My Favorite Question on My Electric Power Industry Final Exam
What is unusual about the retail electric power market in Lubbock? Is this regard is Lubbock a harbinger of the industry’s future or a relic of the industry’s past? Why?
Economics
Some Smart Grid Consumer Value Propositions
Lynne Kiesling Katharine Hamilton, President of the GridWise Alliance, wrote a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes some of the consumer-facing benefits of smart grid technology: I would ask consumers this question: Do you want to adjust your energy usage based on your monthly bill, then wait until the next …
Resilience, Sustainability, and Loosely-coupled Systems
Lynne Kiesling The NIST smart grid interoperability roadmap workshop I attended last week has gotten me thinking about the similarities between system architecture (as the computer systems folks call it) and institutional design (as we political economy social scientists call it). Of course there’s quite a bit of similarity, as the work of the GridWise …
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A Good NYT Smart Grid Article
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a very thoughtful and well-done smart grid article from the New York Times. It focuses on two different cases: the residential real-time pricing product available to ComEd customers in northern Illinois, and the Xcel Energy smart grid project in Boulder. I heartily encourage you to read the whole thing; it’s one of …
More on Carbon Offsets
Lynne Kiesling Dwyer Gunn’s post on carbon offsets at the Freakonomics blog provides a good overview of the issues involved in carbon offsets: The offset credits are a popular component of most cap-and-trade proposals because they have the potential to lessen the economic costs of the programs. The cost of upgrading to environmentally friendly practices …
Smart Grid Policy Heats Up
Lynne Kiesling Smart grid policy and activity continue to heat up … I will be attending the NIST-EPRI Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Interim Roadmap Workshop Tuesday and Wednesday in DC, and will be co-chair of a track of sessions on business and policy. The focus of the meeting is “high-level principles” for developing smart grid …
Pirates Paying for Music
Michael Giberson Freakonomics links to a post at Gizmodo which cites a recent study out of Norway that says people who download free music are 10x more likely to pay for music than people who don’t. Gizmodo is relying on Google translations from the Norwegian, which can be a little rough around the betalingsvilje, if …
NYT Article on Shai Agassi
Lynne Kiesling Here’s an interesting New York Times article profiling Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur behind Better Place. Better Place is fascinating and worthy of our attention because it has the potential to be a complete game-changer in transportation by making battery replacement in electric vehicles as quick and easy as putting gasoline in your car. …
Oil Shocker: Energy Economist Bids to Get Back on the Front Page
Michael Giberson I don’t know about the rest of you university energy economists, but life in the classroom got a little tougher for me this Spring. Last Fall energy economics was on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every week, nearly every day. Anytime I wandered into class a minute or two early, I …
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Ge-fpl Smart Grid Investments in Florida
Lynne Kiesling GE and Silver Springs Network will work with FPL to implement smart grid investments for 1 million Miami customers (here’s GE’s press release). This is an exciting and promising investment, and its open architecture holds a lot of promise for the development of customer-facing applications. GE and Silver Springs have great technology. So …