Archive for November 18th, 2009

h1

Long-distance transmission complements “local self reliance”

November 18, 2009

Michael Giberson

A few weeks ago we mentioned commentary by John Harrell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance asserting that the “last thing renewable energy needs right now are new transmission lines.”  The ILSR has a recent study suggesting the almost every state could be energy self sufficient relying only on in-state renewable power sources.  I remarked, “While I agree that ‘local self-reliance’ in energy may be possible, I don’t think most people are willing to pay the price of such extreme energy independence.”

Comes now Tom Konrad at the Clean Energy Wonk blog who takes a long hard look at the price of local renewable energy self-reliance as conceived of by the ILSR.  The short version of Konrad’s assessment is that (1) the high levels of renewable power proposed will require support from substantial quantities of relatively expensive energy storage, and (2) that transmission can reduce the amount of storage needed.  Those two points, combined with reasonable estimates of the costs of transmission and storage,  reveals that the energy storage + long-distance transmission approach dramatically reduces the cost of pursuing widespread renewable power deployment. (The full version of Konrad’s assessment provides a more complete takedown of the ILSR’s “Heresy on Transmission.”)

In other words, a little extra long-distance transmission investment would go a long way toward making the ILSR’s vision of widespread renewable power an attainable system.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think either vision is way-out-of-the-ballpark crazy for the foreseeable future.  Still, there is a difference between “astronauts landing on Mars” crazy, and “astronauts landing on Pluto” crazy.  Both are way, way out of the ballpark at present, but one will always be way more economical than the other.

[Konrad also blogs at clean energy investing site Alt Energy Stocks.]

Posted in Energy markets, Environmental policy | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

h1

Football helmets and head injuries

November 18, 2009

Michael Giberson

Paul Walker at Anti-Dismal sees the economic content in the recent Wall Street Journal article on football, helmets, and head injuries.  Here’s a piece of the story:

Why do football players wear helmets in the first place? And more important, could the helmets be part of the problem?

“Some people have advocated for years to take the helmet off, take the face mask off. That’ll change the game dramatically,” says Fred Mueller, a University of North Carolina professor who studies head injuries. “Maybe that’s better than brain damage.”

The first hard-shell helmets, which became popular in the 1940s, weren’t designed to prevent concussions but to prevent players in that rough-and-tumble era from suffering catastrophic injuries like fractured skulls.

But while these helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often. “Almost every single play, you’re going to get hit in the head,” says Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Jake Long.

So there is talk about giving up on helmets.

One of the strongest arguments for banning helmets comes from the Australian Football League. While it’s a similarly rough game, the AFL never added any of the body armor Americans wear. When comparing AFL research studies and official NFL injury reports, AFL players appear to get hurt more often on the whole with things like shoulder injuries and tweaked knees. But when it comes to head injuries, the helmeted NFL players are about 25% more likely to sustain one.

Andrew McIntosh, a researcher at Australia’s University of New South Wales who analyzed videotape, says there may be a greater prevalence of head injuries in the American game because the players hit each other with forces up to 100% greater. “If they didn’t have helmets on, they wouldn’t do that,” he says. “They know they’d injure themselves.”

The economics at issue is variously referred to as the Peltzman effect and the Tullock effect, namely, strategic adaptation to safety regulations or devices in ways in which offset some of the intended outcomes.  The safer the vehicle, the bigger the risks that drivers are willing to take.  Note that there may be negative externalities, as for pedestrians walking in the neighborhood of safer drivers taking bigger risks.

Or, to return to the football example provided above, the better the helmet, the harder the hits delivered.

Gordon Tullock’s proposal, illustrated in the title banner at the economics blog Offsetting Behavior, is placement of a large spike on each car’s steering wheel with the point aimed directly at the driver.  Sure, riskier for the driver, but much safer for everyone else.

Posted in Economics, Professional sports | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

h1

Cooperation and cheating among bacteria

November 18, 2009

Michael Giberson

Ed Yong, at Not exactly rocket science, describes recent research into, uh, I guess you could describe it as the socioeconomic life of bacteria:

Bacteria may not strike you as expert co-operators but at high concentrations, they pull together to build microscopic ‘cities’ called biofilms, where millions of individuals live among a slimy framework that they themselves secrete. These communities provide protection from antibiotics, among other benefits, and they require cooperation to build.

… One individual can’t build a biofilm on its own so it pays for a colony to be able to measure its own size. To do this, they use a method ‘quorum sensing’, where individuals send out signalling molecules in the presence of their own kind.

When another bacterium receives this signal, it sends out some of its own, so that once a population reaches a certain density, it sets off a chain reaction of communication that floods the area with chemical messages.

These messages provide orders that tell the bacteria to secrete a wide range of proteins and chemicals. Some are necessary for building biofilms, others allow them to infect hosts, others make their movements easier and yet others break down potential sources of food. They tell bacteria to start behaving cooperatively and also when it’s worth doing so.

Yong mentions research which inserted “signal-negative” and “signal-blind” variants of a bacteria – mutants that can’t pass along signals or that can’t sense them at all – into a population of normal bacteria.  It turns out that all that signaling behavior needed for social coordination is costly; abstaining from social activities allows the mutant bacterium to devote more time and energy to the more self-interested pursuits of eating and reproducing.  The research found that, as summed up by Yong, “cheaters can indeed prosper and then some – they outgrew their cooperating cousins by 60 to 80 times.”

Another researcher working with the same species of bacteria found that non-cooperators occur naturally.

But if cheaters prosper, why does anyone not cheat?  Yong said, “Both studies found that as the proportion of cheaters increased, their growth rate dropped because the value of cheating diminished.”

The second study also discovered that when faced with a population crash, cheaters developed further mutations that restored cooperative abilities.

But, to me, this last finding draws into question the characterization of non-signaling bacteria as non-cooperators and cheaters.  Perhaps the non-signalers emerge naturally in a population to regulate investment in the social infrastructure.  Perhaps “they also serve who only sit and wait (and eat and reproduce).”  This reserve army of slacker bacteria is getting ready for the hard times ahead, and when hard times come they have the energy stored up to leap into action, developing mutations necessary to restore cooperative abilities.

[HT to Economics and Mechanisms, which titles its post "Bacteria that channel Elinor Ostrom," and CogiDDo ergo sum.]

Posted in Economics, Miscellany | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 41 other followers