July 2009

Firstenergy Seeks Switch from Midwest Iso to Pjm

Michael Giberson Platt’s reports: FirstEnergy will switch its Ohio electric transmission assets from the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator to the PJM Interconnection with its other transmission assets, the Akron, Ohio-based company said Friday. “Aligning all of our transmission assets with PJM will provide customers with the benefits of a more fully developed retail choice …

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Refinery Outages Generally Have Small Effects on Gasoline Prices, Gao Says

Michael Giberson A study by the Government Accountability Office has concluded that gasoline refinery outages tend to have small effects on prices.  While large scale weather events like Hurricane Katrina and Rita did result in large prices increases, such events are rare, the study said. In other findings: Typical unplanned refinery outages tended to increase …

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Wind Energy Code of Conduct for New York

Michael Giberson The office of the attorney general of the state of New York announced yesterday that a total of 16 … wait, make that 17 wind power companies have signed onto the state’s new “Wind Industry Ethics Code.” The news release indicates that the main point of the industry “ethics code” is to prohibit …

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Do School Buses Use More Energy Than the Likely Alternatives?

Michael Giberson At Freakonomics, a Q&A with Christopher Steiner, author of $20 a Gallon. Haven’t read the book, but my present question has only to deal with an issue raised in the Freakonomics Q&A: the energy economics of school buses.  Freakonomics asks how higher fuel prices would affect the way children get to school. Steiner …

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Power from the Wind: the View from 1909

Michael Giberson The Financial Times Energy Source blog unearths a recommendation from 100 years ago to try wind power “in view of our diminishing returns of coal and petroleum.”  Practical issues are discussed, storage issues seen as important. Also at Energy Source, “The murky task of curbing speculation.”

Blog Recommendation: Structured Thinking

Lynne Kiesling I would like to bring the blog Structured Thinking to your attention. Structured Thinking captures the ideas of a group of folks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who do a range of energy-related and building-related research. For example, one recent post highlights a topic of great interest to me: behavioral economics and “keeping …

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Wind Power: My Advice to Free Market Critics

Michael Giberson I have a longish guest post, “Windpower: Focusing the Criticism Away from NIMBYism and Aesthetics,” up at Master Resource, Rob Bradley’s free market energy blog.  In general, in the post I offer advice to free-market-oriented critics of wind power, urging them to focus on the distortionary policy problems and to stay away from …

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The Wind Industry Loves to Fret

Michael Giberson “Still, the wind-power industry loves to fret,” writes Keith Johnson at the WSJ‘s Environmental Capital blog, “Now, the worry is about a slowdown in manufacturing which could put thousands of ‘green jobs’ at risk—unless Congress offers even more support to the wind industry in the form of tougher renewable-energy standards.” Of course “fretting” …

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Balancing Swings in Power from Wind Farms on the Bonneville Power Administration Grid

Michael Giberson From the Yakima Herald-Republic, “Ebb and flow of wind power stress NW power grid,” a report of the challenges in keeping the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) transmission grid balanced when power output from wind farms varies quickly: In the space of one hour last month, electricity generated at wind farms in the eastern …

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