It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Growing incomes boost Latino millennials’ purchasing power
UH Market data study reveals ways retailers and creators can reach customers in this sought-after segment
Millennial age groups – born mid 1980s to early 2000s – now have more money at hand than they have ever controlled before. And they are spending it, says Olivia Johnson, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Consumer Sciences at the University of Houston College of Technology.
Tech gear, cars, travel, fashion, furniture, houses, home security, insurance – everything young consumers might want and would likely need – form a retail turf being fought over by companies seeking to occupy that market segment. But if you, as a seller, fail to recognize the label “millennial” as being far from uniform, your volleys into the targeted territory can misfire, Johnson says. And she wants to explain why.
For her recent research project, described in the Journal of Consumer Behavior, Johnson and her research partners zero in on a little-studied subgroup: Latino millennials, a powerful potential customer base that composes 22% of U.S. Latinos.
“Brands are always looking for new target markets. I think they overlook Latino consumers, and more research there is needed,” she added. In total, U.S. Latinos, the country’s second largest population, boasts a collective buying power of almost $1.72 trillion.
In Johnson’s survey of Latino millennial online shoppers, researchers divided respondents into three age groups: younger millennials, ages 18 to 23; medium millennials, 24 to 30; and older millennials, 31 to 37.
“We found a lot of difference among millennial groups. The have distinct online shopping preferences and different views on quality, which are important factors,” Johnson said.
With a research specialty in ferreting out trends and decision patterns among potential customers, Johnson parses data highly valued by retailers and manufacturers looking for an edge to help in their gamble on business decisions made a year or more before their products can reach retailers’ racks and websites.
“In the consumer behavior and retailing field, we see businesses offering the same products, which means they’re targeting the same customers. If the identical red dress, for example, is offered on several sites, how can a store find a niche in the targeted market?” Johnson asked.
The key is in the extras, she suggested.
“If I were selling that red dress online, I’m definitely going to add something called social proofing. It could involve customer reviews, social media influencer buy-in, celebrity endorsements or loyalty programs. The idea is to demonstrate to potential buyers why your version is the winner or the deal you offer is smarter,” she said.
And always, she warns, avoid treating a potential customer like a number. Customers want to be acknowledged and offered products and recommendations based on who they are.
The study found subtle differences within the Latino millennial study group:
Younger millennial respondents were most responsive, among the three subgroups, to well-known name brands and high-fashion logos. They also were most impulsive in purchasing and tended to get more confused among arrays of options.
Distinctions among U.S. Latino cultures – stemming from Mexico, throughout the Caribbean, and Central and South America – highly influence shopping decisions and product preferences.
Levels of biculturalism – acculturation with dominant U.S. cultures compared to identification with lifestyles of a family homeland – were another major factor.
Points of cohesiveness among Latino millennials were also reported:
Overall, Latino millennials were more brand conscious than their non-Latino counterparts.
As they age, Latino millennials tended to become more brand conscious, which is the opposite of white consumers who tend to do the opposite.
“Studying all kinds of consumer differences intrigues me, and I want to help retailers better understand unique qualities that motivate potential customers,” Johnson said.
Also contributing to the study were Hyojung Cho, lecturer in the School of Family & Consumer Sciences at Texas State University, and UH post-doctoral researcher Sarif Patwary. Their project was conducted through a web-based survey of 378 participants.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Biodegradable medical gowns, designed to be greener than conventional counterparts, actually produce harmful greenhouse gases, according to new research published Dec. 20 in theJournal of Cleaner Production.
The use of disposable plasticized medical gowns – both conventional and biodegradable – has surged since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Landfills now brim with them.
Because the biodegradable version decomposes faster than conventional gowns, popular wisdom held that it offers a greener option by less space use and chronic emissions in landfills.
That wisdom may be wrong.
“There’s no magic bullet to this problem,” said Fengqi You, professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell University.
“Plasticized conventional medical gowns take many years to break down and the biodegradable gowns degrade much faster, but they produce gas emissions faster like added methane and carbon dioxide than regular ones in a landfill,” said You, who is a senior faculty fellow in the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “Maybe the conventional gowns is not so bad.”
According to this research led by Cornell doctoral student Xiang Zhao, biodegradable gown production poses an additional 11% higher ecotoxicity rate than conventional alternatives.
