Hot August Nights: California’s Quest for Resource Adequacy Solutions to Promote Integration of Renewables and Energy Storage in the Midst of Climate Change-Related Challenges to Reliability

This Article focuses on the CPUC RA program’s role in helping to keep the lights (and air conditioning) on while advancing California’s continued mission to decarbonize the grid, even in the face of extreme climate-change induced weather events. It explains how the existing RA program creates risks of overestimating the availability of some capacity, including solar, wind, and energy storage resources, to meet demand in the increasingly critical evening hours. These risks are attributable to the program’s original design, which assumed that all resources will be available to meet load in all hours. This Article outlines the major CPUC regulatory developments since August 2020, aimed at reforming the foundation of RA to better plan and account for the availability limitations inherent in the rapidly shifting electricity resource mix that is necessary to meet California’s ambitious clean energy goals. In sum, this Article demonstrates how the pathway to a zero-carbon future in California is inextricably linked to the successful development and implementation of a reformed RA capacity paradigm that properly ensures procurement of resources capable of meeting both gross peak demand and energy requirements across all hours. Absent these key features, reliability will suffer, and accelerated decarbonization will almost certainly face major roadblocks. Part II provides background on RA in California. Part III describes some of the main components of California’s existing RA program. Part IV explains the main factors underlying the critical need for RA reform in California, including how integration of renewables and energy storage uniquely affects the existing structure. Part V introduces the future of RA in California: the CPUC’s newly reformed “24-hour slice of day” RA framework that will be implemented beginning with a test year in 2024 and will pave the way for a fully decarbonized, reliable grid. Finally, Part VI briefly concludes

Comparison of nutrition education approaches on fruit and vegetable intake in older adults

Most Americans do not consume recommended intakes of fruits and vegetables (F/Vs). Hands-on nutrition education applies social cognitive theory as participants practice preparing F/Vs. This study compared a four-week hands-on nutrition education program (L+HO) with lecture only (L) in older adults with assessments at baseline and weeks four and eight. Twenty-three women over the age of 50 participated in either four, 90-minute weekly L+HO classes (n = 14) or four, 40-minute weekly L nutrition education classes (n = 9). Vegetable intake significantly increased at four weeks compared to baseline for both intervention groups. Vegetable intake increased at eight weeks compared to baseline but was only significant for the L group. Fruit intake increased for both intervention groups with significance observed only when the groups were combined for the overall impact of nutrition education. Results did not support a greater increase in F/V intake in the L+HO group for various possible reasons

The harshness and injustice of the common law rule... has frequenly been commented upon : Debating Contributory Negligence in Canada, 1914-1949

In the early twentieth century many legal professionals damned the law of contributory negligence as complicated and unfair to plaintiffs barred from recovery, while businesspeople often complained thatjudges and juries refused to find sympathetic plaintiffs contributorily negligent. Elite Canadian lawyers, through their work in the Canadian Bar Association and the Commission on Uniformity of Legislation in Canada, proposed model contributory negligence legislation that a number of provinces subsequently adopted. Reviews of these statutes were mixed however The large body of existing case law, despite its complications, encouraged some lawyers and judges to fall back on older jurisprudence in interpreting the new acts. Legislators and law reformers responded by increasing the length and complexity of the negligence statutes, thus undermining the goal of simplifying the law

Auditory Sensory Substitution is Intuitive and Automatic with Texture Stimuli

Millions of people are blind worldwide. Sensory substitution (SS) devices (e.g., vOICe) can assist the blind by encoding a video stream into a sound pattern, recruiting visual brain areas for auditory analysis via crossmodal interactions and plasticity. SS devices often require extensive training to attain limited functionality. In contrast to conventional attention-intensive SS training that starts with visual primitives (e.g., geometrical shapes), we argue that sensory substitution can be engaged efficiently by using stimuli (such as textures) associated with intrinsic crossmodal mappings. Crossmodal mappings link images with sounds and tactile patterns. We show that intuitive SS sounds can be matched to the correct images by naive sighted participants just as well as by intensively-trained participants. This result indicates that existing crossmodal interactions and amodal sensory cortical processing may be as important in the interpretation of patterns by SS as crossmodal plasticity (e.g., the strengthening of existing connections or the formation of new ones), especially at the earlier stages of SS usage. An SS training procedure based on crossmodal mappings could both considerably improve participant performance and shorten training times, thereby enabling SS devices to significantly expand blind capabilities

Opportunities for detection and use of QTL influencing seasonal reproduction in sheep: a review

Genetic improvement in traits associated with seasonal breeding in sheep is challenging because these traits have low heritabilities, are generally not expressed until late in life, are commonly recorded only in females, and are expressed only in some lambing seasons and management systems. Detection of quantitative trait loci and their use in marker-assisted selection could therefore substantially enhance selection responses. A population of sheep with an extended breeding season was developed through selection for fertility in spring matings and provides opportunities for further study of candidate genes influencing seasonal breeding. In particular, the melatonin receptor 1a gene is polymorphic in many sheep breeds and appears to influence a number of seasonal reproductive responses. In addition, a variety of clock genes have been identified in laboratory mammals and shown to influence biological rhythms. Mutations in these clock genes have been identified and shown to influence circadian periodicities and reproductive patterns in golden hamster and mouse. In sheep, expression of clock genes in the suprachaismatic nucleus and pars tuberalis (PT) suggests that "calendar" cells in the ovine PT play a role in maintaining circannual rhythms. Thus the various clock genes represent potentially important candidate genes that may be involved in control of seasonal breeding

Reversible low-light induced photoswitching of crowned spiropyran-DO3A complexed with gadolinium(III) ions.

