September 2003

New Source Review

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Juan non-Volokh has a good set of posts on the economic and political dynamics underlying criticisms of the recent New Source Review changes, which I discussed in this post.

How Cool Are These?

Future Pundit was full of all sorts of interesting news while I was gone, including this post on using bacteria to extract methane from coal (and a sidenote on carbon sequestration), and this post on new organic materials to make cheap solar panels. One remarkable thing to note in his discussion of the efficiency of …

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KP Takes A Holiday

Knowledge Problem will be taking a two-week holiday, resuming on Sunday 21 September. I am headed to Budapest for a week to participate in the graduate student workshop of the Ronald Coase Institute and to present a paper at the annual conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). After that, a week’s …

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New Reason Study: A Dynamic And Contestable Grid

The recent blackout in the Northeast and Midwest U.S. and Ontario have brought electricity transmission to the foreground of policy debates. In a new Reason study , Adrian Moore and I explore ways that technological change and innovative contracting practices create potential competition for the grid, or in other words, make the grid contestable. The …

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More Grid Articles

Here’s a little grid roundup: a USA Today editorial from last week on the barriers facing transmission upgrades. Here’s one they forgot: the tax treatment of the heavily depreciated asset base means that utilities have little incentive to sell their transmission assets to a more consolidated owner that could internalize a lot of these goofy …

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