Back in April 2005 we published the feature “Mangroves Stop Tsunami,” which explained that much of the devastation from the tsunami that struck South East Asia in December 2004 could have been avoided if the mangrove forests hadn’t been ripped out to make room for aquaculture and timber.  After the devastating cyclone hit Myanmar earlier this month, there was plenty of talk regarding the possible causes, but not much recognition of the role mangrove forests could have played in preventing much of the destruction.

One exception to this was the Hong Kong edition of the Wall Street Journal, where in a May 9th report entitled “Forest Clearing May Have Worsened Toll,” author Jane Spencer provided some facts regarding just how bad the deforestation has been along that Mayanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta.  Apparently “vast swaths of mangroves have been cleared over the decades to make way for rice fields and shrimp ponds and to provide wood for fuel.”  Spencer went on to report “researchers in Myanmar estimate that 83% of the mangroves in the Irrawaddy were destroyewd between 1924 and 1999.”

This is true elsewhere in the tropics.  Thailand, Indonesia and India have developed a shrimp aquaculture industry that engages in completely unsustainable methods - flooding the shrimp ponds with chemicals and antibiotics that in sum will degrade the ponds to the point where every seven years or so they need to abandon the area and move on - each time destroying new mangrove reserves to make room.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. estimates that 1% of the world’s mangrove forests are being destroyed each year.

The significance of the degree to which mangroves can protect against storm surges and tsunami cannot easily be overstated.  Stretching for miles into the ocean, these trees anchor themselves in the mud and sand, their branches and roots absorbing the waves.  Further inland along the coastline, larger variants of the species stand as tall trees.  These huge forest buffers absorb waves and winds, protecting the inhabited land further inland.  Destruction of mangroves, along with land subsidence due to overutilization of ground aquifers, along with increased settlement along tropical coastlines is the reason for rampant destruction - not alleged global warming.

As for global warming, in an article on May 8th in the reputable Investors Business Daily entitled “Al Gore and Climate Ka-Ching,” the author references recent data on modern temperature buoys:

“The trend in the world’s oceans — as shown by measurements taken by a fleet of 3,000 high-tech ocean buoys first deployed in 2003 — is toward cooling. As Dr. Josh Willis, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted in a separate interview with National Public Radio, “there has been a very slight cooling” over the buoys’ five years of observation.”

Al Gore has made a great contribution to building global consciousness regarding environmental challenges.  But his approach, with the inordinate focus on reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel, is not only failing to keep up with recent observational data (for those who are still paying attention), but misdirects priorities away from where they could really help - such as reforesting the world’s coastal mangrove forests - and creates a potentially dangerous moral outrage in the minds of well-meaning but misinformed multitudes everywhere.

MANGROVE FORESTS OF THE WORLD

Most of the world’s tropical coastlines have a barrier of Mangrove forests, but only about 70% of these forests remain.

Solar thermal power is considered an important step towards developing large scale sources of clean electricity, but within this sector there are some very distinct applications of the technology.  Bright Source Energy, with offices in Oakland, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel, is building next generation “power tower” solar thermal power plants.

The power tower. (Photo: Bright Source Energy)

The stated advantages of power tower technology seem to make a lot of sense.  The solar field of mirrors require no plumbing going to each mirror, containing a thermal transfer fluid, because the two-axis tracking mirrors point to a central boiler.  This saves considerable expense to install and maintain plumbing throughout the solar field. 

Also, because each mirror sits atop a single independently placed post, the ground underneath the solar field can be left relatively irregular and uneven.  With parabolic trough technology, for example, the ground beneath the troughs must be almost perfectly smoothed, meaning far more site preparation is required.

Less obvious but also significant are the costs saved by utilizing super heated steam coming from one central boiler atop a tower, because this design allows the water to be air cooled instead of water cooled.  In order for solar thermal power to require minimal input of water, the water needs to be continuously recirculated - it heats up in the boiler, drives the turbine, then must be cooled and condensed before returning to the boiler for heating.  If this isn’t done, in a closed loop the back pressure of the steam after passing through the turbine would largely counteract the pressure of the incoming steam, ruining the efficiency of the device. 

