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SAM predicts just one change to the top eight between now and the end of the season - with Spurs leapfrogging Liverpool to finish second. Before their win over Chelsea, SAM had Mauricio Pochettino's team down as finishing third. |
Spurs, of course, slipped to third at the end of last season, so finishing as runners-up would represent their best finish in the Premier League. |
There is no movement for the bottom five but Leicester, who are 15th, are predicted to climb five places, giving their title defence an ever so slightly more respectable appearance. |
SAM gives Hull, who are bottom, a 97.2% probability of going down. |
SAM takes into account a wide range of factors to work out match results, looking at average performances so far and calculating what that means for the remaining fixtures. It is based on players remaining fit and continuing with their average performance levels, so an injury to Chelsea striker Diego Costa or Tottenham midfielder Dele Alli, for example, would have a significant impact on these predicted outcomes. |
You can follow Professor Ian McHale on Twitter |
Whatever happened to the 'hidden costs' of renewables? |
By Richard Black, ECIU Director On Tuesday, after reading Aurora Energy Research’s report on the costs of adding solar power to the grid, I tweeted that I’d just read the most important energy story of the day. After a bit more thought, I’m upgrading. I’ll name it as a contender for the most important UK energy story of the year. That might seem like a bold claim given all the shenanigans of the Hinkley Point C power station, which really ought to get a mini-series of its own wherein a bare-chested Ross |
Poldarkian George Osborne woos French and Chinese maidens simultaneously and manages to hand both safely into the care of the new Lady of the Manor even at the moment of his downfall. Not to mention approval of Lancashire fracking applications, the decline of North Sea oil and gas, National Infrastructure Commission endorsement of the smart flexible low-carbon grid... So let me try to justify the claim. |
Repeated analyses from both national and international bodies shows that for most countries, there are three absolutely core steps necessary for eliminating carbon emissions – the long-term goal to which all governments committed themselves under the Paris climate change agreement. Make the use of all energy as efficient as possible Decarbonise the electricity system Extend the use of electricity to sectors where currently, fossil fuels are burned directly, such as heating and transport. There are basically |
three options for building a low-carbon electricity system: nuclear reactors, renewables, or fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Each comes with its own set of issues and costs; and in the case of renewables, the key issue (and it’s a serious one) is that for wind turbines and solar panels, generation isn’t continuous. |
This means that additional measures are needed to keep the lights on – and they cost extra money. |
Among 'brown movement' think-tanks and other organisations opposed to reducing carbon emissions, these ‘hidden costs’ have emerged as a totemic argument against renewable energy. The pre-Brexit Cabinet flirted with it pretty heavily too. Then Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd’s department briefed the Mail on Sunday last August that she’d commissioned a study from the consultancy Frontier Economics that would tot up these hidden costs, with a DECC source adding ominously: ‘Many in the energy |
industry have suspected that previous governments have been “economical with the truth”’ about the economics of a low-carbon transition.' Then, when Ms Rudd delivered her long-awaited ‘reset speech’ in November, she announced that renewable generators would be held ‘responsible for the pressures they add to the system when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine’. More than a year on, that Frontier Economics report has yet to be published. Insiders in the Department of Business, Energy and |
Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which inherited DECC’s responsibilities, say it’s tucked away in a drawer somewhere while civil servants decide what to do with it. Cost becomes benefit Into that vacuum steps this week's Aurora report. And its conclusions are fascinating. Aurora concludes that currently, solar power’s ‘hidden costs’ in the UK amount to £1.30 per megawatt hour (MWh). That hikes the total cost of solar by less than 2%. As a technology devoid of fuel costs, the more solar generation you add, the |
further the wholesale electricity price falls. But there’s a limit, because after a while, you’re adding something virtually free to something that’s already very cheap; so the additional costs rise faster than the additional benefits. Aurora concluded that having 40GW solar capacity on the grid by 2030 would, net, carry a higher additional cost than currently – £6.80/MWh. Even at this pretty high (but doable) level of solar capacity, we’re below the estimate of the Committee on Climate Change, the |
