and automation. 1: There's a giant difference between finding a deposit, getting it properly assessed and then being able to mine it. Circa 2006 I worked on the construction of the Ravensthorpe Nickel project. BHP spent $3.5 Billion on the project. It was laterite nickel which is a bitch to process, but it was justified by the quality of the deposit and the value of Nickel. BHP did NOT complete a full drilling test pattern and the deposit was found to be NOWHERE near as good as the PR claimed. The mine was closed after about 18months and sold for less than 1/7th ($500 Million) its. The Lesson: Don't believe the PR hype even when its from a major player. 2: You absolutely do need Nickel for batteries, just as you need copper for the electrical cabling in an EV just as you need all the other metals, glass and plastics. Go and look at your car and see how much stuff is actually in one. If you have ever been in the plants where they make all those bits that go into a car you'll quickly understand that it takes a whole range of raw materials and lots of energy to make the bits that make a car and all of that uses lots of energy. The quickest way we can reduce emissions is to reduce how much energy we consume as a society. THE AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING SECTOR is one of the largest energy consumers because it not only uses a lot of energy making the cars it uses a lot of energy getting the raw materials out of the ground and processing that into the raw feed stock to make the parts the cars are made from. The best thing we can do is NOT replace old cars with new cars but replace the drive systems in old cars with EV and Hybrid systems. It will save huge amounts of energy and resources while keeping millions of people employed. BUILDING EFFICIENCY: The other great (and inefficient) user of energy are BIG BUILDINGS. Mark Blyth the political economist from Brown U. pointed out this a couple of years ago. Some engineer worked out that just triple glazing all of America's buildings would employ 1000's and 1000's of people for well over a decade and reduce America's emissions so much that meeting the Paris goals is easy because you can then turn off a bunch of dirty old coal fired power stations. All those big giant glass boxes are designed by architects to look pretty NOT by engineers to be efficient. Not only would it creat employment but raise the asset values of all those buildings as well as reduce the power costs all the tenants have making them more profitable. I'd like to hear an economist claim that's not a good idea.
    4
  3. Sorry if I am going to be a spoiler in this but Viking is playing a hype game. Yes this would be great for Australia IF IT HAPPENS. I am a Melbourne born lad and WOULD LOVE TO SEE this happen. I am also an engineer and I have 30+ years of experience in control systems, automation and robotics. I worked in the manufacturing sector for over a decade including in Melbourne but have spent most of the last 20 years in the mining and resources sector. There are some things to this that have me very concerned especially since the collapse of the Sun Cable project near Darwin. That project had a well credentialled team and backing of 2 billionaires AND IT STILL COLLAPSED. There are some monstrous issues with power generation and distribution around the world AND THERE ARE NO SIMPLE FIXES TO ANY OF IT. So here's my list of things to be cautious about. 1) Why is Viking claiming that NOT using Nickel or Cobalt awesome when Australia produces both? We are the 3rd largest producer of Cobalt, 5th biggest Nickel producer with the 2nd largest reserves of both. So how is NOT using what we have in abundance a good thing? What has Russia or China got to do with any of that? 2) David Collard might be a local Geelong boy who's done very well in New York and made partner at PwC but his degree is in accounting NOT ENGINEERING. There is NOTHING that says he knows anything about manufacturing. I'd expect any body with his sort of background to know there is a huge undersupply for batteries and energy storage. They should also be able to work out there is NOT enough lithium supply to do both the cars and stationary storage. That's NOT and Australian thing that's a world thing. 3) Recharge Industries has NOT PRODUCED ANY BATTERIES ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. That's one thing Viking has right, they are a start-up. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it is something people should be aware of. 4) Citing Robyn Denholm as an authority on ANYTHING is not wise. Go and look up the Channel "Common Sense Skeptic" here on YouTube. She was sued by the Tesla shareholders over the Solar City fiasco and ended up settling out of court with them. CSS goes through her court testimony and its pretty clear she's nothing but a professional boardroom sitter. She's very good at getting appointed company boards. 5) The Recharge CEO Rob Fitzpatrick also has NO obvious EXPERINCE in manufacturing but sits on or advises many company boards. His LinkedIn page shows 14 in just the last 10 years and he is still on several along with Recharge. I am warry about this with good cause having been burned on a couple of start-ups and watched other engineers get burned on start-ups. I'm NOT saying don't work for these people or get involved. Just realise that even with billionaire backers projects can fail and fail in the blink of an eye. Just look at what happened with Sun Cable.
