Lynne Kiesling The last couple of weeks have been crazy here in KP land, with things I’ll be able to share in a bit. Today I am off to England (YAY!) for a Liberty Fund conference that I helped to organize. The readings are selections from Schumpeter, Coase, and Hayek. Here’s the motivation: lots of …
Lynne Kiesling I’d like to chime in a little bit on the point that Mike just raised about state lawmakers and retail competition. Although there’s plenty of blame to go around with respect to the inertial state of retail competition, I believe the primary cause is the incentives facing state legislators. State regulators operate under …
Michael Giberson A letter sent to FERC commissioners by a couple of high-paid economic consultants starts innocently enough: In light of two recent decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, we write to identify concerns regarding the analysis presented in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”) Staff’s …
Did the Court’s Billion Dollar Result Rely on Invented Analysis by Commission Staff? Read More »
Michael Giberson FERC Chairman Joseph Kelliher reached out to state policy makers in an effort to pass the blame for any failures of competitive retail power markets. As reported by Platts Electric Power Daily, in remarks to the American Bar Association Kelliher said some states have incorrectly blamed what they call lack of competition in …
FERC Chairman: State Lawmakers to Blame for Retail Competition Failures Read More »
Michael Giberson I’m about half way through Richard Bookstaber’s book, A Demon of Our Own Design, subtitled “Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation.” Bookstaber was among the MIT-trained economists lured from academia to Wall Street in the 1980s. If you’ve read about portfolio insurance and the stock market crash of 1987 or …
Lynne Kiesling Conoco Phillips and Tyson Foods are going to announce a new joint venture today. They: … will announce a strategic alliance … to produce and market the next generation of renewable diesel fuel, which will help supplement the traditional petroleum-based diesel fuel supply. The alliance plans to use beef, pork and poultry by-product …
Innovation: Using Animal Fat to Produce Biodiesel Read More »
Michael Giberson In response to a reader’s question, Tyler Cowen declines to offer support for any of the current candidates for president in ’08. Cowen offers these comments instead: As biological creatures we are programmed to respond to faces, voices, names, and identities. We praise them, follow them, condemn them, figure out what side they …
Lynne Kiesling I overstated the case a bit when I said that CFLs are not dimmable, and Ed Reid helpfully pointed out Noli Control dimmable can lighting CFLs in his comment on my previous post about CFLs and policy. See also the the dimmable CFLs page at 1000bulbs.com. I amend my claim thusly: they are …
Lynne Kiesling Jerry Ellig had a commentary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week about retail electricity choice in Virginia. The state’s governor and legislature, ignoring evidence that shows the benefits of retail choice and that customers actually, actively want retail choice, have decided that customers can’t be trusted to make that determination for themselves. They …
Lynne Kiesling At some level all of this incandescent light bulb ban stuff is a bit ludicrous. If you look at the light bulb as an historian of technology, you probably think pretty quickly about the switch from whale oil to kerosene as a lighting fuel source in the mid-19th century. In that case the …
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