QTRS June 27, 2024
QTRS June 27, 2024
Interesting content for the curious
EIA roundup
The EIA had a few interesting posts this past week. Here they are.
Utilities report batteries are most commonly used for arbitrage and grid stability (6/25/2024).
Electricity utilities increasingly report using batteries to move electricity from periods of low prices to periods of high prices, a strategy known as arbitrage, according to new detailed information we recently published.
It seems utilities have found a new (better?) use for batteries. Is this good or bad? Good because a new use for batteries that make money would encourage utilities to add more battery capacity? Bad because when the batteries are really needed for grid stability and are dry because they were recently used for arbitrage?
Electricity demand surged in New England amid heat wave (6/25/2024). This has been a large surge in electricity demand for a number of days. Wind and solar don’t help here, and this type of peak demand is typically satisfied by natural gas. I’m not sure you can satisfy this with batteries, as they don’t have enough time to recharge (especially if the preferred use is for arbitrage opportunities). I continue to be skeptical that wind and solar can run our grid. Nuclear might be more expensive, but it may also be the only non-CO2-emitting option.
U.S. energy production exceeded consumption by record amount in 2023. (6/26/2024) The main point of the article is this and I don’t know what to make of it.
In 2023, energy production in the United States rose 4% to nearly 103 quadrillion British thermal units (quads), a record. Energy consumption in the United States fell 1% to 94 quads during the same period. Production exceeded consumption by 9 quads, more than at any other time in our records, which date to 1949.
In this post, though, they have the graph below, so I’ll reiterate my points from the Tuesday post, The green energy hype. Renewable energy is a small player at the moment. They represent about 1/5 of what natural gas provides. Yes, their use is growing, but so are natural gas and crude oil. Coal is the only fossil fuel being reduced, but as I noted on Tuesday, other countries, such as China, are increasing its use. We are a long way from any green revolution.
More green energy problems
The title of the Guardian article is almost all you need to know: Two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear planning stage (6/24/2024). Why? I think this sums up many of the problems:
Last year, a report commissioned by Centrica, the owner of British Gas, claimed that some developers were applying to connect projects to the grid that did not even have land rights or planning consent applications.
Not only do you need funding for wind and solar projects, but you also have to get land rights (solar and wind take up a lot of space) or some other form of permission. Then you also need to apply to connect to the grid. I don’t want to be continually pessimistic, but in terms of energy generated per footprint, wind and solar are really inefficient. I don’t think their growth will happen anywhere near as fast as the optimists suggest.
I’ll add that when projections of solar and wind are given, they must include projects “in the pipeline,” but it seems that many of these projects won’t end up happening. This tells me to take projections with a grain of salt, unless they are only counting projects that have broken ground.
Cool map
A 1938 map posted at the LOC, Manuscripts and Historical Journeys: The Maps of the Federal Writers’ Project (6/26/2024).
How hot was May 2024?
Here are the graphs for May and for all months. As you can see, May 2024 was a record for May, but when we look at all months, the El Niño effect is clearly fading. In the all-month graph, the May 2024 anomaly is in line with recent neutral conditions. Here is what NOAA had to say about May 2024. It is almost as if you can predict ENSO by the monthly anomaly
May had a record-high monthly global ocean surface temperature for the 14th consecutive month. El Niño conditions that emerged in June 2023 were replaced by ENSO-neutral conditions during the past month, and according to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center La Niña is favored to develop during July-September (65% chance) and persist into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2024-25 (85% chance during November-January).
From the gardens
There are two different clematis as well as red and black currents that need to be picked. The white currents have already been harvested.
The biology of economies
Gail the Actuary of Our Finite World, does great work with lots of graphs. Her recent post, The Advanced Economies are headed for a downfall (6/22/2024), is one such post. Now, I love my graphs (plenty in sections 1–5), but it is section 6, The problem facing the people of the Advanced Economies is like the problem the biological world often faces, which I want to focus on. Here are the first three paragraphs.
The biological world is constantly faced with the problem of too many animals (for example, wolves and deer) wanting to occupy a given space with specific resources, such as water, sunlight, and smaller plants and animals to eat. In some sense, the world economy is an ecosystem, too, one that we humans have made. The Advanced Economies are already in a conflict with the less advanced economies, trying to decide which parts of the world will “win” in the battle over the resources needed for future economic growth.
The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) tries to explain who can be expected to be the winners and losers in an ecosystem when there are not enough resources to go around. I think of the MPP as an extension of the “survival of the fittest” or “survival of the best adapted.” The difference is that MPP looks at the functioning of the overall system, which, in this case, is the world economy.
The parts of the system (such as the individual people, the levels of borrowing, the government organizations, and the narratives governments choose to tell to explain the current situation) will be selected based on how well they permit the overall world economy (not just the Advanced Economies) to function. The goal seems to be to create as many goods and services as possible by dissipating all available energy in as useful a way as possible. In this way, the world GDP, which is a measure of the output of the useful work performed by the world economy, can stay as high as possible, for each time period.
We tend to focus too much on individual countries and not enough on the entire global system. It frustrates me when someone writes about how some country has really ramped up green energy (again, see Tuesday’s post, The green energy hype) without noting that the world is still increasing fossil fuel use. My understanding of the global system leads me to believe that someone will use fossil fuels as long as they are available. Fossil fuels are energy, and some countries will take advantage of that energy.
Graph of the week
This comes from the paper MdbZIP44–MdCPRF2-like–Mdα-GP2 regulate starch and sugar metabolism in apple under nitrogen supply (3/15/2024) in the section Transcriptome sequencing analysis of apple fruits in different nitrogen treatments. Note that DEG is differentially expressed genes.
This is the conclusion.
MdbZIP44 was identified from transcriptome at the young fruit stage in apple, and this study proposed a working model for MdbZIP44 interacting with MdCPRF2-like to regulate starch and sugar metabolism by modulating Mdα-GP2 gene expression under nitrogen supply (Fig. 8). Nitrogen rapidly induced the transcription level of MdbZIP44, then MdbZIP44 suppressed Mdα-GP2 expression, thereby accumulating more starch content and less glucose content. On the other hand, MdCPRF2-like, as well as the complex of MdbZIP44 and MdCPRF2-like proteins, could activate the expression of Mdα-GP2. In addition, MdbZIP44 could promote sucrose accumulation by conferring the activities of sucrose metabolism-related enzymes and the expression of sugar metabolism-related genes in apple. Overall, this study provided a new perspective for revealing the mechanism of how MdbZIP44 interacts with MdCPRF2-like to regulate starch and sugar metabolism by modulating Mdα-GP2 gene expression under nitrogen supply.
What I find interesting here is the level at which science is working to understand plant physiology and, in this case, to improve apple production.
Families are a plus for young men
From The Family-to-Prison-or-College Pipeline: Married Fathers and Young Men’s Transition to Adulthood (6/13/2024):
The article provides a rationale for why this relationship—only young men from intact families are more likely to go to college than spend time in jail—may be causal.
The spinning CD
New Def Leppard
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