Infrastructure Needs - Another Regional Reference

From time to time, I write something about failing infrastructure in the US.  Usually, I complain about how I seem to be living in a completely different country than the one some article is describing.  This week, The Atlantic ran a piece about the problem of combined storm and sanitary sewer systems.  Such systems are prone to overflows of raw sewage into nearby rivers and lakes when it rains hard.  One of the links in that article leads to the EPA map shown here, which identifies the largest of the 770 or so combined sewer systems in the US.

The American Society of Civil Engineers provides annual (very pessimistic) reports on the nation's infrastructure.  Regional cost estimates in their 2013 report reflect the distribution shown in the map: per-capita costs to fix the problems in the Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, and New England regions are much higher than other parts of the country.  Those regions plus portions of the Plains region are the only one where the cost of wet weather overflows is a significant part of future water system spending needs.

Correcting the overflows inherent in combined systems is expensive.  Washington, DC is about half-way through a 20-year $2.6B project to eliminate most of the three billion gallons of untreated sewage released into nearby rivers annually.  The project includes boring some 13 miles of 25-foot-wide tunnels at a depth of more than a hundred feet below the city.  Milwaukee has reduced its sewage releases into Lake Michigan by almost 80% by digging a longer, deeper tunnel -- at a cost of over $3B.  Somewhat over half of the cost of the Milwaukee system, which began construction in 1983, was in the form of federal grants.  The federal government has largely discontinued making grants for these purposes, making loans instead.  The EPA estimates that the total cost of upgrading the combined systems across the country to be about $90B; the ASCE estimates are significantly higher.

In many cases, local governments are not going to be able to afford the kinds of construction needed to fix the problems.  Detroit, poster child for the Rust Belt, is an example.  This Scientific American piece summarizes the situation -- bankruptcy, massive debt, shrinking population, and long-term climate predictions that include more frequent heavy-precipitation events.  There will be pressure to turn a local problem into a state one, and state problems into federal ones.  In the future, I believe, such spending will be an increasing source of friction between different regions of the country.

Voting Stuff

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran a pair of pieces about voting in the United States.  This one talked about low voter turnout, and how various practices disproportionately increase that problem for the poor and minorities.  This one talked about the aging of voting machines in the US.  I was disappointed, because the word "mail" didn't appear even once in either article.  There's a revolution in voting practices happening in the American West, and it didn't even get a mention.

This graphic from the New York Times illustrates three levels of by-mail balloting.  The lightest shade indicates states where less than 5% of votes cast in 2010 were cast by mail; the middle shade states between 5% and 18%; the darkest shade states where greater than 18% of votes cast were cast by mail.  Those dividing points don't make it clear just how widely used vote-by-mail has become in the West.  Colorado, Oregon, and Washington mail a ballot to all registered voters; in all three, more than 90% of votes cast are cast by mail.  In 2014, more than 60% of all votes cast in Arizona were cast by mail.  That same year, more than 50% of all votes cast in California were cast by mail.

Once instituted, vote-by-mail has incredible bipartisan support from voters.  In a recent poll with the question "Should the state continue to use its vote-by-mail arrangement?", 80% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans answered yes.  Several California government officials seem to be actively pushing universal vote-by-mail as a way to lower the costs of conducting elections.  Both Arizona and California have direct ballot initiatives, so it seems likely that even without action by the state governments, vote-by-mail will become standard within a few years.  That will make vote-by-mail the norm in all of the "big five" western population states [1]; the smaller states seem likely to follow along.

Vote-by-mail directly addresses several of the issues raised on The Atlantic's piece on low voter turnout.  It specifically creates a sizable early voting window.  It fixes the problem of balancing work and other life concerns against taking time off to vote.  Whether it has increased turnout in the three states that have gone the farthest is an unanswered question [2], but it addresses problems that are claimed to contribute to low turnout.  Vote-by-mail also addresses the technology issues that were raised.  Scanners for hand-marked paper ballots are accurate and relatively cheap.  Additionally, the total number of machines of all types needed, and the related expenses, are greatly reduced.

One of the interesting phenomena I have seen with respect to vote-by-mail is geographic.  My friends who are opposed to the idea almost all grew up east of the Mississippi River, and seem to be terrified that vote-by-mail will lead to widespread voter fraud.  The western experience has been that such fraud is almost non-existant -- certainly no worse than the fraud experienced in states without heavy use of vote-by-mail.  There's probably a Ph.D. dissertation in there for some sociology or political science graduate student.

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[1] As usual, I use "western" to mean the 11 contiguous states west of the Great Plains (sorry, Texas).  The "big five" by population are Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, which account for about 85% of the total western population.

[2] All three are direct initiative states. There is quite a bit of evidence that having a contentious initiative item on the ballot does increase turnout.

Arizona v. Arizona and East v. West

On the last day of the term, the US Supreme Court finally released its decision in the case of Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. In this case, the citizens of the state of Arizona had stripped their legislature of the power to draw the districts for election of members of the US House of Representatives. The legislature sued, citing the Elections Clause of the US Constitution:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

By a 5-4 vote, the Court decided that at least for the Elections Clause, the term "Legislature" means the normal legislative process in the state, rather than simply the representative body.  If the normal process includes citizen initiatives, the Court said, then the voters can decide how districts are to be drawn, even if the process excludes the traditional legislature entirely.  The deciding vote was cast by Justice Kennedy, much to the surprise of the conventional wisdom. Not that Kennedy was the deciding vote; that much they got right. What they got wrong was which way Kennedy would jump. Why did they get it wrong?

My answer to that question is that they forgot that Kennedy is a westerner. A California boy who went to college at Stanford, practiced law in the Golden State, and sat on the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court before moving up the Supreme Court. Appointed by Ronald Reagan because Kennedy was a known California quantity. I strongly suspect that the last paragraph of the majority's syllabus in the opinion is Kennedy's work:

Banning lawmaking by initiative to direct a State’s method of apportioning congressional districts would not just stymie attempts to curb gerrymandering. It would also cast doubt on numerous other time, place, and manner regulations governing federal elections that States have adopted by the initiative method. As well, it could endanger election provisions in state constitutions adopted by conventions and ratified by voters at the ballot box, without involvement or approval by “the Legislature.”

Shorter form: the citizen initiative genie was let out of the bottle a hundred years ago, and trying to put the genie back in the bottle now would be extraordinarily messy.

