Doing Stats on Solar Energy

So I've jumped on the online education bandwagon and started taking Delft University Online's "Introduction to Solar Energy". If you ever thought that you were "good" at the physical sciences, but then spent a decade plus in the wilderness, then taking a course like this will likely be a shock to your system and will probably knock your understanding of the world. That was my experience anyway; but whatever, it's pretty cool because you really need nothing more than some basic integral calculus to do it. 

One of the questions posed online provided the table below, stating area of landmass, solar irradiaiton which the country receives (see definition of "sun hours" below) and energy consumption for a set of five countries chosen seemingly arbitrarily. 

Source: edX course on Solar Energy run by Delft University and taught by Arno Smets. 

So my first act as a student was to look up what a "sun hour" actually is: turns out there is such a measure, and that it's equivalent to 1 kWh per meter²; in SI units, 3.6 million Joules per meter ² . My homework assignment--for which the answers are fairly straightforward and completely unsurprising--was to figure out which country needed to cover the greatest proportion of its landmass to photovoltaic cells if it wanted to satisfy all of its electricity needs from solar energy alone. Note that, to answer the question, you can ignore caveats to do with the efficiency of photovoltaics (which seem to always be 15% in the textbooks) or what the conversion factor is for solar irradiation to electricity, or even the conversion from DC to AC. In the shower this morning, the question that came to my mind between shampoo and conditioner was: how does Qatar rank on these scores? 

One (advertorial?) source places the amount which Qatar receives as 1,858 kWh per year as an average, making the daily rate not much more than India's (surprised? I was), and twice that of Britain's (really thought it would be more ...). Of course, Qatar also has a tiny surface area: not much more than about 11,000 km² (or so I estimated). 

As you would expect, Qatar's electricity consumption jumped in tandem with its population in the years from 2006 to 2012; at 18.79 billion kWh (source: Index Mundi). When you plug the numbers in, it's also clear that on the count of "energy consumption per unit of area" (something I kind of made up, I think), Qatar tops all of these countries: 

Country	Energy Consumption per Unit Area
United States	14,237
India	10,503
Brazil	1,926
Spain	19,031
UK	50,938
Qatar	61,494

...and by a mile. FWIW: Qatar, while receiving twice as much solar energy per unit area in comparison to the UK, would need, proportionately, six times as much of its landmass as India converted to photovoltaic cells to satisfy all of its electricity needs from solar energy. 

Just like with the hamour fish, we're consuming far, far too much electricity. 

Hamour | Redux

It's been too long since I've posted here ... and, sadly, this post is going to be fairly quick. (There will be more soon though, I promise; I was recently given a gold mine of statistical data which I plan to dig into). 

ICYMI: yesterday's Peninsula, an English language daily in Qatar, had a front page story on the declining hamour stocks. The piece makes no mention of the amount of hamour catches in tonnage (for that, see my piece here). It does, however, discuss the prices for both wholesale and retail hamour catches. Interestingly, the retail markup for hamour is much lower than it is for fish which are actually much less threatened: wholesale to retail for Kanaad, the local kingfish, is QAR 40 to 70, or 75%; for hamour, this is QAR 80 to 100, or 20%. Clearly, traders are beginning to understand that there are upper limits to how much they can charge for hamour, and are giving in to the fact that it is very much in demand.  

So, like I said, this is kind of a very quick revisit of my earlier post on the hamour dying out ... since I have the 2008 Qatar Labour Force Survey however, it shouldn't be much longer until my next, more data-rich post! 

Population Bursts and the Consumption of Hamour (Better late than never ...)

I'm sure the scores of you who started visiting this blog over the past two weeks started to worry that I might never post again. Fear not. There is a lot to say about Qatari fish stocks, and other things; and so, while I have a lot of pressing things to take care of at the moment--other fish to fry, if you will--I did want to share a few charts I cooked up to elaborate on something I'd mentioned earlier. 

As is well documented, Qatar's dramatic population surge over the past decade or so has been driven largely by the burgeoning growth of inward migration to the country. While the data from the Ministry of Environment (see previous posts) show no major increase in the numbers of fishermen or fishing boats over the last decade, what they do show is a huge rise in the amount of fish caught. 

To give a very crude visualisation of how these two are related, see below: 

The catch per fisherman of fish, overall, rose in tandem with the rapidly expanding expatriate population. 

To put this more simply, we have: 

Amount of fish caught per fisherman in Qatari waters.

What the figures show is more than just the obvious "more people eat more fish", but rather that the amount of fish caught by individual fishermen, on average, shot up at around the same time that the population was growing. Although this does not show statistical correlation, it does demonstrate a fairly intuitive idea: that large numbers of protein-hungry foreigners are moving here and, landing on a fish which tastes a bit like a cod, find it irresistible. One more plot for today can be found below.