Collinsville solar thermal project: yield forecasting (draft report)

The final report has been published and is available here. Executive Summary 1        Introduction This report’s primary aim is to provide yield projections for the proposed Linear Fresnel Reflector (LFR) technology plant at Collinsville, Queensland, Australia.  However, the techniques developed in this report to overcome inadequate datasets at Collinsville to produce the yield projections are of interest to a wider audience because inadequate datasets for renewable energy projects are commonplace.  The subsequent report called ‘Energy economics and dispatch forecasting’ (Bell, Wild & Foster 2014a) uses the yield projections from this report to produce long-term wholesale market price and dispatch forecasts for the plant.  2        Literature review The literature review discusses the four drivers for yield for LFR technology: DNI (Direct Normal Irradiance) Temperature Humidity Pressure Collinsville lacks complete historical datasets of the four drivers to develop yield projects but its three nearby neighbours do possess complete datasets, so could act as proxies for Collinsville.  However, analysing the four drivers for Collinsville and its three nearby sites shows that there is considerable difference in their climates.  This difference makes them unsuitable to act as proxies for yield calculations.  Therefore, the review investigates modelling the four drivers for Collinsville. We introduce the term “effective” DNI to help clarify and ameliorate concerns over the dust and dew effects on terrestrial DNI measurement and LFR technology. We also introduce a modified TMY technique to overcome technology specific Typical Metrological Year (TMY).  We discuss the effect of climate change and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on yield and their implications for a TMY. 2.1     Research questions Research question arising from the literature review include: The overarching research question: Can modelling the weather with limited datasets produce greater yield predictive power than using the historically more complete datasets from nearby sites? This overarching question has a number of smaller supporting research questions: Is BoM’s DNI satellite dataset adequately adjusted for cloud cover at Collinsville? Given the dust and dew effects, is using raw satellite data sufficient to model yield? Does elevation between Collinsville and nearby sites affect yield? How does the ENSO affect yield? Given the 2007-2012 constraint, will the TMY process provide a “Typical” year over the ENSO cycle? How does climate change affect yield? A further research question arises in the methodology but is included here for completeness. What is the expected frequency of oversupply from the Linear Fresnel Novatec Solar Boiler? 3        Methodology In the methodology section, we discuss the data preparation and the model selection process for the four drivers of yield. 4        Results and analysis In the results section we present the four driver models selected and the process that was undertaken to arrive at the models. 5        Discussion We analyse the extent to which the research questions are informed by the results. 6        Conclusion In this report, we have identified the key research questions and established a methodology to address these questions.  The models for the four drivers have been established allowing the calculation of the yield projections for Collinsville

Interest group influence on EU policy-making: A quantitative analysis across issues

This paper presents a large-scale empirical analysis of interest group influence on EU policy-making across a wide range of issues. The explanation of policy outcomes as well as the democratic legitimacy of the EU crucially depends on how much influence interest groups have and how influence is distributed among them. However, only few studies have addressed the question of influence and most are limited to case studies focusing only on one single issue. Recent literature however suggests that interest group influence varies considerably across issues. It is assumed that influence is not a mere function of interest group characteristics, but strongly shaped by the issue context. The lack of large-N studies controling for issue variables is mainly due to methodological difficulties in measuring influence. Hence, this paper employs a new approach: Drawing on a quantitative text analysis performed with Wordfish, policy preferences of interest groups will be compared with the policy proposal in order to identify the winners and the losers of the decision-making process. While controling for interest group characteristics, the effect of issue-related variables on interest group influence will be tested across 15 policy issues

The UK NHS Economic Evaluation Database : Economic issues in evaluations of health technology

Objective: The U.K. NHS Economic Evaluation Database (EED) project is commissioned to identify papers on economic evaluations of health technologies and to disseminate their findings to NHS decision makers by means of structured abstracts that are available through a public database and the Cochrane Library. This paper discusses current issues relating to the economic aspects of producing NHS EED abstracts. Methods: A review of NHS EED was undertaken between 1994 and 1999 to determine the methodologies adopted and issues that influence the usefulness of economic evaluations. Methods adopted to improve the quality of NHS EED abstracts are also reported. Results: Eighty-five percent of NHS EED abstracts are cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs), 9.3% are cost-utility analyses (CUAs), and only 1.4% are cost-benefit analyses (CBAs). Of the total abstracts, 65.9% are based on single studies, 19.5% on reviews, 3.9% on estimates of effectiveness, and 10.7% on combinations of these sources. Models are utilized in 16.7% of CEAs, 60.2% of CUAs, and 20% of CBAs. Analyses of CBA studies reveal a degree of misuse of well-established definitions. NHS EED internal control mechanisms are reported that provide a means of ensuring that abstracts are based on sound academic principles. Conclusions: Most economic evaluations are conducted by means of CEA, followed by CUA, while CBA accounts for an extreme minority of cases. Single studies form the principal source of effectiveness data, although models are widely used, principally in CUA. The structure of NHS EED abstracts provides decision makers with the principal results and an interpretation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of economic evaluations

A brief history of long memory: Hurst, Mandelbrot and the road to ARFIMA

Long memory plays an important role in many fields by determining the behaviour and predictability of systems; for instance, climate, hydrology, finance, networks and DNA sequencing. In particular, it is important to test if a process is exhibiting long memory since that impacts the accuracy and confidence with which one may predict future events on the basis of a small amount of historical data. A major force in the development and study of long memory was the late Benoit B. Mandelbrot. Here we discuss the original motivation of the development of long memory and Mandelbrot's influence on this fascinating field. We will also elucidate the sometimes contrasting approaches to long memory in different scientific communitiesComment: 40 page

Why Local Party Leaders Don't Support Nominating Centrists

Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections. In contrast, the authors argue that many local party leaders - especially Republicans - may not believe that centrists perform better in elections and therefore may not support nominating them. They test this argument using data from an original survey of 1,118 county-level party leaders. In experiments, they find that local party leaders most prefer nominating candidates who are similar to typical co-partisans, not centrists. Moreover, given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists: Democrats do so by about 2 to 1 and Republicans by 10 to 1. Likewise, in open-ended questions, Democratic Party leaders are twice as likely to say they look for extreme candidates relative to centrists; Republican Party leaders are five times as likely. Potentially driving these partisan differences, Republican leaders are especially likely to believe that extremists can win general elections and overestimate the electorate's conservatism by double digits

The Persistence of Accounting versus Economic Profit

Drawing on Schumpeterian theory, this article presents estimates of a first-order autoregressive model of profit persistence for large US firms, using Economic Value Added (EVA), the popular measure of profits produced by Stern Stewart and Company, and simple (unadjusted) accounting measures from the Compustat database. We hypothesize about the differences we should expect to find between these two sets of estimates, and also provide a fresh normative assessment of the dynamic competitiveness of the US economy