Adopting landfill gas capture and utilization processes in biodegradable gown sanitary landfills can reduce 9.79% of greenhouse emissions, life-cycle landfill use by nearly 49%, and save at least 10% fossil resources by employing onsite power co-generation, the researchers found.
Conventional gowns are environmentally and socially sustainable because they can pose 14% less toxicity to humans, cause 10% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and are nearly 10% less toxic to freshwater when compared to biodegradable gowns in landfills with extra gas emissions.
Improving the gas capture efficiency above 85% can make biodegradable gowns more environmentally sustainable than conventional gowns.
“It’s nice to break down the plastic into smaller things,” Zhao said. “But those small things eventually decompose into gas and if we don’t capture them, they become greenhouse gases that go into the air.”
Funding for this research was provided by the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) with funding from the NSF and New York State Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation.
Whether it's on television or in a movie, we love the villain.
No matter how egotistical, power hungry or greedy the person is, many of us are still attracted to their dark side—in part because we suspect some may have a redeeming quality. In fact, according to a new University of Michigan study, both adults and children more often reported that villains were inwardly good than that heroes were inwardly bad.
"In other words, people believe there is a mismatch between a villain's outward behaviors and their inner, true self, and this is a bigger gap for villains than for heroes," said Valerie Umscheid, U-M psychology doctoral student and the study's lead author.
Inside, villains are a little less evil than they outwardly seem while heroes are fully good guys inside and out.
Umscheid and colleagues conducted three studies with 434 children (ages 4-12) and 277 adults to determine how individuals make sense of antisocial acts committed by evil-doers. They focused on participants' judgments of both familiar and novel fictional villains and heroes, such as Disney's Ursula from "The Little Mermaid" and Pixar's Woody from "Toy Story."
Study 1 established that children viewed villains' actions and emotions as overwhelmingly negative. This suggests that children's well-documented tendency to judge people as good does not prevent their appreciation of extreme forms of villainy.
Studies 2 and 3 assessed children's and adults' beliefs regarding heroes' and villains' moral character and true selves, using an array of converging evidence, including how a character felt inside, whether a character's actions reflected their true self and whether a character's true self could change over time.
Across these measures, the research indicated that both children and adults consistently evaluated villains' true selves to be overwhelmingly evil and much more negative than heroes'. At the same time, researchers also detected an asymmetry in the judgments, wherein villains were more likely than heroes to have a true self that differed from their outward behavior.
Both children and adults believed characters like Ursula had some inner goodness, despite the bad/immoral actions they regularly engage in, Umscheid said.
The study, published in Cognition, was co-authored by Craig Smith, senior associate librarian, University Library; Felix Warneken and Susan Gelman, both U-M professors of psychology; and Henry Wellman, U-M professor emeritus of psychology.
Project to convert unwanted rice straw into cheap energy on a commercial scale
Most rice straw in Indonesia is burned causing pollution and health problems
Project will almost double affordable energy captured from waste.
20 December 2022 | Birmingham, UK
Scientists at the Energy and Bioproducts Institute at Aston University are to start a project to convert Indonesia’s unwanted rice straw into low-cost energy on a commercial scale.
Each year the country produces 100 million tonnes of the rice waste, of which 60% is burned in open fields, causing air pollution and has even been linked to lung cancer.
The amount burned is equivalent to approximately 85 Terawatts of electricity, which is enough to power Indonesia’s households 10 times over.
Part of the process involves a biomass conversion technology called pyrolysis. This involves heating organic waste materials to high temperatures of around 500 °C to break them down, producing vapour and solid products. Some of the vapour may be condensed into a liquid product called pyrolysis oil or pyrolysis bio-oil. Both the pyrolysis vapour and liquid bio-oil can be converted to electricity.
Current methods convert just 35% of the thermal energy of rice straw to affordable electricity. However, a newly patented combustion engine designed by consortium member, UK-based Carnot Limited, could see that doubled to 70%.
Energy extracted this way could help low and middle-income countries create their own locally generated energy, contribute to net zero by 2050, create new jobs and improve the health of locals.
The project will help develop a business model which could support companies and local authorities to produce local, cheap energy in Indonesia, and other countries with biomass capacity.