Citizen initiatives were widely adopted in the western states during the Progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century.  The map to the left highlights states with direct initiatives for either constitutional amendments or statutes or both in blue (direct initiatives bypass the legislature entirely) [1].  West of the Great Plains, direct initiatives are the rule, not the exception.  The statement quoted above is almost certainly true of all those western states: all of them have provided regulation of "the times, places and manner of holding elections" in either statute or amendment that bypassed the legislature.

While the initiative processes were adopted in the West during the Progressive era, initiatives are used today by both liberals and conservatives.  During the time I have lived in Colorado, conservatives were successful in adding the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) that removed state and local governments' ability to raise tax rates or introduce new taxes without submitting the measures to the voters.  Liberals were successful in having amendments adopted that increased spending on K-12 education and created a renewable energy mandate.  It's a western thing, and it's not surprising that Justice Kennedy was unwilling to try to put it back in its lamp.

[1] Florida is a late-comer to the party, having adopted direct initiatives for amendments when they rewrote their constitution in 1965.  Since then, the legislature and governors have made it as difficult as possible for Floridians to actually exercise that power.

Ahead of My Time?

A while back I was complaining about the evils of CSS and its mis-use to render the Web ugly, unreadable, or both.  I even threatened to resort to writing code to clean pages up as they were downloaded.  Over the course of April and May I spent quite a few spare minutes putting together a preliminary piece of JavaScript code to carry out that threat.  Tip of the hat to the folks that do GreaseMonkey, a Firefox extension that makes it straightforward to have a piece of code executed whenever a page finishes loading, the product that I use to launch my code.  I have to admit that I have been surprised by how much content can be made to have consistent appearance by working in a bottom-up fashion independent of the Web site -- I thought the code would have to be considerably more complicated.

I installed the newest version of Firefox for desktop machines today, and noticed that "reader mode" is now available by default.  If the software thinks that it can extract a simplified version of the page's principal content, an extra icon appears in the address bar.  Click on the icon and a new pane opens, with the text that the software thinks is the primary page content rendered in a simple layout.  Unsurprisingly, it doesn't get everything right; pictures might be excluded, and graphics that combine both images and text are likely to be garbled.  On some pages -- like the individual post pages Blogger generates for this site -- the software doesn't recognize that there's a main piece of content that could be extracted, so reader-mode isn't offered.  Still, I am clearly not the only one that thinks the Web is being rendered unreadable by the designers.  I'm not concerned with stripping away as much of the clutter as reader-mode; I simply want text presented consistently in terms of fonts and sizes.

Content extraction and formatting tools turn out not to be new (my bad, you can't keep up to date about everything).  Readability, for example, is available for a variety of platforms, and is attempting to build commercial products and services around the idea of simplifying content.  But having the software embedded in a popular desktop browser and enabled by default is probably a bigger thing for user acceptance.  Mozilla offers guidelines for structuring page content that makes it easier for the reader-mode software to recognize and extract content.  Will page designers be encouraged by the folks paying the bills to conform to those guidelines?  Will the advertising companies figure out ways to present ads so that they are still included in the simplified material?  How long before there's a user preference setting that invokes reader-mode automatically if the page content is recognized as conforming to the guidelines?  And of course, Mozilla is a much bigger target, and it might be tempting for an ad-selling firm to go to court on the legal theory that tools that rewrite possibly copyrighted material should be illegal or that damages should be paid.

Speaking broadly, this falls into the type of war that I've claimed for a long time the content providers can't win.  Content providers have to conform to standards so that their content can be rendered.  In this case, they have to stick with HTML and JavaScript's DOM.  Content consumers have a steadily increasing amount of processing power at their disposal for tearing the HTML apart and extracting a subset of the content.  Browsers give consumers the ability to write and/or install software on their own.  Nor is the necessary software all that complex, as I've demonstrated.  So the content providers can't win the war on legal grounds, because they can't put enough people in jail to matter.  The only way to "win" is to make content that is compelling and pleasant to use.

For at least one personal situation, the whole thing is an amusing development.  I was invited to be part of a group discussing site appearance and functionality for a multi-author blog (as a reader who regularly comments, not as a member of the editorial staff that makes the actual decisions).  I've been thinking that perhaps I should resign that "position" since I now run my own rewriting software as the default, and it does things that affects the size and proportions of various widgets on the blog's pages.  More interesting for the long term, though, is the whole question of how much effort should go into appearance issues since it seems likely that contemporary browsers will be making more and more decisions about what content to show and how to format that content.

Challenging the Fifth Branch

In the early 1900s, at the height of the Progressive movement, most of the states in the western half of the US adopted citizen initiative processes to put statutes, constitutional amendments, or both on the ballot. While some eastern states also adopted such provisions, it is not surprising that the movement was widespread in the West. Citizens in western states believed broadly that they were being exploited by outside interests – read large Eastern corporate interests in particular – and that those interests had purchased control of the state legislatures.

I'm a fan of the citizen initiative. Some of it might be that I simply grew up with initiatives as part of the system. Still, state and local government is a machine, elected officials have to fit into that, and there are things that replacing the individual cogs can't accomplish. Consider the issue of Congressional redistricting which arises every ten years following the decennial census. In Article I, Section 4 the Elections Clause of the US Constitution assigns responsibility for such to the legislature of each state. It would be unusual indeed if a state legislature willingly gave up control of that process [1]. In 2000, by ballot initiative, the people of Arizona approved a change in the state constitution that took Congressional redistricting completely out of the hands of the legislature. 

In 2012, after the commission approved a new map, the legislature sued the commission in federal court, arguing that the ballot initiative violated the Elections Clause. Congressional redistricting cases are decided by a special federal court; the three-judge court split 2-1 and rejected the challenge, upholding the validity of the citizen initiative. The main precedents cited were Ohio ex rel. Davis v. Hildebrant and Smiley v. Holm, where the courts had interpreted the Article I Section 4 "legislature" to mean the legislative process as determined by the individual states. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Arizona case in March this year. The expert consensus is that the justices seemed inclined to find that "legislature" should be interpreted more narrowly to mean only the elected legislative body (eg, this piece at SCOTUSblog). 

The Arizona case is not the only initiative-related case potentially before the Supreme Court this term. In 1992, Colorado passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). Among other things, TABOR takes away the state legislature's power to raise existing tax rates or introduce new taxes on their own; the legislature can only refer such measures to the voters. In 2011 some members of the Colorado state legislature sued in federal court, arguing that taking away the legislature's power to control taxation violated the constitutional requirement that states have a republican government. The district court found that the situation was sufficiently different from historical precedents to proceed with a trial [2]. That opinion was upheld by the appeals court, and has been appealed to the Supreme Court. To date, almost five months after materials were distributed to the justices, no decision has been made as to whether to grant certiorari. 