Because a power tower concentrates the entire energy of the solar field into one boiler, the steam is superheated to 550 degrees centigrade.  In the parabolic trough designs, where the heat transfer fluid flows into dozens of distributed heat exchanging tubes above the focal point of dozens (or hundreds) of separate mirrors, the energy of the solar field is less concentrated, achieving a significantly lower top temperature of 300-350 degrees centigrade.

Because the differential between the super hot 550 C steam is so much greater than the ambient air temperature, even in the desert, air cooling is viable with a power tower design, but is not viable with trough designs.  Air cooling systems are less expensive than water cooling systems, and they use less water.  Bright Source estimates their process loses about 1/2 an acre foot for every megawatt-year of electricity they generate, compared to about 20x that amount for designs that require water cooling - even though all of these designs recirculate.

Not only is Bright Source Energy using what could emerge as the most cost effective solar thermal design, but they are well on their way to implementing their technology.  Their pilot plant in Israel, with a 60 meter tower and 1,600 mirrors, is in testing currently and will go active in mid-June.  The plant will generate 5.0 megawatts of thermal energy, which with a boiler efficiency of 74% and a turbine efficiency of 45% will output 1.5 megawatts of electricity.  That is just the beginning.

The solar field and power tower. (Photo: Bright Source Energy)

With a management team that includes several of the executives who built the original solar thermal plants at Kramer Junction in California in the early 1990’s - still operating profitably with an output of over 350 megawatts - Bright Source Energy is likely to be the first company to build new large scale solar thermal plants in California for 20 years.  Their application, filed with the California Energy Commission in Sept. 2007, was the first one filed since 1989, and proposes a 400 megawatt solar complex to be built in Ivanpah, California, in the Mojave desert near the Nevada border.

The power tower - looking across a reflecting mirror. (Photo: Bright Source Energy)

Back in January 2007 we posted “New Environmentalism,” one of several attempts we’ve made to redefine environmentalism, that particular one inspired by comments from Robert Metcalf, a partner at Polaris Ventures in Boston.  Metcalf’s comments were part of a keynote address he delivered at the Massachusetts Energy Summit entitled “Framing the First Massachusetts Energy Summit.”  We liked Metcalf’s take on free enterprise and private sector solutions to environmental and energy challenges, his support for creative innovations, and his unwillingness to accept every precept of the traditional environmentalist’s conventional wisdom.

Bob Metcalf “Every day a fusion reactor flies across the sky, taunting scientists who can’t replicate that on earth.”

Metcalf is an example of someone from the high tech community who has jumped into a world that up until a few years ago, was not generally perceived to be part of the high tech pantheon. 

Now “clean tech” or “green tech” is recognized as one of the hottest sectors in the venture capital driven high tech industry.  More recently, on April 8th at AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit East, Metcalf delivered a keynote on the topic of energy and technology, again highlighting themes that resonate with us, to put it mildly.  To view a video of Metcalf’s keynote in its entirety, click here.

Initially Metcalf explored the term to describe cleantech, rejecting “green” because of its association with a political agenda that includes anti-trade, anti-business, anti-technology, and anti-development sentiments, among others (Metcalf’s delivery probably included some overstatements to spice things up, but only to a point).  He also considered “clean” to only tell half the story, because the objective of successful solutions must be clean, of course, but also cheap.  Metcalf went on to suggest that rather than green as a color to describe cheap and clean technology for environmental and energy challenges, he would choose black - the color of silicon, coal, and outer space, and blue - the color of the ocean, where (along with outer space) many of our technology-driven solutions may lie.  Ultimately, Metcalf appears to prefer the term ”Enertech” to characterize high-tech innovations that will solve our challenge to develop cheap and clean energy.

Metcalf spent a fair amount of time extrapolating lessons we learned from the the high tech industry in general, and the internet in particular, to the burgeoning cheap and clean tech - or enertech - industry.  “Did we conserve our way into the internet,” he asked, noting how we are clearly using far more bandwidth today than we were at any point in the past, despite massive improvements in efficiency.  He also noted that we have learned about bubbles - not that bubbles are bad - stating “bubbles are an accelerator to technological innovation.”

Other lessons from the high tech experience that might be applied to the enertech phenomenon included the need for research to be directed more at competing research universities, and not into the monopolistic environments of government and very large corporations.  As he put it “monopolies can rip off their customers,” and “monopolies are slow to bring innovations to market.”  Metcalf also pointed out the parallel between high tech and enertech with respect to the promise of distributed solutions.