Three academic experts from different disciplines at Aston University are involved in this initial project, which focuses on Indonesia’s Lombok Island.
Dr Jude Onwudili who is leading the team said: “This project has huge potential - commercialisation of this combined technology will have significant economic benefits for the people of Indonesia through direct and indirect job creation, including the feedstock supply chain and electricity distribution and sales.
“About one million Indonesian homes lack access to energy and Indonesia's 6,000 inhabited islands make sustainable infrastructure development challenging in areas such as Lombok Island.
“The new techniques being explored could reduce environmental pollution, contribute to net zero and most importantly, provide access to affordable energy from sustainable local agricultural waste.
“Aston University is a global leader in bioenergy and energy systems, and I am delighted we received funding to explore this area.”
Over a power plant’s life, the project team have calculated that biomass produces cheaper electricity (approx. $4.3$/kWh) compared to solar (approx. $6.6/kWh), geothermal (approx. $6.9/kWh), coal (approx.$7.1/kWh), wind (approx. $8/kWh) and subsidised gas (approx.$8.4ckWh).
The project will start in April 2023 with a total of £1.5 million funding for the four partners from Innovate UK.
Alongside Carnot Limited, the Aston University scientists will be working with two other UK-based businesses to deliver the project, PyroGenesys and Straw Innovations.
PyroGenesys specialises in PyroChemy technology which will convert 70% of the rice straw into vapour or bio-oil for electricity production, with the remainder converted into nutrient-rich biochar, which can be sold back for use as fertiliser on the rice farms.
Straw Innovations will contribute their rice straw harvesting and collection expertise, with their many years of similar operations in Asia.
“Robust” amendments to insurance law and international environmental law needed to allow carbon capture, utilisation and storage
“Robust” amendments to insurance law and international environmental law are needed to allow carbon capture, utilisation and storage to take place legally so the technology can be used in the fight against global warming, a new study says.
Development of EU carbon capture regulatory frameworks is needed to encourage the safe expansion and use of carbon capture, according to researchers.
For many years, the transportation and storage of CO2 has neither been expressly prohibited or authorized by international environmental law. This has left those who want to transport it from one country to another in an unknown position with respect to international law. Due to the nature of international law requiring approval from multiple countries before it can enter into force, amendments to existing conventions have taken a long time to put into place, and in some instances have still not been resolved.
The study, published in the European Energy and Environmental Law Review, argues that a robust liability framework for CO2 capture, use and storage could represent a positive first step towards addressing a difficult regulatory issue.
The research was carried out by Associate Professor Dr Kyriaki Noussia, from the University of Reading, Dr Catherine Caine, from the University of Exeter and Ms Whitney Richardson from the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Dr Noussia said: “Ensuring safe deployment of carbon capture through minimization of leakage must remain a priority, to supplement climate change mitigation efforts and get the most benefits from this technology’s deployment.”
Researchers say insurance and general liability will need to be capped to further allow insurability to operate. Governments may be reluctant to accept amendments which may place a higher burden on public funds, regardless of how unlikely the event of significant leakage is.
They recommend nations should retain their freedom to decide whether to allow carbon capture on their territory. Insurance plays a pivotal role in ensuring there is a safety mechanism to help carbon capture technology and battle climate change. The ‘sudden’ and ‘unexpected’ loss coverage in property casualty policies is not appropriate for environmental pollution incidents.
Both the threat and the frequency of cyber-risks have provided the need for specific and separate additional coverage for cyber terrorism and cyber risks. This in turn has been anticipated to re-establish a ‘soft’ insurance market and help deploy the widespread use of carbon capture.
The study says risk could also be spread through risk-sharing agreements or a pool system which allows operators to share each other’s losses and whereby the operators unlike in insurance are both insured and insurer. There could also be a financial guarantee to the operator by parties such as another company or third party or a financial institution.
Governments can also step in to ensure that guaranteed minimum safety standards are in place for carbon capture, use and storage, to then allow the insurance market to respond.
“Volunteers” tasked with enforcing the Chinese Communist Party’s zero-covid policies have suffered from stress and anxiety, a new study shows.
Having to act as a “buffers” between disgruntled citizens and the Party’s image has led to “grassroots fatigue”, high workloads and people being put under intense pressure, researchers have found.
