September 2009

Walmart Says Iso Power Markets Offer Best Programs for Supporting Demand Response

Michael Giberson From Walmart’s contribution to a complaint against PJM filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday: Demand response initiatives can originate with a utility program, an ISO or RTO program, or by the customer for different reasons. Walmart has been one of the pioneers of demand response in addition to being a …

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Price Gouging and the “Dark Side of Cooperation”

Michael Giberson At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson points out that the human instinct for cooperation has good and bad consequences.  A handful of recent articles in reaction to Frans de Waal’s new book, The Age of Empathy, and other writing on cooperation have treated it as a good thing, as a helpful counterweight to human …

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Will Ethanol Become an Environmentally-friendly Fuel Some Day?

Michael Giberson A Reuters story on an ethanol techology advancement is titled, “UK technology could turn U.S. ethanol industry green.” The essence of the process is a composting bacteria that can take distillers’ grain, a by-product of ethanol production, and extract more ethanol from it.  Because the process works while the distillers’ grain is still …

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Danish Wind Power Report by LER, and Views from the NRDC

Michael Giberson Denmark has a lot of wind power capacity.  On that point, pretty much all observers agree.  Beyond that point, opinions diverge. The Institute for Energy Research, possibly in response to President Obama’s references to Denmark as a renewable energy model, has commissioned a report from Danish think tank CEPOS on the nature of …

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Retail Gasoline Stations Shutting Down to Avoid Price Gouging Complaints

Michael Giberson From Columbia, South Carolina’s The State newspaper, more evidence of the predictable effects of anti-price gouging laws: A day after drivers began a panic-buying run on gas, S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster invoked the state’s price-gouging law with fines up to $1,000 per offense and up to 30 days in jail. Hotlines were …

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Recessions: An Especially Bad Time to Impose Bad Public Policies

Michael Giberson The WSJ‘s Real Time Economics blog surveyed a few economist reactions to the President’s imposition of dramatically higher tariffs on imported tires.  My favorite, and perhaps most appropriate to our times: In 1930, the Republican controlled House of Rep, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, …

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Tyler’s Nyt Article — Important and Well Worth Reading

Lynne Kiesling Mike already anticipated me and beat me to it with his great post surveying the Cochrane and Critical Review reactions to what Alex Tabarrok today calls “Krugman’s theya culpa” in the New York Times magazine. I think all of the commentaries that Mike linked to are well worth reading and considering; not surprisingly, …

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The Wisdom of Crowds Has No Use for Predicting the Lottery

Michael Giberson English illusionist Derren Brown hosted a live television show last week during which he appeared to have predicted winning lottery numbers.  He subsequently claimed (among other things) that he used the “wisdom of crowds” to generate the prediction. In a follow-up show last night, watched by 3 million people, Brown said he used …

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