Lynne Kiesling Wired provides a wiki for collecting ideas and techniques for automating your home. Even though we do not yet have widespread retail choice in electric power service as residential customers, these ideas can reduce energy bills and reduce overall resource use: Aside from the nerd bragging rights, fully-automated homes can be much more …
Lynne Kiesling Thanks to Market Urbanism for linking to Mike’s “prices change everything” post this morning. I encourage you to check out Market Urbanism!
Lynne Kiesling I’ve written a lot here before about dynamic pricing, and Mike has too. Electricity is one of the most poorly-priced services we consume; only water is priced in a way that communicates even less about its scarcity and about the true costs of providing the service. If we are going to meet the …
Michael Giberson Steven Stoft, at the EU Energy Policy Blog, observes that market driven conservation is a slow process: Conservation is the main way consumers respond to high market prices. When price goes up, consumption comes down–but it takes a while for the full price effect to play out. Market-driven conservation is a slow process–slow …
Conservation of Resources: Prices Change Everything Read More »
Michael Giberson Grant McCracken cries out: “JSTOR, get out of the way!” [T]his stuff is bought and paid for. It is time to release it into the public domain. Surely, there is a university server somewhere that would assume the costs. Google, I am quite sure, would be willing to shoulder the burden. The fact …
Michael Giberson Julio J. Rotemberg has a paper out about emotional reactions to prices and their policy implications. (“Behavioral aspects of price setting, and their policy implications.”) I think he is working on some interesting issues, but he comes up with such lousy “policy implications” at the end of the article that it ruined it …
Price Gouging Laws: Emotions, Economics, and Policy Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As authorized by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced the Bright Tomorrow Lighting competition, the L Prize (here’s the prize website). Cash prizes and other inducements for the development of solid state lighting to replace standard incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. Rather like the Google …
Lynne Kiesling This weekend the KP Spouse told me about a couple of his colleagues, both of whom drive Chevy Avalanches, live in the suburbs, and used to drive to work. One of them has started taking the train and is trying to sell his Avalanche, because he doesn’t want to keep spending what he …
Michael Giberson Today a Washington Post article discusses the most recent oil price forecast from Goldman Sachs analysts Arjun N. Murti and Jeffrey Currie, which have oil prices averaging $141/bbl for the second half of 2008. As usual, it isn’t hard to find an analyst with a contrary view, and the article presents some counter …
Lynne Kiesling Google’s blog has a post describing their new investment in BrightSource Energy and linking to lots of background information on their renewable investments. BrightSource does large-scale solar. This is part of Google’s RE < C initiative, through which they channel their investments with an objective of making renewable energy cheaper than coal-fueled energy. …
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