These members of residents committees are responsible for monitoring and tracing sick residents and enforcing quarantines, as well as administering vaccines and achieving centrally set vaccination targets.
Academics conducted 37 semi-structured interviews during summer 2021 in eight Shanghai estates in three districts. This included secretaries and directors from residents committees, government officials, representatives from property management companies and people who worked in party-community and social centres, as well as social workers, volunteers and residents.
They found an increasingly pressurized grassroots infrastructure, then exhausted after 18 months of mobilizational governance, in which party secretaries are required to shoulder ever greater workloads and manage increasingly hierarchical chains of command.
At the pandemic’s height, government officials were also sent into communities to assist with grassroots COVID management. In the second phase they went door-to-door providing information about the vaccine, alongside working in their usual party jobs. They were expected to do this voluntary work. One party worker described the work as ‘voluntary’, but when asked if she could choose not to go, she replied, ‘it seems like we cannot”.
One residents committee secretary told researchers: “Now it seems like the public is forcing Party members onto the moral high ground in all issues. It feels like, if you are a Party member, you have to do this. If you don’t, you will be ashamed of your title of Party member.”
The research, by Dr Catherine Owen from the University of Exeter and Xuan Qin from Fudan University, is published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science.
Dr Owen said: “Since Spring 2022, when Chinese citizens have become increasingly dissatisfied with the on-going commitment to zero-COVID, the high costs of resource mobilisation and the hierarchical chain of command have resulted in intensified workloads and intense pressure on local cadres, leading to grassroots fatigue.
“Following the emergence of Omicron and the hike in public dissatisfaction with the on-going lock-down policies it was the grassroots cadres that filtered out public discontents, protecting the Party’s overall image.”
Another residents committee secretary said: “Now the secretary and the director are under too much pressure. It’s just hard work, and the psychological pressure is too great. We have indicators for every job, including vaccination, and every residential area has a ranking every day. I’m too anxious to sleep at night. Because the city has indicators for the district, the district has indicators for the streets, and the streets have indicators for the residential areas, it is very anxiety-inducing”.
Researchers found tensions were created because higher-level authorities have asked for compulsory enforcement of policies at grassroot levels, but citizens are not formally required to comply. Local volunteers were told to meet vaccination targets, but mandatory vaccination was prohibited. This put the grassroots cadres in the impossible position of having to meet rigid targets without the authority to enforce the policy.
Dr Owen said: “Leeway for street-level bureaucrats to adapt or customise decisions from above during periods of campaign governance is very limited. The tension between the requirement for comprehensive compliance and the basic need for personal freedom is a result of top-level design, but it is experienced and negotiated at the grassroots level.”
The CCP, Campaign Governance and COVID-19: Evidence from Shanghai
Supporting the OSTP memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”
The undersigned Open Access scholarly publishers express our full support for Dr. Alondra Nelson’s United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”
The undersigned Open Access scholarly publishers express our full support for Dr. Alondra Nelson’s United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.”
The memo requires US federal granting bodies to develop and implement new policies making all taxpayer-funded scholarly research and underlying raw data freely and publicly available without embargo by 2026. The guidance applies to all federal agencies with R&D expenditures, regardless of budget size or the subject area of the research being funded.
Our main message is simple: publishing in any journal published by this group already meets or exceeds the requirements outlined in the OSTP memo.
Free public access
We are fully Open Access publishers. Everything we publish is available under a CC BY copyright license. This means the research is not only publicly accessible—it’s also freely available for redistribution, remixing, and reuse.
No embargoes or delays
The content we publish is always immediately freely available for anyone to read, cite, share, or build upon. We enthusiastically support moving away from notions of embargoes, and the old conversations about shortening or lengthening them. One of the first calls from national leaders’ on science policy (including the OSTP) at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic was to make research related to the pandemic freely available. Most publishers who were not already Open Access complied with this call. We strongly believe that there is consensus across the research community that the current mixed model landscape of published research is no longer in the best service of science, health, technology, and scholarship whether inside or outside a time of crisis.
Machine readable
All our content is fully machine readable, indexed, and archived to enhance discoverability, and to enable further cross-referencing, processing, and analysis.