If I wear my natural western-populist hat then I want the Court to rule in favor of the people in both cases [3]. I expect that me to be disappointed. 

If I wear my paranoid "of course the Supreme Court is partisan" hat then I would expect them to simply rule against the people in Arizona and for the people in Colorado, because the Arizona suit was brought largely by Republican legislators and the Colorado suit largely by Democrats. I expect that me to be disappointed as well. 

The reality will be, I expect, rather messy. When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they pretty clearly saw no role for the voters once they had chosen their representatives. It seems unlikely, though, that after a hundred years the Court would decide that initiatives are simply not allowed. That leaves them in the position of trying to draw lines with regard to how much this "fifth branch" of government can do [4]. And line drawing always seems to be messy. 

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[1] In 1983, the Washington State legislature referred an amendment to the people that created a largely-independent redistricting committee. The proposal didn't remove the legislature from the process entirely, as they can still overrule the committee if they can get a two-thirds majority vote in each chamber. 

[2] The distinction drawn by the court in the Colorado case is that it is not just more difficult for the legislature to raise taxes – as in California's two-thirds supermajority requirement – but actually impossible for the Colorado legislature to raise taxes. The court says that's a new situation that should be argued at trial. 

[3] Full disclosure: when I was a budget analyst for the Colorado legislature, TABOR made my job a lot more difficult. However, when the state faced a real budget crisis in the early naughts, the legislature referred a ballot issue granting limited relaxation of the TABOR limits to the people, and the people approved it. 

[4] I would say "fourth branch", except that's been pretty much taken to mean the regulatory bureaucracy. 

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Image credit: Washington State Legislature oral history site.

With CSS, More Seems to be Less

In the beginning -- at least for my purposes here -- there was HTML.  Tags gave straightforward markup capabilities, but large amounts of the actual presentation were left to the readers' discretion.  Some people like serif fonts; some people don't.  Some people need bigger text to read comfortably.  Some people don't like 36-point headlines.  In an online world, those are choices that ought to be left to the reader.

Then the Web was increasingly taken over by commercial concerns, who hired graphics design professionals to lay out more sophisticated pages.  Professionals who took much greater advantage of the newer HTML capabilities to force the pages to look the way the professionals thought they should.  Color!  Giant text!  Tiny text!  Five fonts for different purposes on every page!  Not to put too fine a point on it, but some of the professionals seemed to have taken degrees in Ugly and Hard to Read.

Some Web browsers gave their users tools to fight back.  One of the reasons I settled on Firefox early on was that it let me override part of the ugliness.  I could specify fonts that were usually honored and a minimum font size (a maximum would also be nice, if anyone at Mozilla is listening).  From time to time I would look over someone's shoulder to see how they experienced the web.  I gloated internally, about how much more consistent in appearance "my" web was compared to theirs.  How much easier to read.  How much more visually attractive, because of my superior taste in fonts [1].

Then came CSS, and the widespread adoption of various CSS libraries, and the use of JavaScript to set CSS properties, and the widespread adoption of JavaScript libraries that did all sorts of things besides the feature or two the page developer needed.  Some browsers helped the readers out again, by allowing the user to have their own style sheet that was applied to all pages.  But CSS has, among other things, specificity rules that make it possible for the page developer to identify a particular element at such a fine grain that none of the browsers will honor the user's choices.  In fact, the specificity rules can get so complex that developers need specialized tools to debug their pages, trying to figure out why some bit of text here or there isn't in the font/size/whatever that they expected.  The image accompanying this post is a portion of a screenshot of Firebug, one such tool, showing part of the CSS cascade that resulted in a piece of text on a downloaded page ignoring my font choices.

I suppose I shouldn't feel so strongly about this that I'm sitting here considering the question, "How hard would it be to write a Firefox add-on that (reasonably intelligently) overrides the font choices for all of the content on every page?"  Guess I've finally turned into a full-blown curmudgeon.

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[1] Not to mention faster, because Firefox had Adblock, and it's amazing how much faster the front page of a newspaper site loads if your browser simply skips loading 30 advertising elements from DoubleClick's under-engineered servers.

Will Distributed Generation Kill the Big Utilities?

A friend of mine wrote an interesting piece for Utility Dive this week.  The basic premise is that the rapid growth of edge generating capacity – think rooftop solar – will outpace the country's transmission and distribution grid's ability to cope with the added complexity.  I'm an advocate of renewable energy supplies, so think it's a question worth considering.  I think of the problem in terms of three questions: (1) Which grid?  (2) Can such a collapse happen?  (3) Will such a collapse be allowed to happen?

Which grid?  I continue to be disappointed by pieces written as if the US had a single network for transmitting electric power.  There are three: the Eastern, Western, and Texas Interconnects are synchronized AC networks that have minimal AC-DC-AC connections between them.  The history that led to three grids is straightforward.  The Great Plains are a relatively empty buffer nearly 500 miles wide that split the country.  The yellow line on the figure to the left (you should be able to use your browser's "view image" option to see it full size) runs roughly down the middle of the GP, and comes relatively close to the dividing line between Eastern and Western Interconnects.  Texas was able to opt to be its own grid and did so, hoping to avoid federal interference.  Note that El Paso, the only major metro area in Texas that is west of the GP, is part of the Western, rather than Texas, grid.  Each of the three grids has a different degree of complexity, different renewable resource portfolios, and a somewhat different political environment.

Can such a collapse happen?  In order: least likely for the Texas grid; somewhat more so but not a significant risk for the Western grid; quite possible for the Eastern grid.  The fundamental difference is a simple matter of complexity.  The Texas grid serves about 27 million people, and the large majority of the demand is inside the triangle formed by Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio.  The Western grid serves about 70 million people, and the large majority of demand happens in half-dozen or so large population centers: Seattle-Portland, Northern California around San Francisco Bay, Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix-Tucson, Front Range Colorado, and Salt Lake City.  A small number of single-state situations, and limited interconnect problems.  The Eastern grid, covering 205 million people across 36 states, is a whole 'nother matter.  I've written before about the relative complexity of the grids as illustrated by low-carbon studies done by the various national labs.  There are plenty of nuts-and-bolts studies for the Western grid that all come up with similar plans.  Such studies for the Eastern grid simply don't seem to exist because the problem is so much harder.

