QTRS Nov 29, 2024

Graphs and interesting content for the curious

Nov 29, 2024

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I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving yesterday. I wasn’t going to do a QTRS this week, but a few things crossed my inbox to make a short post worth while.

Two from the eia

The first is that the U.S. set a new record for oil production in August. If you thought Biden and the D team were worried about climate change, well, this would say not so much. The fact is that no president or party in power wants to see higher energy prices, as it is a good recipe to get voted out.

The second, which is related to the first, is that gas prices were at their lowest in four years, adjusted for inflation, this week.

I’m not an economist, but I have to figure that low gas prices discourage the buying of EVs. It would seem this would create an intriguing dynamic. Increasing EV use by some smallish amount would reduce the demand for gas. The reduced demand for gas would lower the price, at least in the short term, as oil production cannot be adjusted quickly. This then depressed the sales of EVs until supply and demand of gas are realigned. It would seem to me that this dynamic will slow the market penetration of EVs.

Utility-scale battery storage

The Washington Post article Climate Solutions: These batteries could harness the wind and sun to replace coal and gas (11/26/2024) got my attention and then made me laugh.

First, the technology is neat.

Each 10,000-gallon tank holds tiny particles of the metal vanadium, which float around in water.

One tank holds vanadium with a more positive charge, while the other tank holds vanadium with a more negative charge.

Vanadium flows through each battery cell on either side of a membrane — which is why it’s called a flow battery.

When HEPCO Network wants to charge the batteries, it uses energy from wind turbines to move electrons from the positive side of the membrane to the negative side, which creates an imbalance: Now there are a lot more electrons crammed into the negative tank than the positive tank, and they’re itching to spread out evenly once again.

Now move the electrons from the negative to the positive side to draw electricity from the system.

You can scale the tanks and add more vanadium to make batteries that store more energy.

Here is what a facility looks like.

So far so good, and it is neat science. So, how much energy can be stored?

Inside a sprawling two-story warehouse, HEPCO Network is storing electricity in 130 gleaming steel and plastic tanks. They can stockpile enough energy to power more than 27,000 Japanese homes for four hours.

That last sentence got me to laugh. The author tried to play this up as much as possible, but 27,000 homes for four hours doesn’t get us very far. You need 37 of these just to do 1 million homes for 4 hours. Google tells me Japan has about 55 million housing units. I’m not sure if this is the same as homes, but if they are, then we need 2037 of these stations to run Japan for 4 hours. I guess these can help, but minimally it seems like a long way off, and it gets better.

One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world’s supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Rodby, who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries.

As a bonus, their up-front cost is about twice as much as lithium batteries, although the vanadium flow batteries will last longer. A neat idea that is worth keeping track of, but I’m not so sure it is a climate solution at this point.

Data center update

Meta set to develop 1,500 acre data center campus outside Indianapolis, Indiana (11/27/2024) Not only is the more electricity, it is more water use too.

Meta has requested a phased water supply of up to three million gallons per day and wastewater of up to 1.5 million gallons per day, phased from 2027 to 2031.

I hadn’t realized the data centers used so much water. This doesn’t seem sustainable.

The vegetarian divide

This is a year old from Gallup, but as they say, new to me: In U.S., 4% Identify as Vegetarian, 1% as Vegan (8/24/2023). First, only 4%? Depending on where you live and what you read, you might think it is way more than that. It was 6% in 1999 and has trended down ever since. Vegans peaked at 3% in 2018. So much for saving the planet by not eating meat.

How do sub-groups differ? Can you guess who is more likely a Vegetarian? Here is the Gallup data:

No surprise that liberals are 3x more likely to be vegetarians. Same for women over men. What surprised me is that lower-income people were about twice as likely to be vegetarians. I wouldn’t have guessed this. Why? Thoughts in comments, please.

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Please point out if you think something was expressed wrongly or misinterpreted. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks R for College Mathematics and Statistics and Applied Calculus with R. I welcome any collaborations.