“What Do You Do, Sir?”
Lynne Kiesling Katherine Mangu-Ward’s musings on Arnold Schwarzenegger and “flip-flopping” reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
Andy Grove: Energy Resilience, Not Energy Independence
Lynne Kiesling Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, has an interesting article in The American magazine this month entitled “Our Electric Future”. Grove argues that energy independence is a flawed and infeasible objective, particularly in a network of integrated global exchange. He suggests instead that the objective should be energy resilience: What was wrong with …
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Megan Mcardle Live-blogs an Iphone Line
Lynne Kiesling Megan McArdle is in line for a new iPhone at the Apple store at Clarendon, in Arlington, Virginia. My favorite of her economist-y observations: The line’s a little disorderly, but no matter, because in a touching display of spontaneous order, the first people here started a paper list to keep track. Of course, …
Superconductor Electric Cables Move from Lab to Market
Lynne Kiesling Over the past six years here at KP I’ve discussed the development of high-temperature superconductor technologies and their application to electric power systems, and today we have reached a milestone in that development: Power executives, engineers, and the media gathered recently to officially throw the switch at the $60 million Holbrook Superconductor project, …
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Prius Will Have Solar Power
Lynne Kiesling Those Prius engineers at Toyota keep working and working … a third-generation version of the hybrid vehicle is due on the market next year, and they are already working on rooftop solar panels to generate the power to run the car’s air conditioning. See also the the picture available at Engadget. I’d like …
Happy 4th, and the End of Our Lewis & Clark Bike Odyssey
Lynne Kiesling Hi all! I write from St. Charles, Missouri, which was the starting point of the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery expedition in 1804 and is the terminus of our 2008 Corps of Discovery bike odyssey. We drive to Chicago tomorrow. We are a bit behind in updating the L&C Bike Tour blog, …
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KP Vacation: Biking the Lewis & Clark Trail
Lynne Kiesling I’m outta here for a couple of weeks of bicycling! Sunday night we will arrive in Pierre, South Dakota, from whence we bike east along the Missouri River to St. Charles, Missouri. We are biking the first one-third of the Lewis & Clark Trail in reverse, accompanied by their journals and other history-relevant …
$4 Gas is Changing Consumer Behavior
Lynne Kiesling The New York Times has an article today that supports the anecdotal evidence I reported last month: consumers are substituting out of low fuel economy cars and into high fuel economy cars. With gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon, consumers are overwhelming dealerships with demand for the littlest vehicles in the showroom. Mr. …
Can You Spot the Attitude Difference?
Lynne Kiesling Note these items from the Financial Times: 1. Peugeot and Mitshubishi enter an electric car alliance, striving toward plug-in hybrid vehicles. The same article notes that Bosch and Samsung have entered into an alliance to develop better lithium-ion batteries. 2. Ford and GM call on the federal government to support plug-in hybrid development; …
The Importance of Energy Storage for Integrating Renewables
Lynne Kiesling This ars technica article on energy storage provides a concise summary of the challenge of energy storage and the current technology options. Focusing on the power needs of datacenters, the article describes the intermittency problem associated with renewable sources (in normal language, the sun doesn’t necessarily shine and the wind doesn’t necessarily blow …
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