    2
  4.  @blackknight4996  Collard is promoted as a successful PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) guy. Just today one of their ex-people was caught leaking confidential government information back to PwC. That's before we get to the subject that PwC are one of the worlds "Big 4" auditing firms who OK all the tax avoidance of major corporations around the world. Being successful at PwC might mean anything from shyster to outright thief.
    2
  5.  @sdfswords  We actually have a combination of several things including parts of the English caste system. We don't lack entrepreneurship at all. We have all 3 basic types. 1) Scam artists who want to take all your money; and 2) Narcissists who actually have something but still want to take all your money; and 3) The incredibly rare who not only have something BUT WANT to take others along for the ride. Like everywhere else in the world we have too many of the first 2 kinds and very, very few of the 3rd. Australia's biggest issue is the insane concept that economists know what they are talking about. Its NOT a matter of what's the missing magic, but a case of what's the shite in the system. 1 Word -> Economists. We have taken the worst stupidity of the clown brigade out of places like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE. Like in other countries, they have levelled chunks of our industrial base, smashed our energy industries, destroyed our river systems and effectively nuked our housing sector. One of our worst is an Australian born Harvard educated clown who did EXACTLY the same thing to our rivers & water systems as one of his fellow Harvard clowns did to the Texas energy sector. You know the most energy rich state in the world where children freeze to death in their beds because they don't have the energy to warm their home. We also imported a Yale to head the economics department at one of our top Universities. She's an outright sociopath as well as a fraud and liar. How economics is practised and how its taught is going to be one of the biggest shitfights of the next few years and maybe one of the biggest ever.
    2
  6. Having worked in the Australian auto sector in the past the one thing management no longer wants to EVER hear is problems. Half the reason we have the supply chain issues we have is because a new management strategy emerged in the late 90s, festered during the 2000s and metastasized in the 2010s into the current shitfest. Its called the "Unless you going to tell me how I will get my bonus this quarter you're fired!" management strategy. It hasn't worked out well for anyone.
    2
  7. I'm an engineer who's worked in both our manufacturing and mining industries. I left manufacturing because I could see it was doomed. As far as electric Viking goes. I hate to slam someone but this guy gets a lot of his basic technical facts wrong. I have tried helping him out and found he's like most YouTubers only interested in clicks. I consider him just another clown in a field of clowns. While the thermal coal industry is doomed because we just can't keep burning the stuff the coking coal industry isn't going anywhere because we still need steel. No matter what you've heard the green steel thing is mostly myth. You can't use hydrogen instead of coal because you end up with garbage that's too brittle to use for anything. But that's NOT Australia's real problem. I did a small consulting job in 2016 and was stunned to find out how bad our energy plans were. 8 years later they are still a joke. The source of the problem is AEMO and that pack of clowns (mostly economists) need to be sacked and I am serious on that. The actual problem is we need to replace our older power stations and upgrade the grid anyway. The whole energy transition was always going to happen for the very simple reason that THINGS WEAR OUT. No matter how well anything is built and no matter how good the maintenance is eventually everything wears out. Power stations and energy grids are no different. It took me a couple of years listening to some fairly smart people to work out why economists have this insane need to be involved in things they have no training in or understanding of and its quite simple. Economists consider everyone else is a problem that they have to manage. They really do see you, me and everyone else as a problem. Even crazier is they have done it all across the developed world and until we can get them out of the road NOTHING anyone wants to do can happen. And its not just energy they have gotten into health care, education and everything else they can get into. That's why there's so much frustration with governments. No matter who anyone elects the economists step in and interfere because in their minds we only elect problems and they have to manage them. In Australia we need to replace over 30GW of older power BECAUSE ITS OLD with new and more power to feed a growing population as well as upgrade the grid to handle that new power. Unfortunately we have this group of clowns who wont get out of the way and clowns like Electric Viking who add to the noise and confusion.
