There is a trade off between how fast a football goes and how much control you have on it. And football designers are always trying to get a ball that goes faster and that has great control. The trade off involves seams (panels) big bumps. The texture of the ball (tiny bumps). This is a graph to tell the story of how theyre has been back and forth over time as technology tries to get us to 1 panel but also sometimes we go to far and step back.
Bray's prediction of one panel by 2022 and why
Nature paper on football shape
The drag crises, spin and how the 2024 football works
I talked before about how we should be playing with 1 panel balls by 2022 here
Code and data for this graph is here
Grid batteries, at current Irish wholesale prices, would pay for themselves in 2 years with a optimal strategy and 3 with a simple one.
This latest auction for supplying batteries to the Chinese grid had a lowest bid at CNY 0.458/Wh ($63/kWh) That is 61 euro. Times a thousand for MWh of storage is 61,000 euro.
Irish wholesale electricity prices per hour are here.
If we take the price at the cheapest hour that day and say we fill the battery at that time. And add 20% to the cost to account for round trip losses. And then the price at the most expensive hour that day for the discharge the profit made is shown below.
A simple strategy of buy at 3am and sell at 5pm takes 3 years to pay off. So the practical optimum is somewhere in between.
The 20% round trip losses means it only occasionally makes sense in 2024 to top up at night, sell in the morning peak time. Top up at noon using solar and sell at 5pm peak again. But Solar has been increasing 38% year on year for decades so this strategy would work a lot better in future. Twice the usage would result in faster payback times.
A fair amount of Irelands wind energy is just lost. This could be bought very cheap near where it is made and later fed back into the system. Wind Energy Ireland said that over 3% was lost last year as due to wind farms being shut down because the electricity grid is not strong enough. Local buying and storage of that excess 3% would be very cheap as at the moment it is wasted. And this locally cheaper price is not reflected in all Ireland wholesale prices used in the calculation.
Business people do not miss opportunities to get the price of a 20 year long asset like grid batteries paid off in 2-3 years. So something must be stopping them adding these batteries at the moment. But knowing what could be achieved now without constraints is still an interesting exercise if we want to work out what constraints need to be reduced.
The code for this analysis is here and i can update it with more realistic assumptions as I learn them.
I grew up worried that the world's population would grow too much and widespread hunger would result.
But I think 2026 is the year there will be a move to a long term drop in the world's population.
By this I mean that
1. World fertility will continue to decline at the same rate as it has been recently. So TFR of 2.3 in 2023 going to 2.25 2024, 2.20 2025, 2.15 in 2026.
2. Infant and child mortality will decline at the same rate as it has been recently. It is down to about 3.5% from 9.7% in 1990. Malaria, TB and other vaccines might reduce this considerably but fairly slowly and not much by 2026.
3. Sex selective abortion will continue to decline but not fast enough to keep females being born above replacement level.
Long term it is number of women that are raised per woman that matters. If our life expectancy goes from 40 to 80 to 120 that's really good for us. And it will mean the world's population goes up. But not in the long term.
Long terms it is really women that matter. They are the ones that actually have children. Obviously this men not mattering idea is not true at the extreme end. You do need some men.
Assuming life expectancy and men do not matter. What does matter in particular is number of female children per woman. And particularly how many of those live to an age when they can have children.
And I think these align so that we move below replacement level in 2026.
The year of peak births seems to have been 2013 and to have moved to below long term replacement that soon afterward is quite surprising. Getting the exact year is hard as in some ways we won't know how many people get to the age they can have children until they get there. At a 1% yearly decline in fertility we will be below replacement birth level soon.
If one Russian tank storage base runs out how many tanks are left in the rest? I saw a video today about how the 1295th tank storage area in Russia is empty.
There is a famous estimation problem called the german tank problem. If you know tanks have a serial number on them from 1 up as each new one is produced. And you find some broken tanks with serial numbers on them. Can you estimate how many tanks N have been created?
But I came across a related problem today. If you have some tank storage bases and one of them runs out of tanks what can you guess about the total number of tanks left?
