From 423a096f17e3ef8b3a7f071f80cd0eba2070eae8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 12:46:10 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Added daily report --- archive-covid-19/17 February, 2021.html | 186 ++++++++ archive-daily-dose/17 February, 2021.html | 510 ++++++++++++++++++++++ index.html | 4 +- 3 files changed, 698 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 archive-covid-19/17 February, 2021.html create mode 100644 archive-daily-dose/17 February, 2021.html diff --git a/archive-covid-19/17 February, 2021.html b/archive-covid-19/17 February, 2021.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..030c4d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-covid-19/17 February, 2021.html @@ -0,0 +1,186 @@ + + + + + + 17 February, 2021 + +Covid-19 Sentry + +

Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+As demand reached new heights, the supply of electricity fell drastically in the past few days, far below what operators expected. Ordinarily, ERCOT plans for winter to be much warmer and anticipates a lower energy demand. Power providers often schedule downtime and maintenance during the winter months to prepare for the massive annual surge in electricity demand in the hot Texas summer. The state’s ample wind and solar energy resources are also diminished in the winter, so ERCOT doesn’t depend on them to meet much of the demand they anticipate. +

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+However, the cold itself posed a direct challenge to the power sources that the state was counting on. Wind turbines iced up. Coal piles froze. +

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+The biggest shortfall in energy production stemmed from natural gas. Gas pipelines were blocked with ice or their compressors lost power. Much of the gas that was available was prioritized for heating homes and businesses rather than generating electricity. That’s helpful for people who use gas for heating but less so for those who use electric furnaces. +

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+Wholesale natural gas prices, meanwhile, shot up as much as 4,000 percent. According to Bloomberg, electricity prices in northern Texas jumped to $300 per megawatt-hour, up from the average this month of $18 per megawatt-hour. +

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+In total, about 34,000 megawatts of power generation in Texas went offline during the winter blast, more than 40 percent of peak winter demand. So even with a diverse range of energy sources, Texas was left scrounging for electrons in the bitter cold. +

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+Many parts of the country suffer outages in extreme weather, but everything is bigger in Texas +

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+The power grid is a complex beast, but it becomes unstable when there is more energy demand than supply, which forces drastic actions like deliberate blackouts. +

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+One question many Texans are asking is whether ERCOT should have seen a scenario like this coming and done more to prepare. ERCOT has historically been more worried about meeting peak summer demand, which can top 125,000 megawatts as hundreds of thousands of air conditioners switch on to cool during the summer heat. +

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+However, Texas has faced cold snaps before, and the current winter storm was forecast days in advance. Some research suggests that as climate change warms the Arctic, periods of extreme winter weather may become more frequent in the United States, and cold snaps that stress the power grid may become more common. But other climate researchers are skeptical of these results and think that periods of extreme cold will become less likely as the planet warms. +

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+ERCOT did do some modeling and planning ahead of this winter, but they used past winters as their benchmarks, which aren’t much help when the cold dips to record-breaking lows. “We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions, and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers,” said Peter Warnken, manager of resource adequacy at ERCOT, in a report forecasting winter energy demand and supply in Texas. +

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+The state was only expecting to lose about 8,600 megawatts in power generation over the winter, with a peak demand of roughly 58,000 megawatts. That forecast was far off the mark from the 34,000 megawatts that went offline and the peak of 69,000 megawatts in the recent winter storm. +

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+Part of the problem may also be Texas’s go-it-alone approach to its electricity. “The Texas power grid is really an island,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University who has done modeling research on the state’s power systems. “Whatever happens in Texas stays in Texas.” While there are some interconnections between Texas and neighboring states, those power lines aren’t adequate to draw the power it would need to cope with such a massive shortfall. +

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+Energy trading across states has helped cushion the blow of extreme cold in past winters, but it’s not clear that there would be much power available for Texans to buy from other states right now, as many are also coping with their own soaring energy demands and supply shortfalls. +

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+The Texas blackouts may also be a symptom of a lack of proper upkeep. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the department of economics at the University of Houston, told the Houston Chronicle. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.” +

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+And Texas isn’t the only part of the country that has struggled to stay warm in chilly winters. In 2019, a winter storm swept across the Midwest and Northeast, with spikes in electricity demand and sudden drops in natural gas production that forced people to ration heat and reduce power use. +

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+On the other end of the spectrum, California suffered rolling blackouts last summer as energy demand surged amid record-breaking heat. California utilities also shut off power to customers to prevent the ignition of wildfires, when high winds picked up amid dry weather. +

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+These events triggered by weather extremes can overwhelm energy systems, even for those that face such spikes and dips on a regular basis. It’s too reductive to blame any individual factor like intermittent renewable energy, fossil fuel generator shutdowns, decrepit infrastructure, or inadequate planning, though such events often become a political Rorschach test. +

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+Rather, it’s a combination of multiple cascading failures that leaves millions of people in the dark. The hope now is that the power outages in Texas will provide important lessons and help avoid similar problems in the future. “I think this is an event that people are going to be looking back at for years,” Cohan said. +

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+In fact, the film’s intentions seem to have amounted to little for many trans people; at Shudder, Harmony Colangelo recently wrote about “every experience I’ve had where people compare me to Buffalo Bill, snicker as they’ve asked me if ‘I’d fuck me so hard,’ or generally see me as some sort of threat directly because of this film.” +

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+“There is no film that leaves me feeling worse than Silence of the Lambs,” she concluded, “and it is elevated because of how I have been treated as a result of it.” +

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+Not everyone in the LGBTQ community views Silence of the Lambs as purely transphobic. Some have argued for a redemptive view of the film’s queer aesthetic, while others have reframed its perceived depiction of villainous trans identity as “empowered monstrosity.” But it’s difficult to deny that the film has disseminated a transphobic worldview that many viewers readily accepted, regardless of either its intent or the other positive aspects of its legacy. As VanDerWerff noted, “It is one of the most influential movies ever made. Its influence includes transphobia.” +

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+In other words, the cultural legacy of The Silence of the Lambs is a mixed bag, full of positives and pejoratives alike, all of which are impossible to ignore. +

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+We might even say it’s a bit like its main character, Clarice: It’s damaged and imperfect, but it’s unquestionably persistent — and its impact is here to stay. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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