government’s statutory adviser, which recently put the ‘hidden cost’ of renewables at about £10 per MWh. But now we get to the really interesting bit. Aurora next modelled the ‘hidden costs’ if you also have 8GW of battery storage on the grid by 2030 – again, a realistic estimate – in addition to the 40GW of solar capacity. Now, the ‘hidden costs’ disappear, becoming a ‘hidden benefit’ – saving £3.70 per MWh. |
The reason why is, at top level, pretty simple. Neither the traditional baseload-heavy model of electricity generation nor the new flexible one based on the variable output of wind turbines and solar panels generates in a way that matches demand; in the old model, you simply turn generation off or on in order to match demand, in the new you rely on various flexibility mechanisms including storage. Both of these solutions have hidden costs. Introducing batteries to store and release solar-generated |
electricity brings flexibility that eases the process of matching supply to demand – and in doing so, turns the ‘hidden cost’ of 40GW of solar capacity into a hidden benefit. At the Helm Now: forecasts are forecasts, models are models. No-one has to believe them. Some will point out that the Aurora report was commissioned by the Solar Trade Association, the trade body for the UK solar industry, and will distrust it on that basis. To which the response would be that Aurora’s USP is its credibility and |
rigour. And it’s not any old company; among its directors is Dieter Helm, the Oxford professor who’s widely regarded as the Treasury’s favourite energy economist. In terms of overall economics, the Aurora study doesn’t include the costs of batteries themselves – which are declining, but still significant – nor the costs of erecting the solar panels. It doesn’t look at the simple technique of encouraging solar farms to point panels east and west, rather than south, in order to spread generation across the |
day. So it’s not a complete picture. But it does appear to slay the canard about hidden costs axiomatically being high pretty effectively. |
Croatia has received six bids in an international tender for oil and gas exploration areas in the Adriatic, and will choose the best ones by the end of the year, Economy Minister Ivan Vrdoljak said yesterday (3 November). |
“We are satisfied, we’ve received bids from big, serious companies,” Vrdoljak told reporters. The government sees oil exploration as a key project for the newest EU member, whose economy has been stuck in recession since 2008. |
Croatia says it expects investment worth some €2 billion over the next five years in exploration activities. |
Local media have earlier reported oil majors like Exxon , Shell, Chevron and Total as being interested but Vrdoljak declined to name any of the bidders. |
The tender, which closed on Monday after running for seven months, comprised 29 block areas for exploration and future exploitation, eight in the north and 21 in central and southern Adriatic. The size of one block ranges from 1,000 to 1,600 square kilometres. |
View from a cruise ship. Croatian coastline, 2012. [Robert Pittman/Flickr] |
View from a cruise ship. Croatian coastline, 2012. [Robert Pittman/Flickr] |
Each bidder was allowed to compete for an unlimited number of blocks. The six submitted bids were for 15 blocks altogether, Vrdoljak said. The government plans to sign concession agreements by the spring 2015. |
The exploration concession will be awarded for five years with a possibility to extend it for another year, while exploitation concessions are planned for 25 years. |
According to the preliminary data, gas reserves are more likely to be found in the north while crude deposits are expected in the southern part of Croatia’s Adriatic, where the seabed is deeper. |
Local environment groups say oil drilling could destroy the Adriatic and hurt Croatia’s lucrative tourism industry. The government said the concessionaires would be required to respect the highest international environmental protection standards. |
Croatia currently covers about 65% of its annual gas consumption of 3 billion cubic metres from its own fields offshore. It hopes to be able to meet the entire local demand from the domestic wells following the new exploration efforts. |
Croatia is currently also running an international tender for onshore oil and gas exploration which expires in February. |
Image copyright Sepahnews Image caption The Revolutionary Guards said Gen Allah-Dadi had been killed while defending the people of Syria |
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have confirmed that a general was killed in a suspected Israeli air strike in the Syrian Golan Heights on Sunday. |
Mohammad Ali Allah-Dadi was in Syria to advise forces supporting President Bashar al-Assad, a statement said. |
The Lebanese Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah said six of its fighters also died when a helicopter fired missiles at a convoy in Quneitra province. |
Sources in Israel said it was aimed at stopping an attack on Israeli soil. |
Earlier, a source close to Hezbollah told the AFP news agency that a total of six Iranian soldiers had been killed, along with its own fighters. |
'Martyred' |
The official news website of the Revolutionary Guards, Sepahnews, only reported confirmation of Gen Allah-Dadi's death on Monday. |
It cited a statement as saying he had been "martyred while defending the shrines and innocent people of Syria". |