Some of Metcalf’s most interesting comments concerned global warming.  Without delving into the debate as to what may cause global warming or whether or not it constitutes an existential crisis, Metcalf noted that from an economic standpoint, “there is going to be a crash associated with global warming investments.”  Of course he’s right, there’s been so much money thrown into so many businesses in such a short time, that just like with the internet bubble, with the global warming bubble we will see great forward progress in the industry but we will also see a lot of misdirection and failed investments.

Also provocative were Metcalf’s ideas not to cool the earth or warm the earth, but simply to manage the global climate ala “geo-engineering.”  He suggested “climate control research” become the emphasis, and wondered why there isn’t more work going into “blasting benign nano-particles into space to increase the earth’s albedo,” or “sticking a giant reflecting membrane at orbital point L-1 between the earth and the sun, to cool the earth and harvest energy to beam back to earth.”

Faith in free enterprise, competitive free markets, private sector innovation, distributed solutions, technological solutions, and thinking big - Metcalf’s philosophy epitomizes the best that the high tech world has to offer as it merges with and influences the environmental community and the energy sector.

On April 22nd we had the pleasure of hearing a presentation by Ripu Malhotra, a researcher with the Stanford Research Institute, who was speaking at AlwaysOn’s “Nordic Green” conference.  Mr. Malhotra has taken the unusual step of converting all forms of energy use into cubic mile of oil equivalents - a measure that is quite helpful if one is trying to really grasp the scope of fossil fuel compared to alternatives.

Using Malhotra’s figures, which he has garnered from the British Petroleum statistical database of global energy usage, among other sources, it is clear that today, at least, the world’s economy is utterly dependent on fossil fuel.

GLOBAL ENERGY PRODUCTION 2005

Global energy production expressed in “cubic miles of oil” (CMO), billion barrels of oil, quadrillion BTUs, and gigawatt-years.

While there is impressive percentage growth in the solar category - including wind power in this analysis - and while these figures have already changed dramatically since 2005, it is clear that alternative energy still contributes well below 1% of total energy supply, whereas fossil fuel contributes well over 80% to global energy supply.

In terms of choosing between fossil fuel development and alternative energy development, another point which should be put to rest is the notion we are running out of fossil fuel.  The next three charts show the potential reserves of the primary fossil fuels - oil, coal, and gas.  In order to develop estimates for unconventional sources of these fuels, we have taken the midpoint between the high and low estimates.

OIL - TOTAL RESERVES

If oil provided 100% of global energy, and we used twice as much as we do today (1,000 Quad BTUs per year), there would be a 59 year supply of oil based on known reserves.

COAL - TOTAL RESERVES

If coal provided 100% of global energy, and we used twice as as much as we do today (1,000 Quad BTUs per year), there would be a 218 year supply of coal based on known reserves.

GAS - TOTAL RESERVES

If gas provided 100% of global energy, and we used twice as much as we do today (1,000 Quad BTUs per year), there would be a 45 year supply of gas based on known reserves.

So when you add it all up, at twice the current energy consumption overall, oil, gas and coal could potentially supply all the energy we need in the world for the next 300 years - not including gas hydrates.

The other question of course is how do the alternatives stack up in terms of affordability and short-term feasibility?  For this analysis, let’s return to the total energy production goal - if you assume 1,000 quadrillion BTUs of energy for 10 billion people, you achieve a per capital energy production of 100 million BTUs per person.  In reality, global population will probably stablize somewhat under 10 billion people, but 100 million BTUs per person is not enough - it really needs to be as much as twice that.

As we demonstrate in our feature “The Good, the Bad, & the BTUs,” citizens in the nations where per capita income exceeds $15,000 per year, consume on average 216 million BTUs per year per person.  In the USA, per capita energy consumption is 327 million BTUs per year per person.  If we assume the planet’s population will stablize at 8.5 billion people, at 1,000 quadrillion BTUs of global energy production, per capita energy consumption will be 117 million BTUs per person.  Even with extraordinary developments in energy efficiency, it is unlikely we can expect to deliver less than this amount of energy per capita, and still allow the world to achieve universal prosperity - global energy production will need to double.