Will such a collapse be allowed to happen?  In Texas, not just no, but hell no.  A single state legislature, a single PUC; they can regulate the snot out of distributed generation in such a way that it's useful, but not threatening to the collapse of the grid.  In the West, probably not.  Most of the individual Western states have statutory requirements for large renewable share of total supply and are already thinking about intrastate distributed generation.  There are only a couple of interstate grid topologies that make sense.  The Western Governors Association spends considerable effort looking at the regional transmission grid as a whole.  When it comes to the Eastern grid, though, I throw up my hands.  When people write about the US having an aging, third-world, rickety electric grid, they're largely writing about the East.  Too many jurisdictions, too many places to connect... yeah, it could be allowed to happen.

My bottom line is that I acknowledge the risk my friend writes about; I just don't acknowledge that it's a national problem.

My Name is Michael, and I'm a Pack Rat

Sometimes the first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have one...

Out in my garage is a galvanized steel bucket. Here's a picture of my daughter with the bucket. She's carrying about three small rocks in it, destined to be mulch for weed control, because she needed to be helping. My daughter now has a daughter of her own just about that age, who looks equally serious when taking on an important task like moving rocks. (I know because the granddaughter and I took a walk around the neighborhood the other day, and stopped to spend a few minutes returning the neighbor's rocks that someone had kicked out onto the sidewalk to their proper place in the landscaping. It was clearly Important Work.) The bucket is stained with this and that these days, and there are other better buckets in the garage, but I'm not about to get rid of it.

I have a piece of software called "scraps" that I use every day. I wrote the first version of it something more than 30 years ago, with the intent of using it instead of writing things on scraps of paper that I would promptly lose. Do you want to know the name, address, and phone number of the dentist who pulled my wisdom teeth the year after I moved to New Jersey and went to work for Bell Labs? It's in there, down at the bottom of a scrap titled "Dentists" that has contact information for every dentist I've seen since then. For no more than it does, an unconscionable amount of time has been spent porting that hunk of antique C code to every operating system I've ever used, from assorted versions of UNIX to DOS to Linux to Mac OSX...

There are a large number of bookcases in our house. The overflow from those are stashed away in bankers' boxes down in the basement. Some of the books in them are textbooks from when I was an undergraduate, and not just books from my major. Some of the books are trash fiction that filled long hours on business trips in the days before portable computing, that I'll never read again. (Sorry, Eric Van Lustbader.) I've been trying to get rid of some of them, but seem to be incapable of throwing any away until I have a suitable EPUB version stored and properly backed up. (It's astounding the range of out-of-print books that people have scanned and put up on the internet.)

My name is Michael, and – among other vices – I'm a pack rat...

New Toy

One of the things on my list of long-term projects is a DIY book scanner. There are a ridiculous number of paper books in my house, and I'm getting old enough to think about downsizing the living quarters at some point. Lots of people have done impressive things in the field, like this one. Being who I am, though, I want a system where the hardware is simpler and smaller, even if that means that the software has to be somewhat more competent. The rough rule-of-thumb of "put everything possible into software" served me well for 25 years in a high-tech field, and I'm not about to give it up.

The usual camera people put into a DIY scanner is either an old smartphone or an old snapshot grade digital camera.  Those are cool, particularly if there's one or both readily at hand.  My own experience with them, at least with a book scanner in mind, is getting them to take the picture when I want it, and to get the picture out of the camera into a computer where it can be worked on.  One a different tack, I've also been wanting to spend some time playing with a Raspberry Pi computer.  Hoping to get two birds with one stone, I purchased a Pi (model B+), a micro-SD card that would let me set up Raspbian easily, and a five mega-pixel camera module.

After going through the old electronics box, I plugged a monitor into the HDMI port, a keyboard and mouse into two of the USB ports, plugged in an Ethernet cable to tie it to the switch in my office and powered it up.  Looked like... Linux.  I felt like the little girl from Jurassic Park: "It's a UNIX system.  I know this!"  The second day I put all of the old electronics back in the box and just ran "ssh -Y" with the appropriate options from my Mac. I haven't gone very far with the camera yet, besides configuring the Pi to use it and verifying that it works. On the other hand, I have spent some time entertaining myself by porting a variety of small software that I've written over the years to the Pi.  Just to see how things went. And "porting" implies that the process was harder than it actually was.

After fooling around for a bit, I copied part of my collection of cartogram software over to it. One of the core pieces is written in C – after downloading a couple of needed libraries (using the provided Debian aptitude and apt-get commands), those just compiled. My front- and back-end code that sets things up for those core number-crunching programs is written in Perl – had to download the GD module, but that also just worked. Copied over some data and map files and ran things and – cartograms! Things ran pretty slowly, but the chip doesn't have the kind of heavy-duty double-precision floating point hardware support that "real" processors provide.

I'm looking forward to seeing how much of the job can be done on the Pi.

Why Did I Think It Would Take Longer?

One of the things that I anticipated would happen, when the Republicans regained control of the US Senate, was that movement conservatives would start talking about opening the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.  I thought it would be somewhere down the line, after they had dealt with the PPACA, tax rates, and (in the energy realm) CO2 regulation.  Silly me.  In today's George Will column in the Washington Post, George has it on his list of six things the Republicans should do very first thing.

I know I'm not entirely rational on the subject.  For many years, though, it has struck me as odd that there were a bunch of people making arguments that spent fuel is safe enough to store less than 100 miles upwind of a major metropolitan area in the West, but it's not safe enough to store in the states where it's produced.  That the dry storage casks are so tough that nothing can happen if they fall off of a truck or train in a Western state, but not tough enough to be safe to store in the states where the waste is produced.  And politically, pundits who oppose the idea that the federal government can ever force anything on individual states seem to be just fine with forcing transport and storage of spent nuclear fuel on states that (a) don't want the stuff and (b) mostly don't have reactors of their own producing waste.

I've said it before, but the federal government's record is not encouraging.  Ask people near Hanford, Savannah River, or the former Rocky Flats how they feel about it.  The first radioactive waste arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in 1999, which is supposed to be safe for at least 10,000 years.  This year, americium and plutonium particles were detected above ground a half-mile away from the facility.  Granted, the containers from which radioactive material leaked were much less robust than dry casks in which spent fuel is stored.  OTOH, I'm inclined to agree with Ryan Flynn, New Mexico Environment Secretary, at a news conference after the WIPP incident: "Events like this simply should never occur. From the state's perspective, one event is far too many."

A Different State-Splitting Trend?

In 2013 there were a number of proposals put forward to create new states by splitting existing ones.  The most widely covered ones have been Colorado's 51st State movement, the State of Jefferson movement in far northern California and southern Oregon, and the movement in western Maryland.  One thing that all of these have in common is that they represent more rural portions of the states in question seeking to "escape" from the urban parts of the states.  Certainly in the cases of California and Colorado, the escape would come with a hefty price tag -- the rural areas that want to leave are subsidized financially by the urban areas.

