Michael Giberson Colleen Haight examines the past and present of Fair Trade-certified coffee and wonders whether it has a future in “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee,” published at the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The title probably should have been “Problems,” plural, as more than one problem gets explored in the article. I’ve argued in …
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Michael Giberson File it under “Ya think???” A post at Freakonomics by Steve Sexton concludes that California’s solar power subsidies may not be making the best use of the technology. Sexton points out, for example, the 1,923 residential rooftop systems installed in cloudy San Francisco rather than sunnier California locations: If San Francisco’s residential solar …
Lynne Kiesling In 2011, roughly fifteen years after the passage of the first state-level electricity regulation restructuring legislation (in states like California, Pennsylvania, Maine, …), retail competition for residential customers remains anemic in most of the 15 states + DC that have implemented restructuring and allow retail choice. Lots of possible theories exist for such …
Electricity Restructuring and the Failure to Quarantine the Monopoly Read More »
Michael Giberson PERC’s Shawn Regan argues in favor of allowing environmental groups to bid in federal auctions for oil and gas development leases, a way to help ensure that use of federal lands reflects both the value of energy resource exploitation and the value of protecting those lands from development. The theory is that if …
Open Up Bidding for Oil and Gas Leases on Federal Lands Read More »
Michael Giberson Even before the natural gas subcommittee to the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board released it’s “Ninety Day Report” on hydraulic fracking today, anti-fracking groups shifted their spin operations into high gear. On Monday, a letter to President Obama sponsored by 68 groups called on him to “employ any legal means to put a …
Advisory Committee’s Fracking Report Spurs Outpouring of Spin Read More »
Michael Giberson Most of the current 18.4 cents per gallon federal gasoline tax is set to expire at the end of September, and there are some indications that it may become the occasion for the next big political fight in Congress. See Politico and Platts for background. Grover Nordquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, says …
Michael Giberson Gasoline stations are violating price regulations at a higher rate than any other industry under government price guidelines, an Internal Revenue Service survey shows. About 20% of service stations checked were selling gasoline above the legal ceiling price, the agency said. Federal energy chief William Simon told The Milwaukee Journal’s Washington Bureau Thursday …
Lynne Kiesling Too many people are writing and saying too many interesting things to digest on the debt actions in the eurozong and the debt downgrade in the US … and some people are saying some extremely misinformed and silly things too. But I’d like to highlight a few comments I’ve read today and over …
Michael Giberson Will electric power consumers facing smart-grid enabled real time prices have the potential to accidentally destabilize the power grid and cause a blackout? A paper presented at a recent IEEE conference says it is a possibility. The surprising culprit? Too much price elasticity in the market demand function. It is a surprising culprit …
Worried About Too Much Demand Elasticity in Electric Power Markets Read More »
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