The next chart shows the potential costs of adding another 500 quadrillion BTUs of energy to global energy production using non fossil fuel means - remember, to eliminate fossil fuel, you would have to add nearly 1,000 quadrillion BTUs to global energy production.

REPLACING 500 QUAD BTUs OF FOSSIL FUEL - COST IN $ TRILLIONS

At current costs, adding 500 quadrillion BTUs of energy using alternative energy sources would require well over $100 trillion.

Wind is the surprise winner in this survey - we’ve made some huge assumptions regarding cost per megawatt, however - using various sized production units across the energy sources hydro, nuclear, wind, roof PV, and utility CSP (concentrated solar thermal).  At a cost of $2.5 million per 1.0 megawatt (installed), wind energy looks pretty good.  Is this an accurate cost?

The key variables affecting these results are, along with the cost per megawatt, the operating availability percentages.  Nuclear has at least a 90% up-time - it goes full bore almost constantly, which greatly lowers the cost for nuclear as a scaleable replacement to fossil fuel.  But do we want 20,000 new nuclear power plants - actually these power stations can be 5-10x larger than 900 MW each - to get our 500 quad BTUs?

None of these solutions are cheap.  Annual global economic output is in the 50-100 trillion range today, probably creeping up on $100 trillion.  This figure is more subjective than you might think when simply compiling World Bank data.  Using purchasing power parity metrics and devalued dollars, $100 tr. is probably not far off.  But even at that, it would cost well over 100% of our entire global economic output for a full year to develop 500 quadrillion BTUs of new annual alternative energy capacity - using very favorable assumptions.  Meanwhile global energy production needs to double as soon as possible.  Pick your poison.  Adapt.

Most of the data referenced here is based on a presentation by Ripu Malhotra, who is authoring a book on these topics to be published by Oxford University Press.

A few months ago we toured the “Idea House,” sponsored by Sunset Magazine, located in the lower Mission District of San Francisco.  The building was fascinating - two units, three stories - with one larger home taking up all three floors, and an apartment consuming part of the 2nd floor on the west side of the structure.  Everything about it was smart, from a wind generator to photovoltaics and solar water heating, to materials and energy efficiency - but the estimated cost was well over $500 per square foot.

Sunset Magazine’s “Idea House” in San Francisco. An excellent example of cutting-edge green home design.

Along with everything else, the appeal of green design is supposed to be economic savings.  If you conserve resources when producing a home, then conserve resources while operating the home, the money you save by conserving resources should more than pay the costs for the extra innovations necesssary to achieve those savings.  Getting from bleeding edge to commodity is never an instantaneous process, however, and if Sunset’s Idea House is pushing the envelope of innovation, Michelle Kaufmann Design homes are at the forefront of matching green innovations with affordability.

If you want to get a good look at a Michelle Kaufmann home, watch this interview with Michelle Kaufmann posted on YouTube by Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat (a very excellent online resource on green building design and green design in general) entitled “MK Lotus, Michelle Kaufmann’s new eco-prefab home.”  As Kaufmann states, “We’ve been trying to find the best blending of being green but also being cost-effective.”

This effort appears to be successful, because Kaufmann’s predesigned, prefab homes are priced at approximately $250 per square foot, which is a competitive price compared with conventional homes.  With townhomes and multifamily units, Kaufmann’s prices can drop well under $200 per square foot, also competitive with conventional construction.  But these homes cost less to operate - and they are green.

As Kaufmann describes this, her homes are designed to “use zero net electricity, maximize water efficiency, minimize waste, and use maximum resource efficiency [in construction and operation].” 

Kaufmann’s latest home design, the MK Lotus, has many good examples of how this is put into practice.  Not only are photovoltaics on the roof, but the entire energy system of the home is integrated so, for example, there is a market-smart charging system where, depending on the price of electricity at any given moment, your plug-in EV is either charging itself from the grid, or discharging electricity into the grid to run the utility meter backwards at a higher rate than the vehicle’s onboard charge was originally acquired.  You don’t just have a home with photovoltaics and an EV, you have your own micro-utility company.

The MK Lotus’s roof has an R45 insulation rating before you put the turf garden on top of that, which not only further improves the insulation value of the roof, but collects and filters rainwater.  Along with runoff harvesting, the home has dual flush toilets, a grey water system that drains shower and sink water to the toilet tanks for 2nd use, and low flow shower heads - making it very water efficient. 