This year there have been two new state-splitting proposals with the opposite perspective: urban areas seeking to be free from the rural areas.  The first of those was the ballot initiative in California that would seek to split the state into six parts.  Funding for signature collection came from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who reportedly believes tax rates in his new state would would be substantially lower because they wouldn't have to subsidize the Central Valley and rural northern California.  Too few signatures were collected for the initiative to make this November's ballot.  The second is a proposal to split off southern Florida, so the urban areas there could begin taking steps to deal with climate change consequences like rising sea levels.

The proposed split of Florida is shown in the upper portion of the figure to the left.  Things are in an early stage.  South Miami's city commission passed a resolution calling for the separation and will now send the proposal to the 24 counties that would be South Florida.  As is true for so many of this type of proposal, this one probably won't go anywhere.  The hurdles for actually splitting a state are pretty darned high.  Among other things, Congress would have to bless it, and the balance of power between political parties, particularly in the Senate, becomes a major consideration.

Why do I say this is a movement by an urban part of the state to flee the rural part?  The lower part of the figure is a cartogram with counties resized to represent population.  The green line shows the proposed division between north and south.  The red/blue coloring is the standard one for election cartograms and shows whether the county voted majority-Obama (blue) or majority-Romney (red) in 2012.  The three biggest urban areas in the state -- Miami, Tampa, Orlando -- would be in South Florida.

Write Like the Wind

Today, in my e-mail, was a request for a political contribution.  That's not unusual, but today, to sweeten the pot, I was offered the chance to win a dinner with George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series.  I don't dare send them any money; I might win.  Then I would find it necessary to play the video below at the meal, because neither George nor I are getting any younger and it would be convenient if he finished the damned series before one of us dies.

It Takes More Than Turbines

The Telegraph ran a brief story earlier this month about UK regulators paying wind farms in Scotland nearly £3.0M to not generate so much electricity for one day.  High winds due to the remnants of Hurricane Bertha coincided with a period with low local demand for electricity, and the grid lacked capacity to carry the available power elsewhere.  Such situations are neither new, nor confined to the UK: in both 2011 and 2012, the Bonneville Power Administration ordered wind generators in Oregon shut down to avoid oversupply problems.  The problems in both cases are not that the grid isn't smart enough to handle the intermittent nature of wind; the problem is that the grid lacks sheer bulk transport capability to move the excess wind power to someplace it could be used.

The map to the left is a portion of a graphic from an NPR story about the US power grid, showing the US portion of the Western Interconnect.  The bold orange lines represent a proposal by the American Wind Energy Association for an overlay high-level grid that would allow full use of wind when it is available in a geographically diverse set of sites.  This overlay grid passes "close" [1] to all of the major population centers in the West, as well as the best of the wind resources.

Building a reliable grid from intermittent renewable sources requires not just geographic diversity, but source diversity as well.  The AWEA overlay also happens to pass close to excellent solar resources in the desert Southwest, undeveloped hydro resources in the Northwest, geothermal resources in the Great Basin, and sites suitable for pumped hydro energy storage.  Balancing all of those resources against demand across eleven states (plus western Canada and a bit of Mexico) is a complex but doable task, given enough bulk transport.  Speaking broadly, the situation in Oregon with too much supply and not enough demand shouldn't happen.  If there really are no consumers for it, it ought to be pumping water uphill against future need.

The AWEA isn't the only group that draws proposals for overlay super grids [2].  In the Western Interconnect, they all tend to look similar.  As I've noted in other posts, geography plays a big role.  The people are concentrated in a small number of areas; the easy routes for transportation or transmission are few and obvious; the energy resources are where they are, many of them either close to one or more demand centers, or along one of the routes between those demand centers.  This is a good part of the reason that people can draw up nuts-and-bolts sorts of plans for a heavily-renewable power grid in the Western Interconnect.  The other parts of the country present a much more difficult challenge.  And as always, I raise the question of whether those other parts of the country will demand a single national energy policy that makes the West's efforts difficult or impossible.


[1] "Close" in the West can be rather different than close in other parts of the country.  As in, "it's only a hundred miles", or "it only has to cross one mountain range".

[2] The AWEA map does get used a lot, though.  Part of that is probably that it shows up in Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons, unencumbered by copyright.  An interesting feature of the full national map is that it doesn't show any additions in the Southeast part of the country, where wind resources are rather poor.

TABOR Conspiracy Theory

I let myself believe in conspiracy theories on alternate Tuesdays; that'll be relevent in a moment.

TABOR -- the Colorado Taxpayers Bill of Rights -- added a section to the Colorado state constitution in 1992 that, among other things, said the state legislature couldn't pass tax increases, they could only refer such measures to the voters.  In 2011, a group of state legislators sued the State of Colorado, asserting that setting tax rates is a fundamental job of government, and that by denying the state legislature that power, the state constitution was in violation of the Guarantee Clause of the US Constitution.  If it's been a while since you read the Constitution, that's the sentence which requires every state to have "a republican form of government."

The conventional wisdom at the time was that the suit would be short-lived.  To borrow from the defense's summary, the federal court would promptly find that this fell under the Supreme Court's political-question doctrine, that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that the case would be dismissed.  Things have not, so far, worked out that way.  The district court judge ruled that the plaintiffs did have standing; this case differed from the political-question precedents; and the arguments should be made at trial rather than in a preliminary hearing.  The defense appealed.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court, arguing de novo, ruled the same way: sufficiently different from the precedents, plaintiffs had standing, and ordered the case returned to district court for trial.  The defense appealed to the entire court for a rehearing.  This past Tuesday, I read that the full appeals court declined to rehear the case, thereby affirming the ruling by the three-judge panel.  Presumably, the defense will now appeal to the Supreme Court, so it will be at least a few months before anything interesting can happen.  The quickest would be if the Supremes declined to hear the appeal, in which case the district court would schedule a trial date; the wheels of justice do grind slowly.

My impression is that the defense has been poorly prepared throughout.  That they were assuming that "political question, no standing, case dismissed" alone would carry the day.  When I read about the latest development, I was struck by the possibility that this was intentional and not just a matter of overconfidence.  Both parties have found themselves tied in knots by TABOR when they controlled the legislature following a recession: the Republicans following the 2000-01 recession, and the Democrats following the one in 2007-09.  The single-subject amendment to the Colorado constitution in 1994 makes it unlikely that TABOR could be removed in its entirety; it would have to be cleared a bit at a time (some experts think as many as 20 separate amendments would be necessary under the current rules).  "What," I thought on Tuesday, "if the secret plan is to lose the TABOR lawsuit and let the federal courts accomplish what the politicians can't?"