    1
  8. Look Viking, I am totally empathetic to your family situation having been their myself, but I'd be negligent as an engineer who has worked in the automotive industry not to call out the hype in this video. You need to tone down "the Elon will save the human race nonsense." I did my degree in aerospace but have done 30+ years in industrial control systems and automation. I worked in Australia's automotive sector building automated work cells before going off to the mining and resources sector. I have spent a lot of my personal time in the last few years looking into economics because of all the clowns with economic degrees interfering with projects. There are over 1 billion cars in the world and almost 500 million trucks. It is going to take decades to swap them over from fossil fuels. Then there is the EXTRA POWER GENERATION NEEDED to power them. There's all the Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Phosphate and other minerals needed to make the batteries and motors and other stuff. NOBODY KNOWS what the operating costs of electric trucks because NOBODY has been operating them long enough. You and many others in the "technology will save us" and "disruption is magic" brigade of cheerleaders need to wake up that all this stuff will TAKE TIME. LETS NOT FORGET that Elon Musk himself promised these trucks and fully 100% self driving cars and neither has come close to fruition. He promised these trucks would start being delivered customers more than 4 years ago and he still hasn't built the factory to make them. Look after your family NOT Elon Musk. Best wishes to your wife and kids.
    1
  9.  @darylfoster7944  That is one of the great questions. Why aren't we already triple glazing every one of those giant glass boxes? To be honest I don't know, but then common sense and corporate decisions don't always line up.
    1
  10.  @darylfoster7944  On putting electric or hybrid drivetrains into legacy cars. You're right there is absolutely no incentive for existing car manufacturers to supply new drive trains. They make their money selling new cars not parts for cars. I worked in the Australian auto industry when we had one and as far as they were concerned they hate spare parts. That hate having to make them, they hate having to store them and they hate having to supply them. Its why they charge so much and why its so profitable to take wrecked cars and strip them of good parts that can be re-sold. But since Australia no longer has a car industry it actually makes sense for us to develop an electric and hybrid electric upgrade industry. In a country like Japan with their laws on vehicle ownership it makes no sense. In America and Europe it makes sense to have some industry developed as PART of an overall strategy, but not have it be the main solution. If you did you'd kill the existing manufacturing base causing mass unemployment and that's the economic disaster everyone needs to avoid. These are things each country needs to look at and work out what's best for them, but we all need to work on it.
    1
  11.  @darylfoster7944  On lithium you need to take comments by Elon Musk the way any sensible person does and consider it bullshite. After working in manufacturing I went to the mining sector where I have been for most of the last 20 years. Everyone thinks mineral extraction is like what you see on Alaskan gold mining shows - ITS NOT. Gold is one of the very few metals that exists as metal most form oxides and other compounds. The weirdest and funniest story I have was my introduction on an Alumina refinery. They simply told a room full of people that if we couldn't handle being stripped naked and held under a cold shower for 1/2 and hour to FK-OFF and they were that blunt. To dissolve the aluminum out of bauxite you use caustic soda at temperatures over 140C (280F) and high pressure. If any of that gets on you then you are under a cold shower immediately or you're FKD. I also worked on mine sites where the power station burns sulphur. Sulphur burns like coal except you get SO2 not CO2. With a catalytic converter you get SO3 and mix that with 100% pure water to get H2SO4 better known as sulphuric acid. You then use the H2SO4 to dissolve the nickel, copper,... out of the ore. I have been on sites where the H2SO4 was 100% pure, which freaked me out until the chemistry boys explained how it works. So trust me I know how much Elon is full of shite on the subject.
    1
  12. *EVERYONE ELSE IS GETTING TIRED OF ELON MUSK SUCK-UPS EXCUSING EVERYTHING HE DOES*. Unlike other Musk detractors I will defend the GOOD Things he has done. Right now any and every discussion on Elon Musk is either 100% pro or 100% con and many of these discussions are NOT that simple AND most require some nuance. FOR EXAMPLE: I am an aerospace engineer (by degree) and I hate the Musk haters who do NOT recognise the fact that SpaceX have saved the West's manned space programs from the disaster that the Shuttle became. While on one hand the Space Shuttle was an extraordinary technological achievement in that they made a reusable space plane work, on the other hand it was also a colossal sponge of both financial and human resources. It enabled more people to go to space than any other system but it starved so many other programs of resources it the single biggest reason we haven't gone past LEO for 50+ years. When you compare SpaceX's Falcon system with Crew Dragon to Boeings Starliner the difference could NOT be more obvious as to how well Gwen Shotwell and her team have done with the Falcon series. HOWEVER Elon's Starship is a bigger white elephant than the Space Shuttle and Starliner combined. Go and watch Destin who is also an aerospace engineer (on the channel Smarter EveryDay) pulled apart the mission profile for Artemis using Starship. You can see that in the video titled "I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293" The launch facility of Texas is so incredibly dangerous I think (my opinion) its only a matter of time before they have a major accident. It would NOT PASS a HAZOP study in any other industry. The fuel storage tanks are not only too close to the launch platform they are unprotected as was PROVEN in the first launch when they were struck by debris. They were all incredibly lucky there wasn't a major incident. After that is the actual launch platform itself which does not have diversion trench for the blast. To not follow standard practices that are well tried and proven is ridiculous. His involvement in politics is all over the place. One moment he's a free speech absolutist the next moment he's cutting off all access to various people because of political influence. And these things HIGLIGHT the problem with everything Elon Musk. His fans think he is the techno Messiah who will save the world. His detractors think he's the worst person on the planet. Reality is that its a lot more complex than that.
