Lynne Kiesling I am currently in the Harrisburg Airport, awaiting my flight home after having spent the past day at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Dickinson College has an interesting history; Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, founded the college in 1783 as an educational institution to serve as a …
Using Technology and Prices to Empower Electricity Consumers Read More »
Lynne Kiesling TXU is going private. KKR and other private investors will acquire TXU and take it private. This is fascinating. Note from the press release two important things: the focus on environmental attributes of the deal, and $400 million planned for “demand side management”: Planned Coal Units Reduced from Eleven to Three, Preventing 56 …
Txu Going Private: Private Equity Buys Into Competitive Power Markets Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’m late to the party, but check out this post from Randall Parker at FuturePundit about using nuclear and wind power to meet most of our electricity demand: Most drastically, we could halt all carbon dioxide emissions from electric generation (cutting out a third of US CO2 emissions) by switching to only non-fossil …
Lynne Kiesling I frequently argue that markets provide the most effective institution for coordination of individual economic activity to improve well-being and create growth and prosperity. Market processes aggregate and transmit information among decentralized, distributed agents, enabling them to make decisions in their own individual interest while still (inadvertently) communicating information about their decisions (and …
Lynne Kiesling The Chicago Cubs will buy their power from Constellation New Energy, a competing retailer in Illinois (as well as several other states). Constellation will purchase the power from generators, transmit it to the local distribution network, where they will pay ComEd to distribute it to 1060 W. Addison St. [Note: technically, because of …
Retail Competition in Electric Power: The Chicago Cubs Go Shopping Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Instead of worrying about XM-Sirius satellite radio, should antitrust authorities investigate the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger? Here’s my unsurprising answer (particularly unsurprising to my three very close friends who are antitrust economists): probably not. The core first questions are the same: what are the relevant substitutes, and would consumers be better or worse …
Whole Foods-wild Oats Merger: An Antitrust Concern? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The Wall Street Journal Energy Roundup has a post on new estimates of the supply of “unconventional oil and gas”. Not surprisingly, it’s good news and bad news: there’s lots of potentially recoverable stuff out there, which means that there is indeed potential for rightward shifts of the supply curve, but the Wood …
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about voluntary purchases of carbon offsets and their efficacy. Importantly, this article points out that private options exist for those who want to negate the carbon effects of their behavior. The couple highlighted in the story used Climate Care. Other organizations that provide carbon offset purchase …
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a great new source from the Wall Street Journal: Energy Roundup, an energy economics blog. Excellent! Welcome to the party. HT to Environmental Economics for the link; now let’s persuade Mr. Gongloff that KP should be on his list of “blogs we’re reading” …
Lynne Kiesling This Houston Chronicle article on human eggs highlights how markets can lead to mutually beneficial solutions: As more older moms look for help getting pregnant, younger women have become increasingly willing to part with their eggs. Some do it to help relatives and friends, or from a sense of altruism, but others openly …
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