Public data
“Scientific data underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research should be made freely available and publicly accessible by default at the time of publication” p. 4
Many fully OA publishers already require all authors to share the raw data underlying each study upon publication when it is legally and ethically possible to do so. Whether or not this is mandatory for an individual publisher, we all stand ready to support US federally funded authors to publicly share data when they are required to do so.
Conclusion
We all agree that this federal policy from the OSTP is an important step forward for Open Access and Open Science. Fully OA publishers have always supported this level of immediate openness, and we stand ready to help the OSTP implement these requirements.
While there remain other issues around Open Access that still need addressing by the research community and scholarly publishing community, let us all ensure we celebrate these important steps forward, and discuss the remaining issues and perspectives transparently, working together to improve upon our work, in the spirit of Open Access itself.
Signatory Publishers
Copernicus Publications
eLife
Frontiers
JMIR Publications
MDPI
Open Library of Humanities
PeerJ
PLOS
Ubiquity Press
Fully OA Interest Group
As a reminder, our OASPA Interest Group intends to provide a platform for exchange and collaboration among “fully Open Access” scholarly journal publishers. The aim of the group is to provide unity, not by creating one voice for full OA publishers, but by bringing together a diversity of different voices.
By “fully” OA, this means such publishers who publish 100% of their journal content OA and are not mixed model nor in any kind of transition to OA.
For individual publisher responses to the OSTP memorandum, see any links next to the publisher names, below.
PLOS, with review and contributions from Copernicus Publications, eLife, Frontiers, JMIR Publications, MDPI, The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), PeerJ, Ubiquity Press
Without guidance, Inflation Reduction Act tax credit may do more harm than good
IMAGE: WILSON RICKS, THE STUDY'S FIRST AUTHOR, STANDS AT THE SOLAR ARRAY AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY.view more
CREDIT: BUMPER DEJESUS
The Inflation Reduction Act established a tax credit to kickstart hydrogen production in the U.S. But without careful implementation, the credit could backfire by inadvertently increasing nationwide carbon pollution.
Since hydrogen does not release carbon when burned, it is an attractive option for such uses as powering fuel cells and transporting carbon-free energy over long distances.
But while hydrogen itself does not release carbon, the processes used to produce it are often carbon-intensive. For example, today’s most common production method uses natural gas to make hydrogen through a process known as steam methane reforming.
The new production tax credit aims to help implement cleaner methods for making hydrogen. Among the leading alternative technologies is electrolysis, which requires only electricity to split hydrogen from water.
New research from Princeton’s ZERO Lab led by Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy the Environment, argues that the source of the electricity used for electrolysis matters. If the energy comes from fossil fuel or coal generators, widespread electrolysis could lead to more nationwide carbon pollution than today’s steam methane reforming.
“This tax credit makes it economically attractive to expand electrolysis-based hydrogen production across the U.S.,” said Jenkins. “But we need to be mindful that it’s implemented in a way that actually accomplishes its goal of promoting low-carbon hydrogen production.”
Consequently, by modeling the grid-scale impact of electrolysis, the ZERO Lab identified three key implementation guidelines for the tax credit that would require grid-based hydrogen producers using electrolysis to procure clean energy in a way that moves the nation toward, rather than away from, its emissions targets. With these procurement guidelines in place, the researchers found a way to enable grid-based electrolysis with minimal carbon pollution.
Their work was recently published in Environmental Research Letters. They recently submitted comments to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service to provide decision-making support on how to implement the hydrogen production tax credit created under section 45V of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Pitfalls of grid-based electricity
Wilson Ricks, the paper’s first author and a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, pointed out the obstacles to using electricity to generate hydrogen. Currently, fossil fuel and coal plants still supply much of the electricity for the U.S. electrical grid. And since there is no way to track individual electricity flows through the grid from generator to consumer, any grid-connected hydrogen producer would indirectly generate large amounts of carbon emissions simply by increasing the overall energy demand. This is especially true because the tax credit pays hydrogen producers based on the amount of hydrogen they produce, encouraging them to operate close to 24/7.
For instance, Ricks said that if a hydrogen producer connected an electrolyzer to the grid today, the emissions rate of the hydrogen produced would be almost double the emissions rate of hydrogen produced directly from fossil fuels through steam methane reforming.
