Lynne Kiesling You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes …
Lynne Kiesling Rob Bradley has an Econlib essay on Enron, and it’s a good one. He focuses on Enron’s particular form of crony corporatism, its ability to take advantage of regulatory complexity, and the lessons that we should carry forward from the experience: Enron was essentially a political company, not a free-market one. Ken Lay’s creation …
Lynne Kiesling After a long and contentious series of battles over the past three decades, two of the original coal-fired steam turbine power plants in Chicago powered down at the end of August. The Fisk plant and the Crawford plant were the last two coal-fired power plants in operation within a major U.S. city, and …
A Proposal for Fisk Power Plant: Museum of History and Industry Read More »
Michael Giberson As noted here at KP in August, a group of electric power economists (including me) filed an amicus brief on FERC’s demand response pricing rule. At the Master Resource blog, Travis Fisher examines the issue with some detail. Here is a bit: In Order No. 745, FERC reasoned that, “when a demand response …
‘Demand Response’ in Electricity: Economists Vs. FERC on (Over)Pricing Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro …
The Lifx Lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of Things to Electricity Read More »
Michael Giberson On the NYTimes.com Green blog, Matthew Wald reports on “An argument over wind.” The issue is the scheduled-to-expire Production Tax Credit for wind power. As previously mentioned here, former PTC-supporter Exelon Corp. has come out against the PTC extension. It parted ways from the American Wind Energy Association, of which it had long …
Negative Power Prices Due to Wind Power’s Subsidy Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As a coda to my previous post on wireless induction charging, there’s a Kickstarter out right now for Everpurse, a wireless charging purse for iPhone 4. The battery pack in the purse has to be charged from an AC adapter, but it will charge a phone as long as it has charge.
Lynne Kiesling Since the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla (have you contributed to his museum yet?) we’ve dreamed of wireless transmission of electricity, including wireless charging of devices. Tesla’s magnetic induction experiments gave us proof of concept almost 140 years ago, so where are the wireless chargers? We were promised wireless charging! Jessical Leber at …
Michael Giberson From the PR desk: HOUSTON, Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Direct Energy has launched New Leaf Energy, a new Texas brand that offers 100 percent renewable, air-pollution-free energy, 100 percent from Texas wind turbines. New Leaf Energy brings expanded product choice in Texas’ green energy market and a variety of plan options that ease the way for residential customers …
Lynne Kiesling Recently the New York Times ran a Sunday magazine article from Jeff Himmelman profiling some companies in the solar industry in the US. The main thrust of the article is that despite the industry’s technological and economic challenges, it’s starting to look like a better investment: Two factors have hurt the industry’s growth. …
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