Michael Giberson Over the weekend the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a long story detailing views on outcomes in the restructured Texas retail power market. The newspaper story might be read as a kind of rejoinder to the view Lynne expressed as she announced the availability of the book on the Texas power market that she …
Texas Retail Electric Rates Remain Higher Than Neighboring States Read More »
Michael Giberson The Wall Street Journal summarizes the news that you already know: the U.S. Department of Energy has become one of the biggest financial forces in the clean energy innovations business. The DOE hopes to lend or give out more than $40 billion to businesses working on “clean technology,” everything from electric cars and …
U.S Government Becoming Clean Energy Venture Capitalist Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’m pleased to announce the publication of a book on electricity restructuring in Texas that I co-edited with Andy Kleit. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story is unique among applied regulatory analyses in several ways, most notably that half of the authors are not academics, but are instead the actual policymakers who worked directly …
New Book — Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I love the little bite-sized podcasts from Quick and Dirty Tips, and one of my favorites is Modern Manners Guy. My favorite thus far is his “get out of the way” podcast with its set of examples of being more attentive, thoughtful, and considerate with respect to your physical presence; one of my …
Lynne Kiesling Every year around this time, my inner aesthetic gets restless and dissatisfied with the KP design. So you’ll notice a few changes around here, including a new custom graphic that I made out of a cool piece of clip art I found. I like this new graphic; it symbolizes complexity, decentralized coordination, and …
Lynne Kiesling The East Anglia CRU leaked climate research emails and the Copenhagen climate meeting are reviving old discussions about the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle has much in common with Pascal’s Wager. Two new analyses this week have caught my eye, the first from George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. Somin argues for consistency …
Somin and Lambert on the Responsible Use of the Precautionary Principle Read More »
Michael Giberson Okay, so my title above is a little over dramatic, but the essence of the title remains. Previously, lacking high quality interval data on retail consumption, ERCOT has been allocating charges to retail energy suppliers based on load profiles – not exactly guesses, more like informed guesses. As distribution utilities in the competitive …
Ercot Begins to Settle Accounts Based on Data Rather Than Guesses Read More »
Michael Giberson Bryan Caplan, in How Wise is Repugnance?, questions Leon Kass’s argument that “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom.” (From Kass’s essay, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”) Kass runs through a list of things that he thinks the reader will accept as obviously repugnant (incest, bestiality, mutilating corpses, cannibalism, and so on) and …
Michael Giberson Both of the Tres Amigas filings at FERC (see background) provide summaries of the anticipated benefits of the proposed interconnection between the Eastern, Western, and ERCOT interconnections. Each of the five kinds of benefits listed below seem plausible to me. While estimating the size of the benefits would require a lot of hard …
The Benefits of the Proposed Tres Amigas Interconnection Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Interesting … via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, links to the two parts of Steve Landsburg’s 10-question exam to determine the honors eligibility of Oberlin economics majors for honors. Oberlin always solicits questions from an outside expert, and Landsburg has posted them on his blog, The Big Questions. I also recommend his blog …
Steve Landsburg’s Questions to Oberlin Honors Students Read More »
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