Knowledge Problem will be taking a two-week holiday, resuming on Sunday 21 September. I am headed to Budapest for a week to participate in the graduate student workshop of the Ronald Coase Institute and to present a paper at the annual conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). After that, a week’s …
My friend Jim Johnston is very knowledgeable about energy markets, and he had a commentary in the Chicago Sun-Times last week on how to improve grid reliability. Thus, we have a new pattern of generation and consumption that overlies the older locally oriented grid structure. It is a prescription for disaster that promises to persist …
The recent blackout in the Northeast and Midwest U.S. and Ontario have brought electricity transmission to the foreground of policy debates. In a new Reason study , Adrian Moore and I explore ways that technological change and innovative contracting practices create potential competition for the grid, or in other words, make the grid contestable. The …
New Reason Study: A Dynamic And Contestable Grid Read More »
Here’s a little grid roundup: a USA Today editorial from last week on the barriers facing transmission upgrades. Here’s one they forgot: the tax treatment of the heavily depreciated asset base means that utilities have little incentive to sell their transmission assets to a more consolidated owner that could internalize a lot of these goofy …
A lovely double entendre … I encourage you all to check out Marginal Revolution, a new blog by George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Some of you may be familiar with Tyler from his research and his posting at The Volokh Conspiracy. Tyler and Alex are incredibly insightful and sure to be …
Okay, let’s review. In the last two weeks of August we had 1. a burst pipeline in Arizona 2. six refineries out of service for up to a week because of the blackout 3. an impending Labor Day holiday So the increase in gasoline prices was the result of price gouging, right? At least that’s …
Yet Another Federal Investigation Of Gasoline Price Spikes Read More »
Where to begin …? With this Contra Costa Times article and this Sacramento Bee article. The political theater that is the California recall election is certain to elicit some very bad policy ideas from candidates, and the prize thus far goes to Cruz Bustamante. On Thursday Bustamante advocated regulating the gasoline industry as a utility. …
Bustamante’s Proposal To Regulate Gasoline As A Utility Read More »
Few environmental policies and response to them are as caricatured as new source review. Earlier this week the EPA finalized the changes to new source review that it proposed in December 2002. Basically, this ruling clarifies what kinds of equipment replacement will and will not trigger new source review, and it allows firms (typically power …
Okay, another one … but at least this one lasted only an hour, and was probably due to a transformer failure in south London, according to this Financial Times article. Not being an engineer, I don’t know if the recent, sustained strains from the heat wave has weakened any part of the transformers on the …
I’ve got to spend the day preparing my fall classes, so I am happy to have a guest post from my knowledgeable friend and colleague Mike Giberson. Mike wrote in response to my claims yesterday that the grid we’ve got is rigid and maladaptive. I was insufficiently clear: the regulatory treatment of transmission has made …
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