August 2008

Insecure Property Rights May Be Helping to Maximize Current Russian Oil Output…

Michael Giberson …but not in a good way. The Streetwise Professor deploys a little Property Rights Economics 101 lesson as he contrasts the development of petroleum resources in Russia and China: An article on the McClatchy wire states that the Russian oil industry is facing a dire future due to “the practice of reaping quick …

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Boone Pickens – Texas Monthly on the Man Behind the Plan

Michael Giberson Texas Monthly magazine profiles Boone Pickens. Here’s a sample: In addition to the advertising campaign, Boone is also laying out his energy manifesto in his latest memoir, The First Billion Is the Hardest, which Crown is releasing this month. (His first memoir, Boone, was published in 1987.) “The times require a George Patton, …

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Compressed Air Storage is Getting a Fresh Look

Michael Giberson Just as Lynne was suggesting the importance of energy storage… If we had more efficient and distributed energy storage, then we could store wind-generated power near the source when lines are congested, and store it near demand by transmitting it when lines are not congested. Distributed energy storage gets us a one-two punch …

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Wind Power and Transmission Capacity and Storage Are Complements (But They’re Also Kind of Substitutes …)

Lynne Kiesling An article in today’s New York Times describes the difficulty of getting wind power to urban demand centers when transmission lines are congested: The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not. The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived …

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Retail Electric Power in Texas: Growing Pains or Just Pain?

Michael Giberson EnergyBizInsider, Examining Texas: Like everything else in Texas, energy prices are getting big. But is it the cause of deregulation or other factors such as the price of underlying fuels?   This is the question that the Governor’s Competiveness Council took up. … It acknowledges that prices have risen there the last few …

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Little Girl, You Need a License for That Fruit Stand

Lynne Kiesling Here’s my cynical, anti-authoritarian link of the day: the mayor of Clayton, California shut down a fruit stand run by two little girls because it was a commercial enterprise in an area not zoned for commerce. Hilariously, the mayor defends the decision to shut down this tiny lesson in capitalism, preferring to make …

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Welcome Deep Glamour!

Lynne Kiesling Virginia Postrel and Kate Coe have started Deep Glamour, which “explores the magic of glamour in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, and advertising to real estate, politics, and sports.” Today Virginia has an energy-related post, about the visual elegance of wind turbines, and their use in advertising: These images epitomize grace, one …

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Vaclav Smil on the Pickens Plan for Wind Power and Natural Gas Vehicles

Michael Giberson Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Pickens Plan is its cascading simplicity. First, Pickens wants to dot the Great Plains (“the Saudi Arabia of wind power”) with wind turbines to replace all the electricity currently produced by burning natural gas. Second, he wants to use the natural gas freed by wind-powered generation to …

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