November 2011

Cute Boots!

Lynne Kiesling I haven’t written about shoes in a long time (sorry Manolo!), in large part because my aging, athlete feet can’t tolerate cute shoes to the degree that they used to. My shoe wardrobe vascillates among low-heeled boots, Converse sneakers (with my orthotics in them), and sandals with heel straps and orthopedic footbeds. I …

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An Sea Meetings Coda

Lynne Kiesling John Whitehead already mentioned our joint AERE/USAEE session at the SEA meetings last week. It turned out well, a combination of carbon offsets analysis and electricity market design experiments. Rim Baltaduonis from Gettysburg College presented two different, interesting experimental papers, one on designing rules for enabling contracts for carbon sequestration in soil (which …

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Cost Savings and Value Creation Are Different

Lynne Kiesling The cost saving-focused mindset has prevailed in regulated industries for over a century, slowing innovation in the process. In electricity, regulation that bases firms’ profits on cost recovery erects market barriers by recognizing only a business model that involves providing a specified product (110v power to the home) transported over a monopoly network. …

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Happy Thanksgiving

Lynne Kiesling Yesterday the KP Spouse and I drove the 11 hours home from Thanksgiving at his mother’s in Maryland. 11 hours each way (I drove out a week early for the Southern Economic Association meetings) is a small price to pay for avoiding the rudeness, indignity, invasiveness, and civil liberties violations associated with air …

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Is Subsidising Renewable Energy is a Good Way to Wean the World off Fossil Fuels?

Michael Giberson The Economist is hosting an online debate on the motion, “This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.” Matthew Fripp of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University has presented the affirmative case for the motion, Robert Bradley, Jr., of the Institute for …

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Gas Exporting Countries Forum Wants Higher Output and Higher Prices

Michael Giberson The Gas Exporting Countries Forum is meeting in Qatar. From a few news stories I gather they want to boost output and obtain higher prices, and they don’t want to issue quotas or be a cartel. My thought is that, unless they’ve discovered an end-run around basic economic principles, they will be unsuccessful in …

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California Regulators Approve Generous Contract to Multinational Corporation at California Ratepayer Expense

Michael Giberson Discovering that renewable power mandates can be expensive, California-style: “California Approves Solar Contract Despite High Cost“: Ultimately, the commissioners voted for Abengoa’s contract mainly because Abengoa already has spent five years and $70 million to develop Mojave Solar and has gotten all the permits and financing to start construction. They noted that getting …

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Hotelling Takedown

Michael Giberson One of the classics of resource economics is Harold Hotelling’s “The economics of exhaustible resources,” Journal of Political Economy (1931). The article gave us what is now called “Hotelling’s rule,” which links resource prices and extraction rates for resources in finite supply. The article was simple, logical, and pathbreaking. It also, by the …

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