No surprise there: blackout took 7 refineries offline for a few days, there was a big pipeline rupture in Arizona, it’s coming up on Labor Day weekend … Here are some links to articles discussing the gas price spike, from the Los Angeles Times (registration required), CNN/Money, and the Associated Press. I agree with Stephen …
The blackout has raised public interest in distributed generation (DG). DG technologies have gotten more cost effective over the past decade, and many businesses that cannot afford power outages use DG for backup. See, for example, this Time article on net metering, which is allowing your meter to run backwards and thus sell power back …
Paul Phlip at Long Harvest notes an oped in the NYT on the electric grid by Steve Stogratz. Stogratz makes some really important points in his argument, including the fact that we should think about the grid in a more organic and less mechanistic way, and that we should abandon the unrealistic idea about total …
Here’s an article from today’s Tribune on wind power in Illinois. Wind power is too intermittent to be totally reliable in the absence of a better storage technology than we currently possess, but it may take strain off of the grid (especially if it’s a hot, late afternoon wind …). Wind power also receives government …
Now is a propitious time to remind folks of a Tech Central Station article of mine from August 2002 on how market-based retail electricity pricing is good for consumers and good for the environment: One of dynamic pricing’s most enticing long-run benefits is that it induces conservation. If it’s expensive to produce electricity in a …
Here are some analyses of the more technical aspects of power systems: Peter Kaminski on who pays for reliability, Sparkey’s outstanding post at Sgt. Stryker, Steven DenBeste, in a second post to follow up, and Shots Across the Bow. Very helpful detail for the supply and infrastructure sides of the issues.
Any day is a good one when I channel Tyler Cowen, who points us to an article in the Washington Post on decentralized power. This New York Times article from last week about Hen Island points out many of the same strategies for removing yourself from grid reliance. Technological change in generators and in solar …
The retail electricity deregulation oped that Vernon Smith and I wrote on Wednesday is available at the Reason website.
This table from the Energy Information Administration at the DOE indicates some estimates of the cost per mile of constructing different types of power lines: 60 kv, wood pole: $120,000-130,000 230 kv, steel pole, double: $230,000-550,000 230 kv underground: $3,700,000 Yes, that’s 3.7 million for a single high voltage wire, per mile. And that was …
Chris King at eMeter sends me the following information as a follo-up to Vernon’s and my oped today: Re your editorial, the equipment cost hierarchy you presented is debatable. Regarding load control, the expense is higher than implementing advanced metering, since the device cost is about the same (around $50), but installation is much more …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive