The Federal Reserve acknowledges peak oil

Coming late to this, but in case you missed it, Lou Grinzo notes that another piece of the government has reconciled itself to the inevitable—even if it is written in almost Greenspannish understatement.

Go read it.  ¶ 7/09/2009 11:01:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Steorn: Epilogue

In an announcement which should have surprised no one (least of all me), a jury of international experts has declared that Steorn's "free energy" device has shown no evidence of working.  FTA:

“The situation was we had engaged them in February 2007 and went through a process with them,” Mr McCarthy said. Two years have passed however and the jury clearly decided that enough was enough.

It posted an announcement on its website http://stjury.ning.com that it was disbanding.

“The unanimous verdict of the jury is that Steorn’s attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy,” it stated. “The jury is therefore ceasing work.”

On the other hand, the scam continues.

The dream lives on, however, as Steorn prepares to begin licensing its Orbo technology “definitely before the end of the year”, Mr McCarthy said.

The company is inviting 300 engineering companies to sign a developer licence agreement, giving them free access to the technology.

I invite the Irish government to charge McCarthy and the other principals with fraud.  ¶ 7/06/2009 11:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

The 2012 oil crunch vs. Cash for Clunkers

Via the UAE comes a warning from Saudi Arabia:  crude oil prices are likely to spike above last year's record high.  "If others do not begin to invest similarly in new capacity expansion projects, we could see within two to three years another price spike similar to, or worse than, what we witnessed in 2008."

This is no surprise to anyone who's been following the peak oil news, and it seems very unlikely that anything can be done on the supply side.  If oil production is to keep pace with the historically rising consumption curve, we'll need 20-30 million barrels per day of new production by 2030 just to keep pace with depletion elsewhere.  That's several new Saudi Arabias.

Where would this capacity come from?  Not Mexico; its fields are sliding fast (Cantarell at 30%/year) and Pemex has neither the capability to develop difficult new resources nor the legal ability to partner with private oil companies.  Not Venezuela; Chavez steals anything that comes into his country.  Not Canada; the tar sands are terribly expensive to develop and are unlikely to hit 3 million bbl/day.  Not Russia, which is past peak and following the same route as the USA's lower 48.  Not Brazil; even if the 8 billion barrels in Tupi can be pumped at an initial 10%/year, that is only about 2 million bbl/day.  And certainly not ANWR or the Bakken shale, which are good for perhaps 2 mmbbl/day total.

Non-solutions = we're screwed

There is NO solution to this problem on the supply side.  The supply needed to continue BAU does not exist; oil prices high enough to expand supply will instead collapse the economy before that supply can be brought to market.  The only way this challenge will be met is on the demand side, by shifting to other energy sources where it is feasible and aggressive economizing where it is not.

What's depressing is the utter inadequacy of our government response.  Let's take this "Cash for Clunkers" bill (HR2751).  It would give a $3500 rebate for the purchase of a vehicle achieving as little as two miles per gallon more than the one traded in.  A five MPG increase nets $4500.

This will help clear dealer lots, but it won't do squat for our real problems:

• It will not significantly reduce our fuel consumption; we will still be burning far too much to accomplish too little.
• It will not fix the bad production mix of the auto companies; it adds demand for guzzlers only slightly less thirsty than the ones they'd replace.  But worst of all,
• It will leave us with a brand-new fleet of guzzlers which will not be paid off for years at the exact time when we are facing radical increases in the cost of oil.

It's almost as if this bill was intended to screw the country.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation

Let's try an example here.  Suppose that Joe Sixpack has a 10-year-old pickup that's EPA rated at 17 MPG combined, which he drives 20 miles one-way to work 250 days a year plus 50 miles each weekend.  His fuel consumption is 741 gallons per year.  He has a choice of trading it for a Model X achieving 19 MPG plus $3500, a Model Y achieving 22 MPG plus $4500, or a Prius netting 50 MPG plus $4500.

At historical gasoline prices of perhaps $1.50/gallon, his fuel expenses were around $1100/year or under $100/month; this is quite bearable.  But at today's local price of about $2.80/gallon, this jumps to $2075/year or $173/month; the extra $80/month has to come from somewhere, which is either his non-existent savings or the consumer economy.  This is a substantial hit; if Joe makes $40,000/year, the increase is roughly 2% of his income.  Things aren't much better with the trade-ins.  The Model X's thirst costs $1857 ($155/month) to slake today, and the Model Y costs $1604/year ($134/month).  Only the Prius gets costs down into the realm of reason, at a mere $59/month.  Joe could pay off some debt and take his lady out for a night on the town now and then.

It will get worse. Much, much worse.

But we're not done yet.  If crude prices head toward $200/bbl in 2012, gasoline will be above $5/gallon.  At $5/gallon, feeding the 17 MPG monster costs $3706/year ($309/mo), which is over 9% of Joe's gross income.  The Model X takes $3316/$276 (over 8%) and the Model Y $2864/$239 (over 7%).  Only the cost of the Prius remains in sane territory, at $1260/year or $105/month—roughly 3% of Joe's income, or about what the old pickup cost at $1.50/gallon.  The Prius, or something like it, is the only vehicle that Joe can afford to keep driving at that point.

You may have noticed that I ignored the rebates in the cost calculations.  They barely matter.  If Joe banks $3500 on the Model X and gas goes to $5, his fuel costs will eat those savings in about 16 months; if he buys the Model Y, the $4500 in the bank will pay his increased fuel bills for about two and a half years.  Joe will be out of savings while he's still upside-down on his new car loan.  Again, only a Prius-class car can save his budget.

Of course, this is in addition to the credit crunch.  The USA needs to be paying its debts off, not adding to them.  Are we going to be able to finance a whole new fleet of guzzlers, and then the crude to run them?  Or will we face a surge of business failures, credit-card defaults and mortgage foreclosures which make the last two years look like a corner lemonade stand on a rainy weekend?  My money (what's left of it) is on the latter, and building another fleet 3 years from now when this year's becomes unaffordable to run is out of the question.

The yawning gap between the crisis and the response

If our government was attuned to the looming problem, we would be seeing some real action on these problems.  Nothing like HR2751 would receive a committee hearing, let alone House passage.  We would be closing truck production lines and converting them to non-automotive products, while pushing to get Fiat's and other manufacturers' high-economy products into the remaining plants as rapidly as possible.  US auto suppliers would be paid to re-tool for the new models, and Toyota's US Prius production line would be opened ahead of schedule.  We'd be settting a high and steadily increasing floor on fuel prices, to keep that money inside the country instead of flowing out to oil producers.

Congress won't even think about anything like that.

Can we stop the Guzzler Subsidy Bill of 2009?  Perhaps not.  But if I was going to try, I'd call my congresscritters and Senators and tell them something like this:

• By 2012 at the latest, we will be facing fuel prices even higher than 2008.
• Paying people to buy inefficient vehicles is insane, no matter what they drive now.
• If we are going to survive the next oil-price surge, we need a fleet which gets closer to 50 MPG than 20.  Anything less puts the economy at great risk.
• Achieving that fleet means Detroit has to build it, and the public has to buy it... and that means Congress cannot waste our money promoting anything less.

At this point it's up to you.  Can you stop this runaway train before it runs off the collapsed bridge?  I'm not sanguine, but I can hope.

  ¶ 6/15/2009 02:38:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

 

Yahoo! Mail Classic "upgrades" making it unusable

How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"?  Let me count the ways:

1. Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason.  For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order.  For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no option to change this without also changing the order of presentation.  Now it's changed back.
2. Yahoo completely changed the way the UI works, breaking several normal browser features in the process, and removing any option to switch it back.  Several methods I use to manage my mail efficiently are partially or completely defeated by these changes, and it takes me far longer to do what I need to do.  For instance, the new AJAX code causes control-click to open the selected link in the current tab as well as a new tab.  This makes it very slow to open a series of folders or related messages in tabs, because one has to right-click the link, wait for the menu to display, then click "Open link in new tab".
3. Yahoo appears not to listen to problem reports from customers.  Yahoo DOES NOT CARE that this is a problem.
4. Long-standing problems remain.  For instance, if a user turns off site-selected colors and backgrounds (to make pages more readable), lots of icons fail to display in e.g. message composition.  Re-enabling colors is not acceptable.
5. Customer support is universally incompetent and dismisses problems for spurious reasons.  Faced with a report of a problem which is clearly due to changes at Yahoo, they blow off a user for "using an unsupported operating system".  Never mind that the problem is exactly the same under Windows - they don't ask.
6. Yahoo does not offer any workarounds, either in the help pages or from Customer Care.  For instance, I can restore the functionality of the control-click feature by disabling Javascript in the folder view.  However, Yahoo does not offer any suggestions about this.  Anyone with different needs or usage patterns is simply blown off.

There are also problems with certain of mail's servers; many pages fail to load without several retries.  This is bad enough, but the new AJAX code hides these failures so they do nothing; there are no error presentations to tell the user to try again.  This is very irritating.

Yahoo, PLEASE stop "fixing" things that aren't broken.  I despise the policies of your major competitors in this market, but if you can't stop crippling me every time I turn around I'm going to be forced to switch to one of them.

  ¶ 5/30/2009 07:48:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Stick a fork in Freedom Car... it's done

Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it.  Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off.

That didn't take long.  (Pity Europe was 3 years ahead of us, but better late than never.)

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles always had a long list of barriers to widespread use:

1. Hydrogen itself is easiest to make from fossil fuels; renewable hydrogen is a much tougher problem.
2. There is nothing like a national network to distribute hydrogen, unlike electricity and natural gas.  This would have to be built from scratch, or hydrogen made from something else near the point of use.  If hydrogen is made from something else, there is no "hydrogen economy".
3. Hydrogen is very difficult to store; the target for hydrogen storage systems is just 7% by weight.
4. Low-temperature fuel cells, such as Proton-Exchange Membrane (PEM) cells, are expensive to manufacture, touchy about operating conditions and rather short-lived regardless.

It might be reasonable to expect one of these problems to fall to an intensive R&D program in a reasonable period.  But four of them?  When two of them are completely intractable matters of physics or infrastructure?  Freedom Car was a boondoggle from day one, never intended to get anywhere.

Unfortunately, Detroit appears to have gone into the crapper with it.  We have lost 8 years, during which peak oil has come and gone.  Had we stayed the course, we would have had PNGV vehicles on sale 2-3 years ago.  A robust American program to produce cars that achieved 70+ MPG would have enjoyed huge popularity as fuel headed for $5/gallon, and the parts business (especially batteries) would have perhaps kept the Chinese company BYD out of auto manufacturing.

What to do now?  I still think independent investigations and trials on charges up to and including high treason are appropriate on this matter (and others).  But scrapping our gas-guzzlers and converting the plants which made them to HEV, PHEV and EV production and other manufacturing (such as wind turbines) should top the list of initiatives to start immediately.

Labels: Freedom Car, fuel cell, hydrogen, PEM, PNGV

  ¶ 5/14/2009 10:58:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Well, it's something.

From Green Car Congress:

The researchers found that Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells.

“We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane.”
—Bruce Logan

This is a long way from a "solution" to the developing fuel crisis.  It's barely even a step.  However, it's a development that is bound to be crucial in retrospect.

Let's recognize this for what it is:  a way to link inorganic electric generation to organic carbon fixation.  If this can be done on a large scale, a great many problems considered intractable can be handled.  We can breathe a little bit easier.

  ¶ 4/01/2009 01:11:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Washington bunraku theater

The furor over the AIG executive bonuses is, as others have already noted, largely misplaced.  Why should anyone care about the disposition of less than 1/10 of 1% of the total bailout money?  The whole thing is less than a day's expenditures in Iraq; it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

It does, however, suggest that there are real culprits, and the government and media are carefully directing our attention away from them.  In this bunraku theater, the puppeteers are shrouded in black and both our government and media pretend they aren't there.

If popular outrage allows the revocation of bonuses which were contractually obligated, why aren't other contracts being looked at just as closely?  For example, let's take the contracts which sank AIG in the first place: the credit-default swaps.  The bulk of the AIG bailouts have been paid out to banks.  Rumor in the WSJ is that the banks in turn have paid out most of this money to the billionaire holders of hedge funds.  These are the contracts which should be blocked.  There is evidence that the CDS's were sold on the basis of false claims, aka fraud.  The solution is to void the contracts.  The hedge funds should return their payouts and get their premiums back, un-winding the whole mess.  The banks would be instantly returned to solvency, and AIG with them.  And the financial products unit of AIG would no longer have a reason to exist.

Even as the economy collapses, the profits are privatized by the wealthiest of the wealthy while the losses are being socialized onto the backs of the middle class (the biggest net taxpayers in the USA).  This is what the kerfuffle over a few million in bonuses is about:  giving the public a scapegoat while the real thieves escape with their ill-gotten gains.  Like the "Two-Minute Hate" in Orwell's "1984", this is designed to exhaust our outrage without threatening the people truly responsible.

When will we learn?  More to the point, when will Congress use its subpoena power to follow the funds through the banks and show us the real culprits?

Labels: AIG, bonus, credit default swap, hedge funds

  ¶ 3/26/2009 09:40:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Electric generation chart

Posted to be linked elsewhere. Nothing to see here, move along.  ¶ 2/19/2009 07:36:00 PM 4 comments links to this post

 

Mr. President, follow that just a bit further

In news today, President Obama implies that faith used as a tool to divide people is being mis-used and says there is no faith in the world that is based on hatred. Will he then note that Islam states in no uncertain terms (Sura 98:6) that "those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings"? This is a faith which clearly divides people from each other based on its foundations. How about 48:29, "Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves…" Is that not a clear call to hatred? Are these verses and others not used daily to call for hate, violence and oppression against non-Muslims? These facts cannot be honestly denied. Will he then conclude that Islam as a faith cannot be properly used, or will he conclude that Islam doesn't fit his definition of a faith at all? The logical contortions must be uncomfortable. No, I don't think we can expect him to take A and B and follow them to C. But it would be interesting to put him in a position where he can no longer deny the facts and see how he reacts to them.  ¶ 2/05/2009 11:05:00 AM 2 comments

 

Saint Gasoline on art

Saint Gasoline has produced an entertaining little exposition on the evolution of art.  An excerpt:

Then something happened in the past century that changed art. Artists sort of went apeshit. James Joyce made novels full of jibberish and vague allusions to Greek myths. Picasso painted portraits of people made out of squares and seemingly smashed into two-dimensions. And in the culmination of this general trend toward absurdity, John Cage composed the famed classical song 4′ 33″.... Someone had thrown a wrench into the art machine.

It is understandable that artists began to revolt in what is now called the “modern” period. During this time period we started seeing strange, inconceivable things happen, like black people voting, women getting jobs and divorces, and worst of all, normal people began publishing their own work, writing their own songs, and creating their own art

Read the whole thing.

  ¶ 12/30/2008 04:27:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Not energy-related, but worth reading

Mostly because it's Dave Barry's year in review, and it's laugh-out-loud funny (okay, that's redundant).  ¶ 12/29/2008 10:38:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

AC Propulsion removes white papers

AC Propulsion used to have a very useful collection of white papers and other things on their site.  I cited this stuff all the time.

The other day I went to cite some of their V2G work related to reactive power... and it was all gone!  The entire resources directory had disappeared; there wasn't even a pointer to a new location for the information.  This probably happened during the revamp of the web site.  A lot of historical information about the tzero and older EV experiments is also gone.

I have written AC Propulsion to ask them why the resources were removed, but I have received no response.  They may be off for the holidays, but I'm sure that the more people who inquire, the more attention they will pay to this matter.

Want to help?  Write them and ask where the V2G white papers and other resources went, and if they'll be coming back.

  ¶ 12/23/2008 09:28:00 AM 2 comments links to this post

 

Efficiency standards: No public comment?

This is the season of bailouts.  A great many people did foolish things with other people's money, and now Congress is putting the US taxpayer on the hook for it.

The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is the biggest of these, but far from the only one.  With Congress handing out fiat money, the auto companies have also begged for and been granted a $25 billion slice of the pie.  The only thing left to be determined was the terms under which they could qualify.  Those terms have now been set, and they don't look good.

Granting money to do what's already been done better

The oxymoronic Interim Final Rule sets out the following standards (table format borrowed from Green Car Congress):

Baseline fuel economy eligibility by vehicle class
Vehicle class	2005 FE average	Baseline (2005 FE x 125%)
Two-seater	25.3	31.6
Two-seater performance	22.2	27.8
Minicompact sedan	29.3	36.7
Minicompact performance sedan	22.4	28.0
Sedan	22.4	28.0
Subcompact sedan	29.6	37.0
Subcompact performance sedan	22.8	28.5
Compact sedan	33.8	42.2
Compact performance sedan	23.6	29.5
Mid-size sedan	29.4	36.7
Mid-size performance sedan	23.1	28.9
Large sedan	26.2	32.7
Small wagon	32.7	40.8
Mid-size and large wagons	26.7	33.4
Small and standard pickup	19.7	24.6
Minivan	24.3	30.4
Passenger van	19.0	23.8
Cargo van	24.2	30.2
SUV	21.8	27.2

These figures are ridiculously low.  They do not even come up to the standards of vehicles available today.  My 2004 Passat TDI, which is either a medium sedan or a large sedan under the rules, has achieved better than 38 MPG in mixed driving despite its antiquated 5-speed automatic transmission.  Achieving 32.7 MPG requires no R&D whatsoever, just building cars with an emphasis on efficiency.  What kind of advance does it take to put a 4-cylinder engine into a vehicle?  Is there any mystery about Atkinson cycles, or dashboard displays with economy feedback?

Over in the GCC thread, commenter Will S opines "And with Prius already achieving 48 mpg overall, the 35 mpg CAFE 2020 "target" is a joke. Is [sic] should be closer to 75 mpg..."  I could not agree more.

And the public frozen out

Which is why the lack of public comment on this rule is so troubling.  The comments from auto manufacturers and suppliers stand alone; the public, whose money is involved and whose available choices are being determined and limited by this process, has had no opportunity to be heard.

This is wrong, and should be changed immediately.  Whatever my reservations about the policies of an Obama administration, I have reason to expect that this is likely to get better.

  ¶ 11/07/2008 11:51:00 AM 5 comments links to this post

 

Looking for plans/instructions

Sometime in the distant past, I recall seeing ads for plans to convert an automotive A/C compressor to a steam or air motor.  These were supposedly simple enough that they could be done with a drill press. Now that I'm interested in playing with something like this, I can't find a bit of info on it.  Anyone know where it's hiding, or did I hallucinate the whole thing?  ¶ 10/23/2008 09:53:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

On the hazards of ignorance of thermodynamics

Wherein the author continues a discussion as an essay

Over at The Oil Drum, a discussion subthread about gas turbines as energy converters ended with this late-arriving statement by Cyril R.:

Non-combustion gas turbines are not proven. They're mostly in pilot/research stages. You say that the conditions in non-combustion lower temp operation are more reasonable than in higher temp combustion gas turbines, but the fact that they are not commercially competing with Rankine steam cycles, even in the higher temperature regimes, should caution us not to trivialize the engineering/commercial issues.

