Yesterday the General Accounting Office released a report on the causes of the wholesale electricity price increases in California August-October 2000. U.S. Representatives Inslee and DeFazio requested the study, which had two objectives: determining whether or not wholesale sellers actually exercised market power to raise price above marginal cost, and determining if the design of …
There’s a lot of good stuff today, including this article by Arnold Kling on the predictive power of Moore’s Law and the future of telephone companies, and this article by Ed Driscoll on the opportunities and roadblocks in the dissemination of wireless networks. A lot of folks, including Virginia Postrel, have thought carefully about the …
Today’s LA Times has an article on a controversy over Medicine Lake, which is in a geothermally active area in northern California. Calpine is looking into constructing some geothermal generation plants, but local Native Americans worry that this use of the lake will sap it of its cleansing properties and traditional spiritual energy. It will …
RAND has released a report on the consequences of increasingly relying on natural gas as the primary fuel for generating electricity. This very good article in the San Jose Mercury News does a nice job of summarizing the risks inherent in such non-diversification, which the report highlights. Hedge, hedge, hedge; it may mean tolerating spending …
What a fantastic start to my day! The BBC reports that three previously unperformed Monty Python sketches will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this fall by Sketch Club. Now if I can just find a good reason to go … although I agree with the article’s author, who calls the troupe’s task in …
Slashdot’s online poll today is hilarious: “I name my pets/children after characters from *Star Wars *Star Trek *Battlestar Galactica *Anime *SF Books *Other SF Movies *What the hell is wrong with you people? *All my children and pets are named CowboyNeal” I had to vote, just to see … thankfully, “What the hell is wrong …
23 online wash trades of $1 billion to influence volumes, a 17 percent decrease in first-quarter net income, an SEC investigation of their trading practices, analyst downgrades of Duke stock. One of these in any week would be bad enough, but this is a pretty overwhelming concatenation of bad news. Investigating these wash trades should …
This three-article series on TechCentralStation (first article second article third article) connects the science behind renewables and technological change in energy to policy issues, much along the lines of my earlier post. And Sallie Baliunas is one of the most insightful and articulate physicists I’ve ever met (and my husband is a physicist, so that’s …
When Napster was active and we were all downloading songs like fiends, recording industry revenues and record sales went up. This Wired story from June reports on a recently released study indicating these results: The Ipsos-Reid study found that 81 percent of music downloaders reported that their CD purchasing either remained the same or increased. …
Arnold Kling suggested that I explore the fuel cell future in more detail. I intend to delve further into the economics of such technological change, but for now, here’s a compilation of several articles on fuel cell research and how close they are to economic viability. Most current analysts predict about 20 years. This October …
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