Image copyright AP Image caption Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of a Hezbollah military chief assassinated in 2008, was also among those killed |
It praised the general for his "effective" role in the Iran-Iraq War, as well as his service as commander of the al-Ghadir Corps in Yazd province in central Iran. |
"The commander was in Syria to provide advice to the nation to confront the Salafist-takfiri terrorists", it added, referring to Sunni extremists. |
Hezbollah's al-Manar TV said Gen Allah-Dadi and its fighters were killed while inspecting positions in the village of Mazraat Amal, which is an area where the Lebanese group is giving crucial help to Syrian government forces fighting rebels from al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate. |
The dead included Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of a Hezbollah military chief assassinated in 2008, and Mohammed Issa, a field commander, it added. |
The BBC's Paul Wood in Beirut says that whatever led up to this incident, the question now is whether Hezbollah retaliates. |
Only days earlier, its leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened Israel with long-range missiles if it carried out any more strikes on Syrian soil. |
On the one hand, Hezbollah may not want to open up a second front against Israel while it is so heavily involved in Syria, our correspondent says. On the other hand, many in Lebanon believe Hezbollah will not be able to remain quiet after such senior people were killed, he adds. |
Annnnnnd the Ubuntu Developer Summit is over for another 6 months. |
Five days, 40 hours, lots of beer, frivolity and discussion have lead to a set of potential plans for the Ubuntu 12.10 release. |
Due to the nature of development not everything intended to happen will. But, pessimism aside, the following list of proposals do all on the to-do list… |
Desktop |
A ‘system compositor’ will be used to generate flicker-free boot and seamless transitions from boot screen to login screen. The login screen will sport a smooth transition to the desktop. |
LightDM will be implemented as the lock-screen, thus adding visual and behavioural consistency to the desktop. |
Unity 2D is likely to be dropped. Unity 3D will be made capable of running on lower-end hardware via ‘Gallium3D llvmpipe’. |
The HUD will sport additional features, including the ability to ‘wrap around dialogs and toolbars’. |
GNOME |
Ubuntu GNOME fans will be excited by word of a potential vanilla GNOME Ubuntu spin (i.e. a “GNOME-BUNTU/GNOME-Shell Remix”). |
Elsewhere, GNOME 3.6 will be used as the base of Ubuntu 12.10. |
Apps, Settings and Installer |
Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer will be ‘beefed up’ to provide all of the features offered by the ‘alternate installer’, resulting in the latter being dropped as a download option. |
The installer will also see the Windows settings migration assistant feature removed. The team conclude that it is too untested and buggy to remain in place. |
LibreOffice will – finally – ship with AppMenu support out of the box, making it fully HUD accessible. |
Jockey, Ubuntu’s current 3rd party driver installer, will be replaced with a ‘better version integrated with System Settings’. |
Technical Stuff |
Ubuntu 12.10 will use the 3.5 kernel, with a view to supporting the 3.6 version after its release. |
Python 3 will ship on the CD by default, meaning various default apps and utilities will be rewritten to take advantage of this. |
Boot speed and application start-up speeds will be improved. |
• Claude Michy blames resignation on Costa being a woman • Costa left post on Tuesday before taking first training session |
The president of the French football club that lost its new female manager just hours before a first training session, blamed it on her being a woman on Tuesday. |
In an astonishing response that will spark accusations of sexism, Claude Michy, president of the second division Clermont Foot 63, said: “She’s a woman so it could be down to any number of things …” |
The Portuguese-born Helena Costa, 36, who became the first female coach of a French professional men’s team, had refused to say why she was walking out on the club at a press conference on Tuesday. |
Immediately after she left the room, however, Michy’s declarations took a different tone. He insisted the reason for Costa’s decision was a mystery. |
“It’s an astonishing, irrational and incomprehensible decision. She’s developed a confidence problem, but I don’t know what it was that caused this,” he told journalists. |
“She told me quite simply: ‘I’m going,’ and we didn’t succeed in making her change her mind. She’s taking her secret with her.” |
The appointment of Costa last month was seen as a watershed in the macho world of football. She was previously the coach of the Iranian women’s team and was nicknamed “Mourinho in a skirt”, after a period of work experience at Chelsea when her compatriot José Mourinho was manager. |
Costa announced she was resigning and decided to return to Portugal on Monday. She was due to oversee the team’s first training session on Tuesday. |
“Until now I’ve totally honoured by commitments, but after a discussion with the president, I’ve decided to leave. It’s my own decision,” she said. |