The one-week period for comment on the post ended before I could write a response.

What's missing from this analysis?  Let me lay it out in easy pieces:

1. One can already purchase simple-cycle combustion turbines achieving 46% thermal efficiency.
2. These are internal-combustion units running on open cycles, requiring neither hot-side nor cold-side heat exchangers.
3. A turbine using inert gas as a working fluid is not internal combustion, by definition.  The source of heat must be something outside the fluid.  If the heat source is combustion, this requires a hot-side heat exchanger.  This is an unnecessary capital expense.
4. Preserving the inert working fluid against loss requires a cold-side heat exchanger.  This is another unnecessary capital expense for a combustion system.
5. Reducing the operating temperature from ~1100°C to ~800°C would also reduce the thermal efficiency.  If the heat source is combustion, this increases fuel costs.

We can see from a relatively simple analysis that today's absence of inert-gas turbine generators has nothing to do with technical feasibility.  It is soley a matter of economics.

How does a nuclear heat source change the economics?  Comparing to the points above:

1. One cannot buy a steam turbine operating at 650°C and higher temperatures.  The most feasible option for taking advantage of the high temperature of molten-salt and pebble-bed reactors is gas turbines.
2. The hot-side heat exchanger is either implicit (in a gas-cooled reactor) or required to separate the nuclear materials and the working fluid (molten-salt reactor).
3. Nuclear plants do not chemically modify the working fluid of their heat engines, so are the equivalent of "external combustion".
4. The cold-side heat exchanger is required (like the condenser in a steam turbine).
5. The reduced operating temperature is a given, set by the nuclear heat source.
6. Since the gas turbine can operate at a higher source temperature than a steam turbine and can thus achieve greater thermal efficiency, it improves the return on the capital investment in the rest of the plant.  This reduces costs relative to revenue.

The thermodynamic properties of inert gases are well-understood.  Designing a fractional gigawatt gas turbine to run on e.g. helium would require design changes such as gas bearings (to eliminate petroleum lubricants or water which would cause corrosion or coking in the hot side), but these have already been proven in other applications.  The only reason we aren't running helium turbines today is that it would increase both capital and operating expenses.  If the heat source was a high-temperature nuclear reactor, the helium turbine would generate more revenue than a steam turbine for the same capital expense in the reactor.  This is why we can expect to see inert-gas turbines as part and parcel of any PBMR or MSR powerplant.

  ¶ 10/01/2008 12:07:00 AM 5 comments links to this post

 

Nature abhors anything below sea level

  ¶ 8/28/2008 10:32:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Among the living, or the dead?

We interrupt our regular schedule of energy blogging and rants for this special bulletin.

Does anyone know if Möbius Stripper is on-line even the tiniest bit?  It's been two years since the last post on Tall, Dark and Mysterious, and I miss the acerbic humor and take-no-hostages approach to the follies of edu-land.

We now return you to Whatever The Hell I Feel Like Posting Next.

  ¶ 6/05/2008 11:21:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Useful questions re: CAES

CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) is being promoted as a way to smooth the delivery of intermittent supplies of power from e.g. wind.  This would increase its ability to displace other supplies of electricity and reduce carbon emissions from the same.

Of course, pumping lots of air around is going to have secondary effects (you cannot do just one thing).  A question I have not seen addressed yet:  how much CO2 would be handled directly by CAES in the process of compressing air?  What if some fraction of this CO2 was chemically bound and not released back to the atmosphere?  Could this make a significant difference in atmospheric CO2 levels?

I don't know, and I don't have the energy at this moment to come up with a ballpark estimate.  But given the large volumes of air involved in CAES, widespread use might just be a two-fer.

  ¶ 5/31/2008 01:20:00 AM 19 comments links to this post

 

Inspired by Picasso

Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."  He was right.  Correct answers to the wrong questions get you nowhere.

