April 2010

Making the Most of Spain’s Feed-in Tariff for Solar Power

Michael Giberson Bloomberg reports on fraud via Spain’s subsidized feed in tariff rate for solar power: Preliminary evidence shows some solar stations may have run diesel-burning generators and sold the output as solar power, which earns several times more than electricity from fossil fuels, El Mundo said, citing unidentified people from the energy industry. The …

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Will the Cftc Allow the Newly Approved Box Office Futures Exchange to Actually Offer Box Office Futures Contracts?

Michael Giberson As just noted, the CFTC has approved Media Derivatives request to establish Trend Exchange, a box office futures exchange.  At Midas Oracle, Chris Masse reacts to the news by drawing attention to remarks by CFTC commissioners suggesting that it may be difficult for Trend Exchange to gain the subsequent CFTC approvals needed for …

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CFTC Approves Box Office Futures Market

Michael Giberson Today the CFTC approved Media Derivatives Inc.’s request to create a futures exchange based on box office receipts.  The exchange “is primarily focused on the development of a variety of products to benefit the entertainment industry with one if its initially proposed products being designed to help mitigate risk and enhance the successful …

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Technology + Dynamic Pricing Conserves Water Too (duh)

Lynne Kiesling I love this story; it’s like Knowledge Problem + Aguanomics = individual choice, efficiency, conservation, and elegance. Water conservation is a large and growing concern, in large part because our public policy does such an abominable job of creating a framework/market design to send good scarcity signals to diverse individual users, and to …

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Tim Harford Asks About Inclining Block Rates …

Lynne Kiesling … he just doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t know that it’s an established regulatory concept. Recently in his Undercover Economist blog, Tim Harford picked up on an idea floated by another FT columnist: … we need tariff schemes that encourage conservation. One option is “reverse pricing”, a simple framework that would increase the …

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Grid-connected Energy Storage Taking off

Michael Giberson Yesterday’s announcement by General Compression, Inc. and ConocoPhillips that the companies would cooperate in developing compressed air energy storage systems (CAES) in Texas is yet another indication that grid-connected energy storage is beginning to take-off. For more background on CAES see the recent article by Alexis Madrigal in WIRED, “Bottled wind could be …

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