Lynne Kiesling
OK, this comic hits a leeeetle too close to home!
Archive for August 11th, 2009
Dynamic electric power prices for residential customers in Illinois
August 11, 2009Michael Giberson
From the Danville, Illinois Commercial-News, a report of a two-year old dynamic power price program for residential customers of Ameren in Illinois:
The program offers customers the ability to track in real time, via the Web, the day-ending regional commodity price of electricity. And as the rate fluctuates, participants can adjust their usage to avoid peak rates the following day.
“You don’t have to turn everything off and you don’t have to sit around in the dark,” said Stephanie Folk, a spokeswoman for CNT Energy….
She said it’s more a matter of knowing when the prices are high or are going to go higher, and then saving major chores such as laundry for a less-expensive part of the day.
“Maybe you just turn up the air conditioner a couple of degrees at certain times,” she said.
The reporter suggests that customers “can save nearly 15 percent”, but doesn’t indicate if that is a maximum or mean value.
Probably nothing new in the article for regular KP readers, but in a world in which people think such pricing programs are impossible — politically or practically — the mere existence of a two year old program offers a proof.
The next step is to automate the adjustment processes. For example, if the air conditioner’s thermostat setting was a function of price rather than a fixed number, the power customer could capture savings without needing to check prices nightly. This kind of thing is already possible, but hampered by the current lack of energy data communication standards to allow thermostats to communicate to other household systems, the power meter, and the consumer’s energy retailer.
Lynne could probably name devices that can already do this kind of thing, and describe the current state of progress on data standards, too.
Anniversary: Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
August 11, 2009Lynne Kiesling
I am on a plane all day today, flying to England for a few days of holiday before proceeding to Stockholm for the Mont Pelerin Society annual meeting. My main activity for the flight is to work on my course prep for my new freshman seminar this fall, entitled “Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment”. I have a pretty good idea of the schedule, now I just have to plan each class … which means I’ll be spending most of the flight with Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
2009 is the 250th anniversary of the publication of TOMS, which I count as one of the most influential works in the social science canon. It truly is impossible to think about questions of how individuals live together in civil society without making great use of Smith’s insights in this work. If you haven’t read TOMS yet, now is a good time, particularly in light of what has happened in the past year and the current federal policy debates surrounding climate change legislation and health care legislation. Much of that policy direction does not draw on Smith’s insights in TOMS, to our great detriment.
At The Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer has an outstanding post reflecting on the 250th anniversary of TOMS and the great relevance of Smith’s ideas today. He even excerpts the wonderful “man of system” passage from TOMS, which is even more relevant and urgent to consider today than it was when I wrote these earlier KP posts on the “man of system”.