Photoswitchable spiropyran has been conjugated to the crowned ring system DO3A, which improves its solubility in dipolar and polar media and stabilizes the merocyanine isomer. Adding the lanthanide ion gadolinium(III) to the macrocyclic ring system leads to a photoresponsive magnetic resonance imaging contrast agent that displays an increased spin-lattice relaxation time (T₁) upon visible light stimulation. In this work, the photoresponse of this photochromic molecule to weak light illumination using blue and green light emitting diodes was investigated, simulating the emission spectra from bioluminescent enzymes. Photon emission rate of the light emitting diodes was changed, from 1.75 × 10¹⁶ photons·s⁻¹ to 2.37 × 10¹² photons·s⁻¹. We observed a consistent visible light-induced isomerization of the merocyanine to the spiropyran form with photon fluxes as low as 2.37 × 10¹² photons·s⁻¹ resulting in a relaxivity change of the compound. This demonstrates the potential for use of the described imaging probes in low light level applications such as sensing bioluminescence enzyme activity. The isomerization behavior of gadolinium(III)-ion complexed and non-complexed spiropyran-DO3A was analyzed in water and ethanol solution in response to low light illumination and compared to the emitted photon emission rate from over-expressed Gaussia princeps luciferase

IL-23 produced by CNS-resident cells controls T cell encephalitogenicity during the effector phase of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis

CNS-resident cells, in particular microglia and macrophages, are a source of inflammatory cytokines during inflammation within the CNS. Expression of IL-23, a recently discovered cytokine, has been shown to be critical for the development of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in mice. Expression of the p40 subunit of IL-12 and IL-23 by microglia has been shown in situ and in vitro, but direct evidence for a functional significance of p40 expression by CNS cells during an immune response in vivo is still lacking. Here we report that p40 plays a critical role in maintaining encephalitogenicity during the disease course. By using irradiation bone marrow chimeras, we have generated mice in which p40 is deleted from the CNS parenchyma but not the systemic immune compartment. Our studies show that p40 expressed by CNS-endogenous cells is critical for the development of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein-induced EAE. In spite of the reduced clinical disease, the absence of p40 from the CNS has little impact on the degree of inflammation. Expression profiles of the CNS lesions show an increase in Th2 cytokines when compared with mice that develop EAE in the presence of CNS IL-12 and/or IL-23. Taken together, our data demonstrate that p40 expression by CNS-resident cells forms the basis for the Th1 bias of the CNS

Marine eutrophication review. Part 1: Quantifying the effects of nitrogen enrichment on phytoplankton in coastal ecosystems; Part 2: Bibliography with abstracts

Professionals who are responsible for coastal environmental and natural resource planning and management have a need to become conversant with new concepts designed to provide quantitative measures of the environmental benefits of natural resources. These amenities range from beaches to wetlands to clean water and other assets that normally are not bought and sold in everyday markets. At all levels of government — from federal agencies to townships and counties — decisionmakers are being asked to account for the costs and benefits of proposed actions. To non-specialists, the tools of professional economists are often poorly understood and sometimes inappropriate for the problem at hand. This handbook is intended to bridge this gap. The most widely used organizing tool for dealing with natural and environmental resource choices is benefit-cost analysis — it offers a convenient way to carefully identify and array, quantitatively if possible, the major costs, benefits, and consequences of a proposed policy or regulation. The major strength of benefit-cost analysis is not necessarily the predicted outcome, which depends upon assumptions and techniques, but the process itself, which forces an approach to decision-making that is based largely on rigorous and quantitative reasoning. However, a major shortfall of benefit-cost analysis has been the difficulty of quantifying both benefits and costs of actions that impact environmental assets not normally, nor even regularly, bought and sold in markets. Failure to account for these assets, to omit them from the benefit-cost equation, could seriously bias decisionmaking, often to the detriment of the environment. Economists and other social scientists have put a great deal of effort into addressing this shortcoming by developing techniques to quantify these non-market benefits. The major focus of this handbook is on introducing and illustrating concepts of environmental valuation, among them Travel Cost models and Contingent Valuation. These concepts, combined with advances in natural sciences that allow us to better understand how changes in the natural environment influence human behavior, aim to address some of the more serious shortcomings in the application of economic analysis to natural resource and environmental management and policy analysis. Because the handbook is intended for non-economists, it addresses basic concepts of economic value such as willingness-to-pay and other tools often used in decision making such as costeffectiveness analysis, economic impact analysis, and sustainable development. A number of regionally oriented case studies are included to illustrate the practical application of these concepts and techniques