The crisis in commodities is feeding back into the cost of energy.  The amount of raw materials (both steel and fuel) required to bring new oil fields into production is growing rapidly.

Sooner or later, you'll get more energy return in less time by using the oil to make composite blades and the steel to make pylon towers than to drill in really out-of-the-way places.  The question is, how close are we to that day?  Could some places be there already?

Maybe that's not the best question, but it looks like a good one.

Labels: commodities, energy, peak oil, resources

  ¶ 5/28/2008 11:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Sauer-Danfoss: A rant

I've been suffering with the products of a company called Sauer-Danfoss.  This company makes industrial controllers and displays, programmed with a proprietary graphical system resembling ladder logic.  Here is my litany of complaints (addressed as an open letter, because I would like the world to know what a pain this stuff is; maybe S-D will take bad press as a good incentive to improve their product, rather than mealy-mouthing explanations for why The Product Is Perfectly Designed For Its Intended Users).

---

Dear Sauer-Danfoss,

I have some serious complaints with your Plus+1 Guide software.  The poor packaging and lack of proper documentation (plus counter-intuitive behavior of the system versus the description in the help) have caused me to waste a large fraction of a week thus far.  Your "tutorials" lack the most basic amenities for the aspiring learner.  Several of the extended sequences can neither be paused nor backed up to repeat sections.  Even YouTube does better than that, and their stuff is free.

The graphical system is painfully cumbersome.  Take, for example, a common calculation:

degrees_F = (degrees_C * 18 + 5)/10 + 32

This takes about ten seconds to type in C code.  It takes no fewer than four calculation blocks, four typed constant blocks and drawing a number of dataflow "wires" to do it in Plus+1 Guide, and the product is inherently obfuscated by the complexity and harder to document.  The fact that the graphical mess is translated into roughly the above C code before being compiled adds insult to injury.

Packaging needs to be radically improved.  If you download the Plus+1 Guide software, you have neither the device templates nor the function libraries.  The rest of the world has figured out how to create interactive installers, why haven't you?  These things should either be included and installed by default, or prompted during the install process.  If the user should fail to install them, they are left with blank tabs in Plus+1 Guide.  Nothing mentions a missing element, no pop-up tells the user what else is required.  How useless is that?

Or take the "context-sensitive" help... please!  It claims that you can click on something and press F1 to get help on that block.  I opened an existing application (trying to hit the ground running), clicked on a block with a triangular symbol in it (looked like an op-amp) and pressed F1, hoping that I could get some help to tell me what this unknown block was.  I got the standard help screen.  Try again, same result.  Apparently, telling me what this function block was didn't rate in Sauer-Danfoss's priorities.  I found this not the least bit endearing.

The "component" menu was no help either.  It's full of little icons for various categories, but the icons bear no resemblance to the symbols actually used in the program itself.  You have to click through list after list after list until you find the item which bears a similar symbol to the unknown.  THEN, once you have gone through the laborious search, you can click on the item in the component MENU and use F1 to get the details.  You cannot use this to get details on a component already in a design and save time and effort.

This is the sort of design detail which leads me to suspect that the product has been made deliberately obscure, to sell expensive training classes.

The "service tool", which downloads compiled programs to the units, is equally ill-designed (if not worse).  It appears to require an ECU list before it will do anything (even with hardware connected), but the navigator entry for the ECU list won't open when clicked (perhaps because the company firewall blocked a download - but there is no diagnostic for this!) and there is no help entry for ECU lists.  How do I get an ECU list?  Do I need to download something?  The "help", doesn't.

In conclusion, you have the sorriest, lousiest, most cumbersome, most time-wasting excuse for a programming interface that I have seen in more than 20 years of work on embedded systems.  I have accomplished more useful work in less time with assembly code.  I am forced to use them in my job, but I will be making a personal recommendation that design engineers avoid your products at all costs.

  ¶ 5/06/2008 12:24:00 AM 3 comments links to this post