Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods is a synthetic meat company.

The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants — even fast-food stalwart White Castle…

It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat…

Fake meat will be one of the year’s hottest food trends. An increasing number of flexitarians — people not looking to eat meat at every meal — are helping to drive interest, according to Rabobank. Sales of alternative proteins are dwarfed by the $49 billion red meat and chicken market, but they’re expected to grow about 17 percent a year to $863 million in 2021, according to a CoBank estimate.

Apparently the company is having some trouble with the FDA, which it voluntarily sought approval from.

San Francisco area earthquake forecast

USGS reminds us that a big earthquake in the San Francisco area is eventually coming.

In the 50 years prior to 1906, there were 13 earthquakes with a magnitude between 6 and 7, but only 6 earthquakes of similar magnitude in the 110 years since 1906. The rate of large earthquakes is expected to increase from this low level as tectonic plate movements continue to increase the stress on the faults in the region…

Smaller earthquakes occur more frequently than larger earthquakes. The probability that an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 or larger will occur before 2043 is 98 percent. The probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger in the San Francisco Bay region is 72 percent, and for at least one earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or larger it is 51 percent. These probabilities include earthquakes on the major faults, lesser-known faults, and unknown faults.

value of learning curves in climate change planning

This article gives an example of how to put an economic value on climate change adaptation incorporated in a larger planning framework.

The Economic Value of Climate Information in Adaptation Decisions: Learning in the Sea-level Rise and Coastal Infrastructure Context

Traditional methods of investment appraisal have been criticized in the context of climate change adaptation. Economic assessment of adaptation options needs to explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of future climate conditions and should recognise that uncertainties may diminish over time as a result of improved understanding and learning. Real options analysis (ROA) is an appraisal tool developed to incorporate concepts of flexibility and learning that relies on probabilistic data to characterise uncertainties. It is also a relatively resource-intensive decision support tool. We test whether, and to what extent, learning can result from the use of successive generations of real life climate scenarios, and how non-probabilistic uncertainties can be handled through adapting the principles of ROA in coastal economic adaptation decisions. Using a relatively simple form of ROA on a vulnerable piece of coastal rail infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and two successive UK climate assessments, we estimate the values associated with utilising up-dated information on sea-level rise. The value of learning can be compared to the capital cost of adaptation investment, and may be used to illustrate the potential scale of the value of learning in coastal protection, and other adaptation contexts.

envisioning a water-energy utility with smart metering

This article envisions a single utility that provides water, electricity, and natural gas service, meters all three at the household level, and is able to integrate them using smart grid concepts. To me it illustrates some concepts of how multiple utilities and government agencies, each making cost effective operating and capital investment decisions within their narrowly defined missions, do not necessarily add up to an efficient whole.

Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

gamification and water planning

This article is about gamification and water planning.

A review of water-related serious games to specify use in environmental Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Serious games and gamification are nowadays pervasive. They are used to communicate about science and sometimes to involve citizens in science (e.g. citizen science). Concurrently, environmental decision analysis is challenged by the high cognitive load of the decision-making process and the possible biases threatening the rationality assumptions. Difficult decision-making processes can result in incomplete preference construction, and are generally limited to few participants. We reviewed 43 serious games and gamified applications related to water. We covered the broad diversity of serious games, which could be explained by the still unsettled terminology in the research area of gamification and serious gaming. We discuss how existing games could benefit early steps of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), including problem structuring, stakeholder analysis, defining objectives, and exploring alternatives. We argue that no existing game allows for preference elicitation; one of the most challenging steps of MCDA. We propose many research opportunities for behavioral operational research.

ecosystem value of urban soil

Soil is a critical part of a functional ecosystem, and yet most engineers and architects who work with soil in urban areas are not trained to really understand how soil works as part of an ecosystem. Soil scientists and agricultural engineers are, but they are not working in cities for the most part. Anyway, I like the premise of this article.