    1
  13. Clearly a lot of people here have NEVER worked in the mining industry or have NO IDEA about manufacturing, but then most of these idiots spouting nonsense have NO IDEA because they have never been involved in manufacturing or been involved in mining and I'VE DONE BOTH. I used to work in the Australian automotive sector before it shut down and have since worked in the Australian mining sector in control systems and automation. 1: There's a giant difference between finding a deposit, getting it properly assessed and then being able to mine it. Circa 2006 I worked on the construction of the Ravensthorpe Nickel project. BHP spent $3.5 Billion on the project. It was laterite nickel which is a bitch to process, but it was justified by the quality of the deposit and the value of Nickel. BHP did NOT complete a full drilling test pattern and the deposit was found to be NOWHERE near as good as the PR claimed. The mine was closed after about 18months and sold for less than 1/7th ($500 Million) its. The Lesson: Don't believe the PR hype even when its from a major player. 2: You absolutely do need Nickel for batteries, just as you need copper for the electrical cabling in an EV just as you need all the other metals, glass and plastics. Go and look at your car and see how much stuff is actually in one. If you have ever been in the plants where they make all those bits that go into a car you'll quickly understand that it takes a whole range of raw materials and lots of energy to make the bits that make a car and all of that uses lots of energy. The quickest way we can reduce emissions is to reduce how much energy we consume as a society. THE AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING SECTOR is one of the largest energy consumers because it not only uses a lot of energy making the cars it uses a lot of energy getting the raw materials out of the ground and processing that into the raw feed stock to make the parts the cars are made from. The best thing we can do is NOT replace old cars with new cars but replace the drive systems in old cars with EV and Hybrid systems. It will save huge amounts of energy and resources while keeping millions of people employed. BUILDING EFFICIENCY: The other great (and inefficient) user of energy are BIG BUILDINGS. Mark Blyth the political economist from Brown U. pointed out this a couple of years ago. Some engineer worked out that just triple glazing all of America's buildings would employ 1000's and 1000's of people for well over a decade and reduce America's emissions so much that meeting the Paris goals is easy because you can then turn off a bunch of dirty old coal fired power stations. All those big giant glass boxes are designed by architects to look pretty NOT by engineers to be efficient. Not only would it creat employment but raise the asset values of all those buildings as well as reduce the power costs all the tenants have making them more profitable. I'd like to hear an economist claim that's not a good idea.
    1
  14. Its called BASA - Basic Australian Stupidity and Arrogance. Our business executives are insanely stupid and insanely arrogant. So long as they get their bonuses they don't give a damn about the rest of the country. About 20-30 years ago we used to talk a lot about "value adding" but the execs found it was better to value add in China than here. FYI - I'm a Melbourne boy but did my degree at U. Illinois where one of the real founders of Tesla went and 2 of the 3 YouTube founders went as well as Marc Andreessen who helped create the first proper Web Browser - Netscape. Our current Australian economy is a lot like SoCal where its just easier to value add in Texas or Mexico like the car companies or in China like Apple do. Just like there's a push in America we also need to bring a lot of our manufacturing and supply chains back home. I call COVID "Acid Flu" because it stripped away a lot of economic grime and crap and showed what was underneath. This one looks and sounds good but there's a couple of things to be very cautious about. the biggest issue is NONE of the senior people on this seem to have any experience in manufacturing. I'm an engineer whose worked in manufacturing and that's NOT good. The Cobalt and Nickel Viking raves about is stupid because we are the 3rd biggest supplier of cobalt and 5th biggest in Nickel and have the 2nd largest reserves of both. How can NOT using what we have lots of be good?
    1