That leaves hydrogen producers who want to qualify for the full tax credit with two options: either they must supply their own carbon-free electricity without connecting to the grid by co-locating resources like solar farms alongside their electrolyzer, which poses many spatial and logistical constraints, or they can connect to the grid and find some way to demonstrate that they are using carbon-free electricity from clean sources.
The current carbon accounting approach, known as annual or volumetric matching, requires a grid-connected company to examine its annual energy usage, calculate the total megawatt-hours of electricity used, and procure an equivalent amount of clean energy that was produced at any time during the same year.
In the paper, though, the researchers argued that the current accounting method does not fully consider the scope of emissions embodied in grid users’ energy consumption. When Ricks and Jenkins, along with fellow co-author Qingyu Xu, a former postdoctoral researcher with the ZERO Lab who is now a researcher at Tsinghua University, modeled the system-wide impacts of implementing the hydrogen tax credit alongside the existing clean energy procurement approach, they found that the approach did little to reduce carbon emissions from grid-based electrolysis.
However, they found that they could minimize the emissions impact of grid-based hydrogen production by enforcing additional guidelines for clean energy procurement alongside the tax credit. The findings built off previous work in collaboration with Google, a member of the Princeton E-ffiliates Partnership, on 24/7 carbon-free energy procurement, which identified ways to improve current accounting practices to better reflect the carbon emissions embodied in the grid’s electricity.
Three guidelines for a better tax credit
First, the current accounting approach only requires producers to procure energy on an annual basis, but the researchers argued that hydrogen producers should be required to procure clean energy on an hourly basis to match their consumption during that hour, which better accounts for daily variations in grid emissions.
Overall grid emissions are generally lowest during the daytime, when resources like solar farms supply a stream of clean energy, and are higher at night, when fossil fuel and coal generators supply more of the grid’s electricity.
Consequently, a hydrogen producer using electrolysis, incentivized to operate at all hours of the day, would likely rely on fossil fuels for extended periods of time. By requiring producers to procure clean energy on an hourly basis, an approach being explored by companies like Google and Microsoft as well as the U.S. government, they would be more accountable for the energy sources they use at any given time.
Second, the researchers specified that to qualify for the tax credit, hydrogen producers must procure electricity from newly built clean resources beyond those required to meet state-mandated clean energy goals. If hydrogen producers only procured renewable energy from pre-existing sources, which would be possible under the existing paradigm, they would increase the overall demand for energy without contributing to new projects that expand the clean energy supply. In many cases, that would spur fossil fuel and coal generators to supply the deficit.
Lastly, the team found that procured clean energy must be from sources close enough to the producer to be deliverable. Because of transmission bottlenecks in the grid, electricity is limited in the distance it can practically travel. As a result, the researchers found that allowing the procurement of far-away clean energy resources, which is possible with today’s accounting approaches, did nothing to limit system-wide carbon emissions.
Ricks explained that even if a producer claims to pay for electricity from a non-local source, their overall demand might be met by a nearby fossil fuel or coal plant due to transmission constraints between the clean generator and the electrolysis facility. By implementing a deliverability requirement, hydrogen producers would be required to procure clean energy from sources within a practical distance.
When the researchers implemented these three requirements alongside the tax credit, they found that grid-based hydrogen producers would have a comparable impact on grid emissions as hydrogen producers who supply their own clean electricity without connecting to the grid.
Even with the requirements in place, there are still some circumstances in which adding hydrogen demand leads to higher grid emissions. That is because demand from electrolysis may compete for the best renewable energy sites, and as those sites get used up, fossil generators may become more competitive. However, Jenkins noted that the same issue applies to clean hydrogen producers who do not connect to the grid.
“Given the incentives created by the production tax credit to deploy electrolysis, there is no real way to ensure zero consequential emissions in all cases,” Jenkins said. “But we can ensure the lowest consequential emissions of the procurement strategies we explored and comparable outcomes to an off-grid electrolysis facility powered exclusively by clean electricity.”
When the researchers removed any of the three requirements, though, system-wide emissions shot up. Without the proposed guidelines, the tax credit would ultimately subsidize a production process that would increase emissions, which Ricks said could be a disaster for the credibility of the nascent clean hydrogen sector and overall decarbonization policy.