This involves some assumptions. Each tank storage base draws at the same proportional rate. As in if one base has 100 and another has 100 each will have a 50:50 chance of having the next tank removed. And in the case where the second has 1000 tanks it will have a ten times higher chance of the next removal.
Bases should have a similar proportion of fixing up sheds and staff per tank so I think this is a reasonable guess. Unless some base you know to be much more likely to have high repair speeds and rates.
So this tank storage base is empty according to this short video 1295th - Empty of Tanks in 2024 December Satellite Imagery. Looking at the video it does not seem to be high tech refurbishing place. And if it was other tanks to repair would be moved there to also get repaired so it would not be empty first. it does seem small only having 325 tanks 2 years ago. But with the proportional withdrawal assumption that doesn't matter hugely.
This is the code to simulate how many tanks are left in all bases once one runs out.
Assuming random withdrawals are random.
There is less tanks left than I expected. Once one store is empty less than 10% of the tanks remain.
And this is with various numbers of bases and initial number of tanks in the base.
What will Ireland's Electricity mix look like in 2030 assuming
The code for this projection is here.
* obviously the weather in any hour of the year won't be the same as that hour in 2023. But by copying a year you get to see how wind and solar peak and lull in an accurate way. Combining more years into an average loses the 'what happens if its dark and calm for a week' accuracy of copying one years weather.
| year | demand_twh | solar_twh | wind_twh | waste_twh | battery_used_twh | unmet_twh |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 39.7 | 1.0 | 13.7 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 24.9 |
| 2024 | 41.2 | 1.4 | 16.2 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 23.7 |
| 2025 | 42.9 | 1.9 | 19.1 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 22.0 |
| 2026 | 44.6 | 2.6 | 22.6 | 0.7 | 0.2 | 20.0 |
| 2027 | 46.4 | 3.6 | 26.6 | 2.0 | 0.3 | 17.9 |
| 2028 | 48.2 | 4.9 | 31.4 | 4.3 | 0.6 | 15.7 |
| 2029 | 50.2 | 6.8 | 37.1 | 7.9 | 1.0 | 13.3 |
| 2030 | 52.2 | 9.4 | 43.7 | 13.3 | 1.7 | 10.6 |
| 2031 | 54.3 | 13.0 | 51.6 | 21.1 | 2.9 | 7.9 |
| 2032 | 56.4 | 17.9 | 60.9 | 31.8 | 4.3 | 5.1 |
| 2033 | 58.7 | 24.7 | 71.8 | 46.1 | 5.3 | 3.0 |
| 2034 | 61.1 | 34.1 | 84.8 | 65.1 | 5.4 | 1.9 |
| 2035 | 63.5 | 47.1 | 100.0 | 90.0 | 5.3 | 1.2 |
| 2036 | 66.0 | 64.9 | 118.0 | 122.6 | 5.2 | 0.5 |
| 2037 | 68.7 | 89.6 | 139.3 | 165.1 | 4.8 | 0.1 |
This post here estimated there would be about 16.5GWh of Grid scale batteries power in ireland in 2030. an actual expert said 13.5GWh. Eirgrid estimate 3.4GWh and SEAI 1.7GWh.
But apart from Grid scale batteries what other ones will we have?
Grid scale solar and domestic solar are about equal. There might be a similar relationship between Domestic and grid scale batteries. In 2019 in the UK 10,000 homes had domestic storage batteries. And those batteries seemed to be about 5KWh on average. They have gone up since. that would be 50MWh. This is tiny compared to the amount of grid scale energy at the time. I do not think currently domestic batteries make up a big proportion of total batteries. I could be wrong on this but that is what the data I see at the moment says.
'Under the Climate Action Plan, the Government initially set a target of having 175,000 electric passenger cars on the road by the end of 2025 which would increase to 845,000 by the end of 2030.' That would be 34GWh of batteries in cars. And given that EV battery capacity keep going up, Range doubles every 7 years that could be nearly doubled by then. Even if they do not go from 40KWh to 80KWh, 60KWh is pretty standard and probably will be average by then.
