Patrick Bryant

AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow placed at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Strategic Analysis Team

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

If you have a retirement account, please check that it is in a fund focused on fossil fuel divestment and/or companies doing the hard work of pivoting to renewables. It’s one of the single largest economic signals a typical middle class American can give. https://t.co/3ljzzwpdaa

[Jesse D. Jenkins @JesseJenkins]

The best science tells us that climate change is not like an asteroid hurtling towards earth, an all-or-nothing battle for survival. Rather, every billion tons of CO2 & every 10th of a degree of warming we prevent will save lives, prevent suffering, and avoid countless damage.

The fight cannot be surrendered, and the project of building a world where the lives and aspirations of 8-going-on-10 billion people can be powered by clean, abundant energy remains essential.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

New favorite YouTube channel. Electric trucking is obviously the future. For many applications it’s a no brainer today!
https://t.co/Y7d1ki64HT

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

@JessePeltan Wow I definitely had not appreciated that a single coal plant consumes O(500t) of coal every hour.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

@actualdrdoctor Good to know, I felt I needed to go see it because of how bad the reviews are

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

EVs save lives

[InsideEVs @InsideEVs]

A veterinarian's Ford F-150 Lightning and Kia EV9 helped her provide nearly uninterrupted critical care to her furry patients during Hurricane Helene:

https://t.co/Gq6KfUn2X9

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

@JesseJenkins Mine is exajoules to gigawatt-years. GCAM people really like EJ and I prefer to think of things in terms of energy produced by a large power plant in a year. 1EJ = 31.8GWy

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

Just remember:
Begging the question <=> asking the question for answers
Begging for the question <=> raising the question

[Liam Bright @lastpositivist]

The one thing linguistic prescriptivists and pedants are correct on is that "begs the question" should not be used as a synonym for "raises the question". Hold the line comrades.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

The future is electric. Fundamentally more controllable energy carrier than hydrocarbons.
Local battery storage makes this possible with a cheap distribution system and provides resilience to power disruption. All of this tech is highly modular and on a learning curve.

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

OK at popular request, I made Annie’s Mac and Cheese in *about* the minimum time possible, with a stove about 3-4x more powerful than other induction stoves.

This also demonstrates how we can control temperature precisely, as that’s key to making the all-important cheese sauce.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

If you count that increased absorption as negative emissions, you can emit more CO2 than would have been net zero with a pre-industrial atmosphere. This means you are still contributing to warming.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

Net zero accounting is tricky
https://t.co/wnrIpqQYgC

[Robert Höglund @RobertHoglund]

🚨This is the HUGE. Unless country carbon accounting is changed we will only reach fake net zero, resulting in 0.5C more warming end of century.

The way countries account for removals in the land sector includes the natural CO2 fertilization effect on managed lands. That effect is already accounted for in carbon budgets, and is on the order of 4-6 Gt/yr. So if countries also account for that CO2 it means they are actually not reaching net zero when they say they are.

There is a difference between UNFCCC and IPCC accounting rules here that enables this.

From Myles Allen et als poster (and upcoming paper). Also the most discussed poster, but far from enough.
#negativeco2emissions

Thanks @brunncy for giving additional details.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

Got to make sure you aren’t giving yourself credit for carbon sinks which are a direct consequence of your emissions! In this case increased CO2 levels in the air result in managed lands absorbing more CO2.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

The office where I’m doing my fellowship at @ENERGY funds this work, one of our most useful projects for the energy modeling community! Cost projections for all kinds of electricity generating technologies under different scenarios out to 2050.

[Jesse D. Jenkins @JesseJenkins]

It's that time of year! @NREL's Annual Technology Baseline compendium of electricity generation and storage technology cost scenarios is out now. Dig in ⤵️
https://t.co/AVxcydymGw

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

The main thing I did as a postdoc is finally out!