It’s that time of year again when NASA scientists compete to make the most creative, the most technologically challenging, and the most impressive pumpkin display of them all. This year, pumpkins spun, floated, and sailed like ships in the seventh annual (unofficial) pumpkin carving contest at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. |
The rules of the pumpkin carving contest are simple, says Pete Waydo, deputy section manager of spacecraft mechanical engineering at JPL and a judge of the contest. Contestants can pick up their pumpkins a week before the competition and start assembling their displays, but only on the day of the contest can they actually work on their pumpkins — in just one hour. Other than that, Waydo says, “There are no rules.” |
Attention all nerds: the @NASAJPL Mechanical Engineering Sections Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest is TODAY! Stay tuned for some #NASAPumpkin! pic.twitter.com/iccEGQKlHn — Aaron Yazzie (@YazzieSays) October 30, 2017 |
The competition is a way for scientists to let off steam — by doing more science, Waydo says. “If you look at the entries over the years, you'll see a lot of creative use of the kind of technologies that we use in research for spaceflight — applied to the pumpkins,” he says. And over the past few years, the competition has only gotten steeper. “It has also forced people to really up their games, so we get some really intense, crazy, off-the-hook creations,” he says. |
The winner this year is a pirate pumpkin ship floating on a sea of dry ice meant to represent Europa, Jupiter’s icy ocean moon. The ship represents a 19th century trading vessel called a clipper ship, a play on the name for NASA’s mission to investigate whether Europa is capable of sustaining life: Europa Clipper. |
Another pumpkin in the contest spoke to the fears of many at JPL’s Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group. That’s the team of people tasked with ensuring that Earth’s microbes don’t travel to other worlds and that alien microbes don’t find their way here. Their pumpkin display is meant to resemble the NASA InSight lander, which is scheduled to launch next year. But here, it’s covered in terrifying, gourd-like spores from Earth. |
This flower-shaped pumpkin is an homage to NASA’s starshade, a space-based device intended to make taking photos of exoplanets easier. It’s just a concept right now, but it’s designed to work with space telescopes to shut out distracting starlight and let the dim light of an exoplanet shine through. |
If Martians were to collect the wreckage left behind by human explorations of Mars, it would look something like this pumpkin: sticking out is the wheel from the 1997 Sojourner Rover, gadgets from previous missions like the Mars Phoenix lander, “and a bunch of other odds and ends,” Waydo says. There are also models of sample tubes planned for the upcoming Mars2020 mission, to investigate whether microbes ever lived on Mars. |
.Mars Waste Management #NASAPumpkin. Mars’ way of cleaning up all the junk we send there! pic.twitter.com/zBlAVm0MeC — Aaron Yazzie (@YazzieSays) October 30, 2017 |
One of Waydo’s favorite pumpkins was created by a team of scientists specializing in entry, descent, and landing of spacecraft. These are the experts on entering Mars’ atmosphere, and landing safely on its surface, Waydo says. The team attached a parachute to their pumpkin, and hovered it over a blower. “It was like one of those indoor skydiving places,” Waydo says. “You could hang the pumpkin there on the parachute and it would free-fly indefinitely there.” |
Of course, these are professional scientists and engineers, so don’t be discouraged by your own orange, snaggle-toothed creation. But, if you want to start prepping for a more impressive pumpkin next year, NASA has some tips. |
If this puppet-master behavior were not strange enough, scientists have now found out how the parasite may change rat behavior. |
Toxoplasma infection activates a part of the rat’s brain normally engaged in sexual attraction. The smell of cat urine revs up this set of neurons like the presence of a sexually receptive female rat normally would. |
The neurons that trigger the rat’s normal “freezing” reaction to cats continue to fire. But their message may get swamped by the overactive sexual attraction signaling, the researchers suspect. |
“Thousands of scientists are trying to figure out how to tamp down anxiety, and this tiny parasite has already figured it out,” said Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroscientist and co-author of a paper reporting the discovery in the journal PLoS One. |
The discovery by Dr. Sapolsky and his colleagues is “quite intriguing,” said Joanne P. Webster, director of parasitic diseases in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London. |
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“It’s a small study, but it makes sense,” Dr. Webster said. “The rodents’ fear of cats is such a strong innate reaction. Something that’s going to override it is going to have to be quite a focused, fine-scale response in the mind of the rat. The neuronal activity underlying sexual attraction is a good candidate.” |