With top value insulation everywhere, Energy Star appliances, a high velocity, highly efficient mini-duct ventilation system, and LED lighting, the MK Lotus home is very energy efficient.  This is furthered by windows placed at corners and in floor to ceiling configurations to maximize natural light during the day.  “Our goal is to never require electric lighting during the day” said Kaufmann.  The home also has radiant heating and skylights that are positioned to allow hot air to easily rise out of the home on hot days.

“You can live in this home completely off the grid with just backup systems,” said Kaufmann - a statement which highlights a trend where not only will green homes save money and resources for the owners, but they will save society additional significant resources when more and more, new communities are built without requiring huge investments in new water and electrical utility infrastructure - all of this can be downsized.  Green homes march on.

Believe it or not, with hundreds upon hundreds of entries - most of them lengthy diatribes filled with quantitative factoids - we have never posted a press release.  Well everything comes in good time, and this is an interesting press release.  Heat transfer and heat storage fluid indeed!  This is the missing link, the central point, the integrative catalyst for a competitive alternative energy industry.  This is energy storage and management at a level where thermal and electric are equally managed on one system.  This is cheaper at macro and micro levels because systems are integrated and thermal-electric conversion is efficient.  This is PVs cooled with fluid that harvests heat and routes it everywhere.  See  “Thermal Circulation Systems,” and “Redistributing Thermal Mass.”

The flower of innovation in full bloom. (Borago officinalis)

Well it isn’t just us, it’s them too, the U.S. Dept. of Energy, who want to know where the next generation designs are for building-scale or even city-scale (witness neighborhood thermal distribution systems using co-gen heat from coal plants in Denmark, for example) thermal systems.  Harvesting, managing and storing energy at various scales using a thermal transfer fluid.  Sweet.  Where are the credible companies already innovating these crucial technologies - systems to perform building and neighborhood integrated thermal energy management?  Here goes:

Funding Opportunity Announcement:

Advanced Heat Transfer Fluids and Novel Thermal Storage Concepts for Concentrating Solar Power Generation

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Program has released a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) entitled, “Advanced Heat Transfer Fluids and Novel Thermal Storage Concepts for Concentrating Solar Power Generation.” This FOA solicits proposals from industry and academia to take on key challenges related to this growing need in concentrating solar power (CSP). It will support research, development, and demonstration of novel thermal energy storage concepts and improved heat transfer fluids to further increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of promising CSP technologies.

About $60 million is expected to be available for new awards under this announcement during a project period of 3 to 4 years. DOE anticipates making 10 to 25 awards under this announcement, depending on the size of the awards. Awards will be made for both long-term research and development and near-term demonstrations, with awards ranging from $125,000 to $14,000,000, including cost-sharing.

The Solar Program considers CSP technologies to be the most attractive option for meeting utility-scale electricity needs in the U.S. Southwest. Currently, 350 megawatts of generating capacity are located in California’s Mojave Desert, with portions of this capacity generating electricity for more than the last 20 years (see Assessment of Potential Impact of Concentrating Solar Power for Electricity Generation (PDF 1.4 MB). Download Adobe Reader. CSP technology is currently in various stages of development or deployment throughout the U.S. Southwest, as well as in Spain, Israel, Africa, and the Middle East.

The current cost of energy for CSP plants is in the range of 13–17 cents per kilowatt-hour. The goal is to achieve cost-competitive power in intermediate power markets by 2015 and in carbon-constrained baseload power markets by 2020. Critical to achieving these goals is the development of inexpensive thermal storage.

Applications for this solicitation are due on or before Thursday, July 10, 2008. For more information on this FOA, visit the Financial Opportunities page or Grants.gov. The Funding Opportunity Number (FON) is DE-PS36-08GO98032.

A wheel-motor series hybrid is indeed coming up from Volvo, but don’t hold your breath.  Apparently something very big could be in the wings, some sort of next generation hybrid or e-flex technology, making the announcement of the “Recharge” concept car - a wheel-motor series hybrid - not the biggest story Volvo intends to break this year.  And with that titillating tidbit, back to Volvo’s car of the future, the car that Science Officer Ichiro Sugioka, based at Volvo’s think tank in Southern California, says ”will be probably coming out in ten years at the earliest.”  He said the series hybrid using in-wheel motors was “definitely not our next hybrid,” and “we like to keep the surprise.”