Nah, that's too crazy even for me on a Tuesday.

Migration

A while back at Ordinary Times, there was an interesting comment thread on the subject of defining the Midwest region of the US.  One of the thoughts that occurred to me while reading that was whether it was possible to define regions based on inter-state migration patterns.  The idea grew, I suppose, out of my own experience.  I lived and worked in New Jersey for ten years, but never really felt like I fit in there.  Eventually my wife and I moved to Colorado, to the suburbs of Denver, where we immediately felt right at home.  Most people, I thought, might have been brighter than we were and not moved to someplace so "different."

I've also encountered a variety of nifty data visualization tools that look at inter-state migration in the US, like this one and this one from Forbes.  State-level data for recent years turns out to be readily available from the Census Bureau.  We can define a simple distance measure: two states are close if a relatively large fraction of the population of each moves between them each year.  "Relatively" because states with large population have large absolute migration numbers in both directions.  For example, large numbers of people move between California and Texas -- in both directions -- because those states have lots of people who could move.  From Wyoming, not so many.  Given a distance measurement, it turns into a statistical problem in cluster analysis: partition the states into groups so that states within a group are close to each other.  Since there's only a distance measure, hierarchical clustering seems like a reasonable choice.

The map to the left shows the results of partitioning the 48 contiguous states into seven clusters.  The first thing I noticed about the partition is that states are grouped into contiguous blocks, without exception.  While that might be expected as a tendency [1], I thought there would be at least a couple of exceptions.  The resulting regions are more than a little familiar: there's the Northest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, the Midwest (in two parts), the West, and "Greater Texas".  There are a couple of other surprises after reading the discussion at Ordinary Times: Kentucky is grouped with the Midwest, and Missouri and Kansas with Greater Texas.  New Mexico clustered with Texas isn't surprising, but New Mexico with Louisiana and Arkansas?  Hierarchical clustering is subject to a chaining effect: New Mexico may be very close to Texas, and Louisiana also close to Texas, and they get put into the same cluster even though New Mexico and Louisiana aren't very close at all.

One way to test that possibility is to remove Texas from the set of states.  The result of doing that is shown to the left. As expected, New Mexico is now clustered with the other Rocky Mountain states and Louisiana with the Southeast.  Perhaps less expected is that the other four states -- Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma -- remain grouped together.  None of them is split off to go to other regions; the four are close to one another on the basis of the measure I'm using here.

Answers to random anticipated questions... I used seven clusters because that was the largest number possible before there was some cluster with only a single state in it [2].  The Northeast region has the greatest distance between it and any of the other regions.  If the country is split into two regions, the dividing line runs down the Mississippi River.  If into three, the Northeast gets split off from the rest of the East.  There are undoubtedly states that should be split, ie, western Missouri (dominated by Kansas City) and eastern Missouri (dominated by St. Louis); a future project might be to work with county-level data.


[1]  My implementation of hierarchical clustering works from the bottom up, starting with each state being its own cluster and merging clusters that are close.  Using the particular measure I defined, close pairs of states include Minnesota/North Dakota, California/Nevada, Massachusetts/New Hampshire, and Kansas/Missouri.  These agree with my perception of population flows.

[2]  The singleton when eight clusters are used is New Mexico.  When ten clusters are used, Michigan also becomes a singleton, and Ohio/Kentucky a stand-alone pair.

An Update on the War on Coal

[A longer version of this post appeared at Ordinary Times.]

It's been a tough year for coal in the United States. I generally dislike the use of war-on-this and war-on-that. But if the intended meaning is "make it much more difficult and/or expensive to continue burning large quantities of coal to produce electricity," then the phrase is accurate. Where most people who use it are wrong though, is just who it is that's fighting the war. It's the federal courts, and to a lesser degree some of the individual states. The EPA is just the tool through which the courts are acting. Well, also ghosts of Congresses past, who left us with various environmental protection statutes in their current form. Since the SCOTUS hammered the coal side of the fight twice this just-concluded term, it seems like a good time to write a little status report.

Not all the constituents of coal are combustible. Anywhere from 3% and up are not and are left behind as ash, and even 3% of a billion tons is a lot of ash. A bit more than 40% of coal ash is typically reused in various ways: some of it can replace Portland cement in the right circumstances, some it can be used as fill for roadbeds, etc. The remainder winds up in landfills or ash ponds. Ash ponds contain an ash/water slurry; the wet ash stays where it's put rather than being blown away by the wind. Ash pond spills are becoming more common. The federal EPA has not regulated ash ponds in the past; in January this year the DC District Court accepted a consent decree between the EPA and several plaintiffs that requires the EPA to issue final findings on ash pond problems by December. The expectation is that the findings will lead to significant new regulation, and increased spending on both existing and future ash ponds. Things are also happening at the state level. The North Carolina Senate unanimously approved a bill last week that would require the closure of all coal ash ponds in the state over the next 15 years. NC's not exactly one of your liberal Northeastern or Pacific Coast states.

Most of the visible pollutants that go up the flue at coal-fired plants have been eliminated. The picture to the left is the Intermountain generating station near Delta, Utah. The visible white stuff escaping from the stack is steam. Not visible are things like mercury compounds, sulfur and nitrous oxides, and extremely small particles of soot. Those are all precursors to haze, smog, low-level ozone and acid rain, as well as being direct eye, nose, throat and lung irritants. Some of these pollutants can travel significant distances in the open air. In April this year, a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit upheld a tougher rule for emissions of this type of pollutant (the MATS rule). Also in April, the SCOTUS approved the EPA's Cross State Air Pollution Rule that will result in tighter controls on this type of emission. Approval of the cross-state rule has been a long time coming, as EPA rules that would regulate cross-state sources made multiple trips up and down the court system. The courts have always held that the EPA should regulate cross-state pollutants; the problem has been finding a technical approach that would satisfy the courts. In EPA v. EME Homer in April, the SCOTUS reversed the DC Circuit, and the CSAPR will now go into effect.

Finally, last week the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case of Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA. This opinion confirmed the Court's 2009 opinion in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases. Massachusetts was a suit brought by several states against the Bush EPA, which had decided the carbon dioxide was not harmful. I think Utility is an odd opinion, cobbled together out of three different factions on the court (more about that in a moment). The opinion has three conclusions: (a) the EPA can and must regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources, (b) the EPA can only regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources if those sources would have been regulated for non-greenhouse emissions anyway, and (c) the somewhat controversial approach the EPA is taking to the regulation is acceptable. The last one seems to me to have been sort of an afterthought. OTOH, it's likely that we'll see a number of cases about it later when the states make the details of their individual plans known.