Towards an operational methodology to optimize ecosystem services provided by urban soils

Urban soils need to be taken into account by city managers to tackle the major urban environmental issues. As other soils in forest or agricultural environments, urban soils provide a wide range of ecosystem services. However, their contribution remains poorly assessed up to now, and as a result there is a strong lack of consideration by urban planning of the services they provide. Indeed, urban soils are mostly seen as a land surface (land area, two-dimensional system) and if they are characterized, it is almost exclusively for their potential contamination and their geotechnical properties. So, policy makers and planning operators rarely consider soils as a living resource, capable to fulfill essential functions. From the conclusions of previous studies, a selection of ecosystem services provided by soil and adapted to the specificity of urban context is proposed. This paper also aims at proposing the concept of the DESTISOL decision support system for urban planning projects upstream of the planning decisions, illustrated by an application example. It is based on an integrative approach linking soil quality indicators (e.g. physico-chemical and biological characteristics, fertility, pollution), soil functions and soil ecosystem services. The method leads to the semi-quantitative assessment of the level of ecosystem services that are either provided by urban soils or required to fit with the urban design.

water tunnels

As tunneling technology continues to advance, this article says that transportation tunnels get all the press but water tunnels are also becoming much more numerous and common.

Most of the attention in other cities may go to the multibillion-dollar transportation tunnel projects, like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City or the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. But the sheer number of water tunnels being built or planned exceeds the sexier transportation tunnels. “There are more water tunnels than transportation tunnels,” says Mike Schultz, technical strategy leader for the geotechnical-structural group at CDM Smith.

Egger at Black & Veatch estimates there are about 200 miles of water tunneling in various stages of planning and design in North America, 50 miles of which directly involve Black & Veatch. Jacobs alone is involved in the development of  more 150 miles of water, wastewater and CSO tunnels around the world.

Technology has reduced the price of tunnels enough so that mid-size cities like Fort Wayne and Alexandria, Va., can use a tunnel option to handle their excess water. Technology also has made tunneling a viable option in some cities with soft ground, such as Houston, which couldn’t have considered building tunnels just a decade ago.

Full disclosure: This is the business I am in and I have a business relationship with one of the firms above. Well, not the tunneling business specifically but the water management business. I would much rather see water managed using green infrastructure and ecosystem-based solutions as much as possible, but a backbone of hard infrastructure certainly has its place in urban areas.

“coal plant chicken”

No, coal plant chicken is not grilling chicken using waste heat from a coal plant, although that is not a terrible idea. It’s the idea that coal-fired utilities are competing for slices of a shrinking pie, and they are going to blink out of existence one by one.

Zindler, BNEF’s head of Americas, said about half of all U.S. coal plants lose money on any given day as cheap gas, along with wind and solar farms, push electricity prices lower. Meanwhile, demand for power is flat. The result, Zindler said, is coal plants wrestle to outlast one another, fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. “Every day across multiple regional transmission operating systems, we see power plants staring across at each other and saying ‘Who is going to go first?’ ” Zindler said. “It’s only a matter of time as these plants try to outlast each other.”

Elsewhere in the same article, coal-fired utility executives say this is not true because coal and nuclear are currently the only two cost-effective ways to generate a constant base load. I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree, but I know that nuclear technology is advancing, and battery technology which can be used to smooth out intermittent loads is also advancing.

farm robots

Farm machinery is getting more high-tech and more automated all the time, due in part ot climate change.

Technological improvements from boosting crop yields to data-tracking systems will be required in coming decades as companies adapt to shifts in weather patterns, according to BMI Research. That may increasingly push agribusiness companies, especially grain handlers and input firms, into acquiring agritech startups.

“The rise of agtech use and ‘precision agriculture’ will benefit or disrupt a number of operations and businesses in the process,” the company said in a report Tuesday.

Farmers and businesses around the world are poised to feel the impact of climate change as supplies get disrupted and farmland and yields come under pressure. At the same time, agriculture, one of the largest sources of gas emissions, will face action from regulators targeting livestock and soil management.

 

more on small modular nuclear reactors

From Bloomberg:

The type of reactor NuScale is targeting would be cheaper to build than current designs and more capable of operating intermittently to back up wind and solar power, Chris Gadomski, a BNEF analyst, said Tuesday on a panel at the summit. NuScale is aiming for commercial operations in 2026 for a plant in Utah comprised of a dozen 50-megawatt reactors. It is the only company with small-reactor design certification pending before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.