[CMU Physics @Physics_CMU]

CMU Physicists John Alison and Patrick Bryant with help from the @NSF AI Institute are pushing the frontiers of data-driven background estimation @CMSExperiment at the LHC

https://t.co/X5mqgS1xVR

[Michael Thomas @curious_founder]

To decarbonize homes, we need to install millions of heat pumps.

In 2023, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the second year in a row.

I spent the last month trying to understand why. Here's what I learned: https://t.co/EPgD8d5Lzt

🧵

[Lion Hirth @LionHirth]

IRENA puts the utility-scale solar PV learning rate at 33% in their recent cost report

Thirty-three.

You really need to plot costs on a log scale for them to not disappear.

[Sean Casten @SeanCasten]

Morning musing: climate change is fundamentally a problem of *energy* policy, not environmental policy. Prior to the passage of the IRA we never really framed that right - and even now, we still focus too much on the latter and too little on the former. Thread:

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

Thinking more carefully about this, could just be the case that there is a local field strength minimum above the magnet in that spot which would allow a strong diamagnet to levitate stably.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

A sample this tiny would reach room temperature pretty quick right?…

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

First video of LK-99 Full Levitation, aka flux-pinning

This video was just posted to the Chinese video-sharing site BiliBili and claims to be a highly pure synthesized sample of LK-99.

What is the physical phenomenon behind this and what does it mean?

Levitation of superconducting materials is a phenomenon unique to what is called Type-II superconductors, and is an effect whereby magnetic field lines becomes 'trapped' as it passes through the material, providing the force needed to levitate. These are the popular images and videos of cryogenically-cooled discs floating above a magnet frequently seen online and in the pinned post on my profile.

You can think of this like strands of hair being caught in gum - the gum is suspended in mid-air by adhering strongly to the hair as the hair passes through it. The hair in this case is magnetic field lines and the gum is the Type-II superconductor. Just like hair comes in individual strands, or in other words hair is 'quantized' or 'discrete', so is the flux trapped at the 'pinning centers' quantized in what are called 'magnetic vortices' - the quantization of pinned flux lines is a key property and distinguishing characteristic of Type-II superconductors (although technically can occur in Type-I superconductors if the material thickness is smaller than the London penetration depth, which is indeed very small - specifics for the physics nerds out there).

Flux-pinning is entirely unique to superconductors and is also wholly distinct from the Meissner effect. It is not a property of diamagnets or diamagnetism.

At @TRIUMFLab I contributed to flux-pinning studies in Niobium crystal superconducting radio-frequency cavities used for particle acceleration. In that application, trapped flux poses an issue by increasing the remnant surface resistivity of the cavity, which has the effect of decreasing its effective quality factor or Q-factor, which is a measurement of a resonators efficiency. SRF cavities typically have Q-factors of 10E10 and trapped flux at pinning centers reduces the maximum effective accelerating electric field used to drive charged particle bunches close to the speed of light.

Flux pinning is thought to arise in some Type-II superconductors by small imperfections in the crystal, also called volume defects, that enable flux to penetrate the material. In SRF cavities an issue that arises is any magnetic field that is passing through the material, e.g. by the Earth's background field, can become pinned or trapped inside the cavity as it transitions into a superconducting state. See some attached plots in the comments from a study showing how the surface resistivity of SRF cavities increases the more there is a background field as the cavity transitions into superconducting state.

This is the first video I am aware of that claims to show the flux-pinned levitation of a LK-99 sample. If this is in fact what is happening, then it is a very unique and promising finding of this new materials properties and potential for future study.

If this is real then it is truly ground-breaking

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

@Andercot I think it's possible this isn't actually a dipole field at the point where it is levitating. If there is a local field minimum it could just be strong diamagnetism.

[Patrick Bryant @patrickbryant_]

@Andercot The thermal background of microwave photons at temperatures above a few ~mK would destroy coherence in multi-qubit SC chips. Unless I’m missing something obvious, this is not a use case for RTAPS.