Michael Giberson In an article so absurd that you really ought to read it for yourself, see the story from USA Today: “Economic Growth from Hurricanes Could Outweigh Costs.” It is so incredible that I am almost left speechless. Of course, no one expects a USA Today reporter writing about the weather to have training …
Michael Giberson A news report in the Hungry Horse News (Columbia Falls, MT) captures the some of peculiar flavor of federal power marketing in the Northwest: “The price of electricity mirrors the price of natural gas to a certain degree. With natural gas prices up, electricity prices are also up overall. That puts more money …
Lynne Kiesling An unusual and well-done study makes you think differently about something that you think about day and night. The recent General Accounting Office study entitled Electricity Markets: Customers Could Benefit from Demand Programs, but Challenges Remain did just that when I read it. The GAO report is a very useful summary of the …
Gao’s New Study On Electric Power Demand Response And Retail Choice Read More »
Lynne Kiesling So, I get back to my office about half an hour ago, after the first class session of my Environmental Economics course, to find this Marginal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok on the following question: You can’t take it with you. A private owner of a natural resource, like a forest, therefore, will …
Michael Giberson Take billions of dollars of network assets owned by a number of local for-profit monopolists regulated by both state and federal agencies, turn control (but not ownership) of the assets over to a bigger regional monopoly organized as a non-profit run by an independent board, require that all major decisions must be vetted …
Non-profit Management Of Regulated Network Assets: Recipe For Efficiency? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Many thanks to Andrew Morriss over at The Commons for the link to this Chay and Greenstone working paper on the effects of air quality on housing prices. The typical econometric method for performing such an analysis is called hedonic estimation, where your dependent variable is the house price and your independent variables …
Lynne Kiesling Hey, how often do I get to use an Ultravox song title?!? Here’s a cool Wired magazine article on using computer models to estimate the wind power potential of a particular location. Before the development and refinement of such modeling, those wanting to know how much power potential they have would have to …
Lynne Kiesling There’s a lot going on in world oil markets, as summarized in this Channel News Asia article. China is growing like gangbusters, shifting out demand for oil. Yukos, with a contract to supply them, is under fire from the Russian government (I am suspicious that it’s a case of expropriation on the part …
Lynne Kiesling While we’re linking to PFF posts, I particularly think that more people should consider the ideas that Ray raises in this post on the perils of a naive acceptance of the perfect competition model. The point is the damage done by perfect competition models to the regulatory psyche. There is an unstated supposition …
Lynne Kiesling Reader Robert Schwartz sends a link to a Slashdot thread on alternate fuels. Lots of hydrogen, nuclear, solar discussion. Of the posts I read, though, when people compare the costs of each, no one seemed to correct for/account for the subsidies that different technologies get. For example, there’s lots of folks in there …
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