Michael Giberson With Exxon Mobil reporting $10.65 billion profits for the quarter, expect (1) news reports on the billions of dollars in profits the company is raking in even as consumers are faced with $4/gallon gasoline, followed by (2) outraged political commentary about how Exxon is profiting from consumer misery. Mark Perry, blogging at Carpe …
Mark Perry: Gasoline Taxes Vs. Exxon Profit, Per Gallon Read More »
Michael Giberson At the Freakonomics blog, guest Charles Fishman explains “Why water will never be the next oil.” A sample: If you leave aside the somewhat silly world of bottled water, there has been almost no innovation in the industry of water for decades. A water facility today uses the exact same technology it did in 1973. In what …
A Wal-mart Long-haul Truck Has More Intelligence in It Than a Typical Water System Read More »
Michael Giberson Casually scanning a solar resource map wouldn’t naturally lead you to think that New Jersey would be a good candidate for solar power, but state government policies have resulted in it leaping into second place in PV installations (after California) in 2010. More PV was installed in New Jersey last year than in …
Michael Giberson The ERCOT independent market monitor (IMM) has released its report on the February 2, 2011 rolling blackouts. Excerpts from the report introduction are below, but let’s get to the meat of the matter. The IMM was asked (1) whether there was any evidence that market participants tried to manipulate the market for financial …
Independent Monitor Finds No Market Abuse During Ercot Rolling Blackouts on February 2 Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today the Energy Information Administration released the 2011 Annual Energy Outlook (link is to executive summary). This year’s outlook explores scenarios that include updated forecasts of shale gas production, which have changed considerably since last year’s outlook, as KP readers know due to Mike’s excellent analyses. Another aspect of the analysis that will …
Lynne Kiesling It shouldn’t surprise you to find, given my recent working paper on Adam Smith, sympathy, and mirror neurons that I am an avid reader of neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer. His post today riffs off of President Obama’s birth certificate to muse on voter ignorance. In discussing some research on the subject, he observes …
Michael Giberson The Montana-Alberta Tie Line, a transmission project linking Alberta and Western U.S. power markets, has stalled over the resistance of one landowner, who has claimed the proposed line would cross wetlands and native American heritage sites on her land. MATL tried exercising eminent domain last July to take the easement it wants, but …
Michael Giberson A study by Ben Hoen, Ryan Wiser and Peter Cappers of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Mark Thayer at San Diego State University finds that, on average, the sales price of homes with PV systems is boosted enough to cover the homeowner’s own investment in the solar power system. One might, as the Berkeley Labs’ …
Homeowners Recoup Their Investment in PV Systems in California Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a fascinating visualization of data center power use at Boing Boing: Note that over 10% of data center power use is for Facebook, with all of those updates and photos … as noted in the article: The company’s data centers range from from 10,000 square feet to more than 35,000 square feet, …
Michael Giberson An NPR Morning Edition story, “Indie Truckers: Keep Big Brother Out Of My Cab,” reports on a change of attitude at the American Trucking Association toward proposals for mandatory electronic logging of long-haul truck movements. This month, an industry group called the American Trucking Associations, which represents thousands of trucking companies, dropped its …
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