The results of the various court decisions are going to have very different effects on different states. Compare California and North Carolina, to pick two (not exactly at random). North Carolina has 43 coal ash ponds; California has none. North Carolina, despite being a much smaller state, generates more than 30 times as much electricity from coal as California; the MATS rule will require much more effort to meet in North Carolina. The CSAPR does not apply to California; but North Carolina power plants will be required to make reductions to improve air quality in downwind states. North Carolina has to reduce the CO2 intensity of its generating plants by more than the national average; California's required reduction is much less than the average, and decisions that California has already made at the state level will probably be sufficient to meet the EPA requirements. North Carolina's electricity rates are likely, it seems to me, to be noticeably higher in the future; California's rates will remain high and perhaps go higher, but aren't going to be driven by these decisions.

Infrastructure Needs - A Cartogram

From time to time you find articles that talk about how far behind the United States is in infrastructure spending.  The American Society of Civil Engineers maintains an entire web site dedicated to the topic.  I have often wondered whether there are geographic patterns to the infrastructure shortfalls.  One of the things that raises that question for me is the stuff I read about how the electric grid is falling apart.  In the Denver suburb where I have lived for the last 26 years, and the Front Range generally, there's been an enormous amount invested in the electric grid and service seems to be noticeably improved compared to what it was when I moved here.

Bloomberg maintains an interesting collection of state-by-state numbers, including infrastructure needs.  They only consider a limited number of things: roads, drinking water, and airports.  I'd like to have figures that included more factors — ah, how pleasant it would be to have minionsgraduate students to do the grunt work — but Bloomberg is an easy-to-use starting point.  The cartogram at left — double-click in most browsers for a larger version — shows US states sized to reflect Bloomberg's figure for annual per-capita infrastructure spending needs for the period 2013-2017.  West Virginia has the largest value at $1,035; New Jersey has the lowest value at $78.  While there are lots of things that would be interesting to regress against the numbers, in this essay I'm just thinking about geography.

One of the obvious things that jumps out is that high-population states do better.  California, New York, Florida, and Illinois all fall into that group.  The most likely reason would seem to be that there are economies of scale involved in the things Bloomberg measures.  An airport can serve more people in a high-population state; highway lane-miles are used by more people; doubling the capacity of a water- or sewage-treatment plant doesn't mean that the cost of the plant will be doubled.

Another factor appears to be that states with high population growth over the last 20 years do better.  California, Colorado, Texas, Georgia and Florida are examples.  In this case, the likely reason would be that rapidly growing populations have made infrastructure spending a critical need.  To use Colorado as an anecdotal case, since I live here and pay some attention, Denver built a major new airport, my suburb greatly expanded its water-treatment plant, and I-25 along the Front Range has been subject to an entire series of improvements (if you drive its length, it's not whether part of it is under construction, it's a matter of how much).

Finally, some simple regional observations. Here's a standard map of the 48 contiguous states using an equal-area projection for comparison.  The 11 contiguous western states appear to be in much better shape than the country as a whole.   As might be expected, Wyoming and Montana, the two western states with the smallest populations, do the worst in that region by a wide margin.  With a caveat that this is state-level data, the upper Great Plains, New England, and Appalachia all do very poorly.  With a small number of exceptions, the East Coast looks particularly bad.

I think I'll just sum this up with the obvious statement: "There are new parts of the country, and old parts of the country, and the new parts tend to have more and shinier stuff per person."

Western Secession 7 -- The Age of Electricity

Lots of people who believe that Civilization is Doomed because of energy constraints talk about this being the Age of Petroleum. As far as transportation goes, that's absolutely true. But it's not really the most critical aspect of our current high-tech society. This is really the Age of Electricity.

If petroleum were to slowly go away, eventually reaching zero, there are alternatives. Existing land transportation can become much more efficient: smaller vehicles, trains instead of trucks, etc. Alternate power sources are available, at least for some applications: smaller electric vehicles, electric trains instead of diesel, etc. Goods can be produced closer to where they are consumed in order to reduce the amount of transportation required to deliver them. Slower transportation and delivery of objects helps — delivering the small package by electric train and electric vehicle uses much less energy than flying the package overnight. More expensive synthetic alternatives to petroleum-based liquid fuels exist for situations where alternatives are impractical.

OTOH, we have reached a point where there is no substitute for electricity. This short essay was written on a computer; it was uploaded to Blogspot and copied into some number of their computers; the copy you're reading was downloaded from one of those servers. The non-electric alternative is paper and ink (since radio and television also require electricity in large quantities).  If that were the only medium available, chances are that you would never see this. Paper and ink distribution imposes serious limits on how many people's writing gets distributed widely.  I'm using "widely" in the sense of making it possible for many people in many locations to read it. Having the NY Times publish it would count, as the NY Times is popular enough to have nation-wide physical distribution (although without electricity, that may mean being a day or two behind).  Putting it up on a wall in a public place in Arvada, CO doesn't count.

Recall that the original "wire services" that distributed stories to local newspapers were called that because it was a description of what they did. Stories were collected and distruted by telegraph and later teletype, both of which require electricity. David Weber's popular Safehold series of science fiction novels, set on a world where the use of electricity is strictly forbidden, envisions a semaphore network instead. It's slow, it's even slower at night, it fails temporarily when the weather is bad enough, and it fails completely when the message has to cross a large enough body of water (discounting transcribing the content, moving it physically across the water, then putting it back on the semaphore network).  High-speed communication means electricity.

Electricity is a key consideration in developing countries as well, with China as the most interesting case. Their population is extremely large. As recently as three decades ago, that population was desperately poor. The government is working — at a pretty hectic pace — to urbanize and find non-farming work for what was an enormous peasant population. In order to do that, electricity is vital. As a result, if it will generate electricity, China is deploying lots of it. Coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar... China's rate of growth in the use of all of those is among the very highest in the world.  India has been less aggressive about expanding its grid, leading the head of one of that country's software development firms to say, "Job one is acquiring the diesel fuel to power our private generators; job two is writing software, and doesn't happen if we fail at job one."

