Global Crude Hierarchy, Price of Electricity, and African Food Riots.

Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze  
  
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# Global Crude Hierarchy, Price of Electricity, and African Food Riots. 

### Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze 

| | Adam Tooze  
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**Asger Jorn, Untitled**

**Matching oil type, supplier and buyer.**

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**Why does gas set the price of electricity - and is there an alternative? Very useful this by Simon Evans**

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> In liberalised economies, electricity is bought and sold via market trading. The market uses a system called "marginal pricing" to match buyers with enough supply to meet their demand. (The same system is used in most commodity markets, including for oil, gas or food products.) All of the power plants that are available to generate make "bids" to sell electricity at a particular price. The bids are arranged in a "merit order stack", from the cheapest to the most expensive, shown in the illustrative schematic below. This means that the price of gas sets the price of electricity, whenever gas plants are at the margin. In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.

Source: Carbon Brief

**Drones like bicycles - on the economics of manufacturing in Iran (some brilliance from Esfandyar Batmanghelidj)**

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> An Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone is a simple weapon. The delta wings, which span 2.5 meters, are made of fiberglass and end in two fixed vertical stabilizers. The rear control fins are operated by simple servos. The drone carries an autopilot system, a global positioning receiver, and a data module. Propulsion is provided by a basic air-cooled four piston motor, made of cast aluminum, producing 50 horsepower to drive a pusher propeller. While built to aviation specifications, the motor is not unlike that found on a small motorcycle. The drone can fly at a speed of 185 kilometers per hour while carrying a 40-kilogram warhead over a distance of 2,000 kilometers. 
> 
> This simple weapon has thrown the global economy into disarray. Dozens of articles cite the cost of the drones as somewhere in the $20,000 to $50,000 range--a mere fraction of the cost of interceptor missiles, whose price tag can reach up to $3 million. The price juxtaposition is getting a lot of attention, as an evocative illustration of fast-evolving contemporary warfare. But is the comparison accurate? Most of the estimates of the cost of the Shahed-136 are based on analysis of the Russian variants and none of the public estimates appear to be derived from an actual breakdown of the components of an Iranian-made drone. The real costs of Iranian drones could be dramatically cheaper than assumed--the cost asymmetry more extreme. 
> 
> I asked an academic in Tehran with knowledge of Iran's defense industry whether he had ever come across an estimate for the production cost of a Shahed-136. He asked around. The number he came back with was IRR 6 billion, or around $4,000 at the current main exchange rate.

Source: Phenomenal World

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Source: Julia Berazneva , David R. Lee

**Asger JornUntitled **

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**Mega-detention centers**

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**Asger Jorn | La vache courante (1961) | MutualArt**

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