Michael Giberson An article on the barriers to combined heat and power plants from Forbes: Utilities that want to can often hit projects with repeated delays. [Neal Elliott of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy] describes the sort of scenarios he’s seen. “Require an interconnection study, takes 60 days, present the study, 60 days …
Combined Heat and Power Plants Killed by Gratuitous Delays Read More »
The conversations about the “utility death spiral” to which I alluded in my recent post have included discussion of the potential for “grid defection”. Grid defection is an important phenomenon in any network industry — what if you use scarce resources to build a network that provides value for consumers, and then over time, with …
“Grid Defection” and the Regulated Utility Business Model Read More »
Michael Giberson The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that low natural gas prices are putting the squeeze on biomass-based energy projects in Minnesota, in some cases including biomass projects supported by direct taxpayer or ratepayer subsidies. One example, an ethanol plant once gained about 20 percent of its heat from a $20 million biomass gasification system. …
Lynne Kiesling Tom Casten, a pioneer of recycled waste energy and combined heat and power technologies, recently received a well-deserved Inspiring Efficiency-Leadership award from the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. For some background on Tom’s outstanding work that aligns economic profit and environmental benefit, this Atlantic article from May 2008 is a good place to start. …
Michael Giberson The New Republic has an excellent article by Bradford Plumer about the current state of the electric power industry and the prospects of the industry achieving what diverse interests expect of it. (Yes, in TNR, who’d a thunk it?) The article highlights the political economy of regulated electric utilities and their immense lobbying …
Private Wires and the Electric Power Industry You Want Read More »
Michael Giberson From the Annual Energy Review by the Energy Information Administration (a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy), a chart showing the sources and uses of electric power: Via Lou Grinzo at the Energy Collective. Click through on the chart to see a larger version (or get the PDF) from EIA. The chart …
Sources and Uses of Electric Power Consumed in the United States Read More »
Michael Giberson Richard Munson’s book From Edison to Enron provides a pretty engaging run through the history of the electric power business in the United States. The title actually understates the scope just a bit on each end, with Munson touching briefly on developments before Thomas Edison gets involved and discussing developments after Enron’s 2001 …
Lynne Kiesling UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter who alerted me that I mis-labeled my graph, and that equilibrium B should be at the intersection of S’ and D’. I may not get to update the graph Monday, my apologies. There’s been an interesting discussion going on this week building off of a Sean Casten post …
Lynne Kiesling Mike’s two recent posts about turning animal waste in to electric power and John Doerr’s focus on methane recovery from animal waste prompt me to mention one of the innovative entrepreneurs in this space: RealEnergy. RealEnergy builds, installs, and manages distributed generation and combined heat and power (CHP) systems, and can do so …
Michael Giberson At Common Tragedies, Rich Sweeney observed that “Pool and spa safety makes it into the energy bill,” but “renewable portfolio standards and increased oil taxes didn’t.” According to the preamble of the proposed “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007,” it is intended (among other things) to “move the United States toward greater …
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