Dependency on electricity has been greatly increased by the integrated circuit revolution. The common design approach for an enormous range of things is now a processor, a batch of sensors (some as simple as push buttons), and a handful of actuators. All of the difficult parts are implemented using software. Television is now digital, and depends on billion-transistor integrated circuits for every step from source to final viewing by the consumer. Film has disappeared. Music is (at least the vast majority is) delivered in digital formats dependent on those same integrated circuits. The banking system depends on computers to run the check clearing house, the stock markets are all electronic, the Post Office depends on computers to read addresses and route mail...  I told my bosses at Bell Labs that it was a software world back in the late 1970s; it has only become more so.


All of this may seem trivially obvious, but any plan to ensure that modern technology continues on into the future depends on maintaining robust reliable supplies of electricity.  The next post in this series will look at where the US gets its electricity today.

A Thought on the EPA's New CO2 Rule

Recently, the US EPA announced its proposed regulation of CO2 emitted by existing power plants.  The proposed rule follows as a consequence of (a) the Supreme Court's finding that greenhouse gases are an air pollutant under the language of the Clean Air Act, and that the EPA is therefore required to regulate it if it is harmful, and (b) the DC Circuit Court's subsequent finding that greenhouse gases are harmful.  Everyone knows that the matter will wind up back in the courts.  Ben Adler at Grist provides a nice summary of the potential legal vulnerabilities of the proposed rule.

As described in an earlier Grist piece, each state will have its own target for reduction of CO2 emissions, and each state will be allowed to develop its own plan for achieving the necessary reduction.  Washington will have to reduce its emissions by about 70%; North Dakota will only have to reduce its emissions by about 10%.  The EPA formula(s) (PDF) for calculating the required emissions targets are complicated and consider a number of factors.

One of the factors that is not included is where the electricity is consumed.  Some states produce more electricity than they consume, others produce less.  The graph to the left shows the approximate net exports for each state, in megawatt-hours [1].  California is at the top, with a negative value indicating they are a large importer of electricity.  Pennsylvania is at the other end of the chart and is the largest exporter.

Tracking exports and imports in more detail can be difficult.  Some cases are relatively straightforward.  Xcel Energy owns the coal-fired Comanche power plant in Pueblo, CO and sells the electricity generated there to consumers up and down the Front Range.  The 1.9 GW coal-fired Intermountain power plant in Utah is owned by utilities in California and Utah.  75% of the plant's output goes by HVDC transmission directly to San Bernardino County, CA; the remainder goes to utilities and electricity cooperatives in Utah.  The coal-fired Jim Bridger power plant in Wyoming is owned by Berkshire Hathaway and sells its output to two utilities operating across six states.  Oregon is one of those states.  Oregon is a net exporter of electricity, primarily hydro electricity sold to utilities in California.  Oregon generates a modest amount of in-state power from coal and imports coal-fired electricity from Wyoming and Utah.

Reducing CO2 emissions will require that money be spent on coal-fired power plants -- on sequestration technology, or on efficiency improvements [2], or on fuel conversions.  That money will eventually be collected from the pocketbooks of electricity consumers.  The fact that there are states that are exporters and importers of electricity would seem, at least to me, to create an opportunity for a certain amount of mischief.  That is, a state's plan for reducing CO2 emissions might be structured so that, as far as is possible, out-of-state consumers pay for the necessary changes.  From the examples in the preceding paragraph, Wyoming and Utah have an interest in getting California and Oregon to foot as much of the bills as possible.  In addition to Ben Adler's list of reasons that the EPA's final rule will end up in court, look for the distinct possibility of some states (and interstate companies) suing other states over their plans.

Myself, I'm in the camp that says, "A carbon tax would have been enormously simpler."  Reality, though, forces me to acknowledge that politics is the art of the possible, that such a tax would be DOA in Congress, and that not allowing Congress to delegate taxes and tax rates to the EPA is a good thing.


[1] Data from the EIA's state electricity profiles for calendar year 2012, total net generation minus total retail sales.  For the US as a whole, net generation exceeds retail sales by about 10%.  Each state's generation figure is scaled down by the US ratio so that the US Total exports comes out zero.

[2] An older conventional coal-fired plant may have 30% thermal efficiency.  That is, 30% of the heat energy released by burning the coal is converted to electricity.  New technology may achieve 45% thermal efficiency.  Such technology would lower CO2 emissions by 33% for the same amount of electricity.

What Is It With Economists and Spreadsheets?

The hot book in economics this year is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  The book addresses topics of inequality, asserting that inappropriate levels of such are a natural outgrowth of capitalism.  It makes sweeping policy proposals, such as a global tax on wealth and much higher income tax rates on the upper income brackets.  It has been favorably reviewed by liberal economists like Paul Krugman, and criticized by conservative economists.  Recently we learned one more thing about it, as reported by the Financial Times: calculations critical to the argument relied on error-plagued spreadsheets.

Last year we went through the episode of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that asserted that national public debts in excess of 90% of GDP killed economic growth.  Conservative politicians jumped on the paper as a justification for proposing drastic changes in US public policy.  As it turned out, critical calculations were done by spreadsheet, the spreadsheet had errors, and when the errors were corrected the "cliff" in economic growth at 90% disappeared.  The damage had already been done, though.  The 90% debt-to-GDP cliff was quoted in a variety of government reports, and those secondary sources continue to be cited in policy debates today.


What is it with economists and spreadsheets?  Spreadsheet software is a programming system.  There is a large literature on the frequency and nature of spreadsheet errors (the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group's annual conference on the subject will be held in July this year).  Even using best practices, complex spreadsheets contain errors at a rate that would be completely unacceptable in any other programming environment.  Not that there seems to be any evidence being offered that the economists mentioned above were making use of those best practices.  For example, I have yet to read that Reinhart and Rogoff conducted formal code reviews.

One part of this is particularly puzzling to me.  Some years back I spent two semesters in a PhD economics program.  The econometrics classes used R and Gauss.  There was never even a hint that Excel was an acceptable method for doing research calculations.  Certainly none of the graduate students I met who were working on their dissertations were using a spreadsheet to do the analysis.  So to find highly-respected academic economists using spreadsheets is surprising.  They have to know that if the spreadsheet is even moderately complex, errors are creeping in.  Quite possibly embarrassing errors [1].

 For some decades, economists have been accused of suffering from "physics envy."  That is, they want their field to be considered a hard science like physics, not one of the so-called soft sciences.  I'll offer economists a piece of free advice on that: hard sciences don't do data analysis with spreadsheets.  Clean up your act.  Require authors to certify that they use real tools for numerical work, reject out-of-hand papers that don't, and punish people who lie about it harshly.


[1]  Using better tools is no guarantee that errors won't creep in.  But they offer a better chance of catching them.