Fortunately, the team concluded that the cost of implementing these requirements and tracking hourly energy usage would amount to around $1 per kilogram of hydrogen. Meanwhile, with the tax credit and current sale price of hydrogen, producers could bring in $4 per kilogram of hydrogen, assuming they qualify for the full tax credit.
“Even with current high electrolyzer costs, complying with our recommendations should be profitable in many regions across the country,” said Jenkins. “If we assume further cost declines, which are likely in the coming decades as one of the intended impacts of the hydrogen subsidy, producers could meet these guidelines on an even wider scale.”
In the United States, a multi-billion-dollar industry employs nurses and nursing assistants to provide long-term care in facilities such as nursing homes, residential care facilities, and home health agencies. A new study examined how these facilities — some of which have residents receiving care from more than 40 different nursing assistance in a month — should assign workers to resident groups on each shift to maximize the consistency of care. The study found that scheduling practices for part-time, per diem, and contract workers can drive poor consistency of care in long-term care facilities; prioritizing the consistent assignment of these workers can significantly improve consistency of care, which is associated with better quality of life for both residents and workers.
Conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Cornell University, the study is published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
“Our findings are relevant to the daily staffing practices of more than 15,600 nursing homes in the United States, especially for the more labor-intensive nursing assistant role, but also for nursing roles,” explains Alan A. Scheller-Wolf, Professor of Operations Management at CMU’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study. “We find that relatively simple changes in how facilities schedule workers can have a significant impact on consistency of care, which should also improve quality of care, and the satisfaction of residents, their families, and staff.”
The amount of hands-on care delivered and the extended time horizon of care have important implications for long-term care staffing practices. In particular, concerns about quality of care have led practitioners to emphasize the idea of consistency of care, focusing on such matters as building relationships between staff and residents, reducing residents’ distress, and improving clinical outcomes. During the pandemic, consistency of care (minimizing the number of unique caregivers seen by any given resident) has also been emphasized to limit the spread of COVID-19.
Yet based on the authors’ analysis of shift rosters from three mid-Atlantic nursing homes, common practices in assigning part-time and contract workers significantly impair consistency of care: In many facilities, full-time workers are first assigned to the same unit over a period of time, and part-time workers are then assigned to fill in gaps.
Researchers examined the relationship between consistency of care and rostering decisions, that is, how caregivers are assigned to different units for each shift. Specifically, they analyzed data from more than 15,000 shifts worked by nursing assistants at the three nursing homes over several months, comparing actual rosters to optimal schedules that maximize consistency. Then they compared the performance of the optimized rosters to the facilities’ schedules.
Repeatedly assigning full-time workers to a home unit and giving low priority for home-unit assignment to part-time workers can result in high levels of inconsistent care, the study found. In contrast, consistently assigning part-time workers and having some flexible full-time workers can significantly increase consistency of care. Flexibility among full-time workers helps achieve consistency because their higher frequency of work makes a reassignment away from their home unit less likely to cause a problem in inconsistency since full-time workers can often work multiple shifts in a single non-home unit.
The authors’ studies indicate that nursing homes that prioritize part-time workers can significantly improve consistency of care, potentially reducing the average number of different nursing assistants a resident interacts with by 20 to 30 percent each month. Most of the benefits of improved consistency of care can be achieved even if many of the full-time employees are still granted scheduling priority to work in their home unit.
Furthermore, for facilities that house residents in large units (four to six nursing assistants per day or evening shift), splitting these units into smaller ones and prioritizing part-time employees can potentially reduce the level of inconsistency by 50 percent.
The researchers provide strategies for nursing homes that schedule shifts manually, and strategies for software companies that are automating scheduling long-term care shifts. Further work is needed to bring the principles of the study into practice; work with assisted care homes and software companies is ongoing.
“Facilities should seek as much flexibility as practicable from full-time workers to allow part-time workers to be assigned more consistently and improve their overall inconsistency level,” suggests Vincent W. Slaugh, Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Cornell’s S.C. Johnson College of Business, who led the study. “The insights from our analysis offer a simple cost-free solution to improve quality of life for both residents and caregivers. Nursing homes that use more part-time and contract workers due to the labor shortage can use these insights to improve the experience of those workers.”