With a prototype car already operating in Sweden, using a C30 body, the most interesting revelation that came out of our lengthy conversation today was how far in-wheel motors have advanced, and the advantages using them imparts to the overall vehicle design.

VOLVO’S WHEEL MOTOR SERIES HYBRID CONCEPT CAR

Balances the grid, buys, sells and stores electricity. Not just a car, but your very own micro-utility company.

A criticism of in-wheel motors is that their centrifugal inertia due to the weight of the motors makes handling the car difficult.  But PML Flightlink, a maker of in-wheel motors, has supplied modular in-wheel motor-generator components that Volvo engineers have pieced into a unit that delivers, for the first time according to Sugioka, “enough torque to deliver normal performance but still fit into the rim of a normal tire.”  Up till now, vehicle electric motors required reduction units to achieve sufficient torque for starting and accelerating.  This motor’s powerful 1,000 newton-meters of torque allows much higher regeneration efficiency as well as braking ability.  And in turn, the superb regenerative braking of the motors makes it possible to replace the entire disk brake assembly with much lighter ring brakes.

The weight in the wheel-motors is further offset because the wheel bearing housing has been replaced by the motor casing, and a lot of the suspension components are combined into the wheel motors.  Using lighter rims and lighter tires also reduces wheel weight.  And, of course, with motors possessing this much torque, the otherwise mandatory reduction gear is eliminated, further reducing weight and also improving drive-train efficiency.  Sugioka acknowledged “there is validity to the weight issues,” but clearly didn’t think they were insurmountable.

Volvo has a lot of experience with series hybrids, having first tested series hybrid prototypes back in the 1990’s.  But in ten years, along with having wheel motors and series hybrid technology, cars will be really, really smart.  In ten years cars will function as decentralized electricity storage units living on the grid, leveling demand, buffering surge, storing intermittant surpluses such as wind energy, when they aren’t being driven around.  “We have to talk with all the stakeholders,” said Sugioka, “we need to get the utilities engaged to reinvent the business model for cars in general.”

Another interesting spec discussed today was the dedicated generator, which is charged onboard by a standard 1.6 liter four-cylinder gasoline engine.  The generator is also built using components from PML Flightlink.  Sugioka stated the 50 kilowatt generator was so small and flat, it could be placed directly behind the standard gasoline engine and would take up considerably less space and weight than the transmission which is removed.  On gasoline only, the prototype gets 44 miles to the gallon.

It’s all about efficiency. A young Elephant Seal - spring equinox, 2008 Piedras Blancas, California

“My responsibility is on things that are pretty far away,” said Sugioka, which means his team is spending a lot of time on wheel-motors and not a lot on batteries.  The prototype is currently using an oversized battery pack that is located in the car’s truck, for testing purposes.  And even with the heavier battery pack, this car is sipping 200 watt-hours per mile, or 5.0 miles to the kilowatt-hour.  The battery is spec’d at 12 kilowatt-hours of usable storage, hence a 100% battery range of up to 60 miles.

As for zero to sixty and top speed, the prototype has artificial limits - the engineers want to keep the motors cool until they’ve completed a power management system.  The intelligence of cars is a revolution happening at the same time as the greening of cars.  The smart electric vehicle will be a working, self-sufficient vendor for the owner, collecting money from utilities for storage and buffering services, as well as from buying energy low and selling it high.  Eventually smart cars will greatly help level utility rates.  Smart cars will respond to wireless commands, and automatically customize the driver experience per operator.

Every day brings us closer to freeway capable personal transportation appliances that are smarter, cleaner, and greener than ever, as we see new innovations from in-wheel motors to the e-flex platform, and Volvo, known for some of the safest cars in the world, has been preparing for the electric age for a very long time.  Surely we are at the tipping point of the next automotive revolution, that the wheel-motor series hybrid announcement by Volvo just this January, given the car on the street could be ten years away, might just be some sort of marketing dept. derived head fake, a diversionary tactic, so nobody will scoop the new vehicle they are about to unveil…