Electricity

Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles and the New York Electric Power System

Michael Giberson The New York Independent System Operator – the folks the manage the electric power transmission system in the state – has released a report on the potential effects of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) on New York power systems  operations.  Given the very early stage of technology development – if there are any PHEV’s …

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Technology and Changing the Business Model in the Electricity Industry

Lynne Kiesling Germany’s utility Yellow Strom is a technology leader. They are leading in the introduction of digital technology in the interface between their wires network and the customer’s home; for example they are one of the first partners with Google to roll out Google’s Power Meter, and they are working on an application that …

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Hohm, and Cloud Computing

Lynne Kiesling Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason: The trend of …

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Microsoft’s Hohm Joins the Smart Grid Fray

Lynne Kiesling Microsoft announces its new Hohm service: Called “Hohm” (presumably, a play on the combination of “home and “Ohm”), the product will take advantage of smart grid data on energy use when it’s available. Even when it’s not, however, Hohm will allow users to input their own details and share the results of their …

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Another Waxman-markey Blemish: Reinforcing the Obsolete Utility Business Model

Lynne Kiesling Over the past few days Josh Blonz at Common Tragedies had a couple of posts (here and here) about the permit allocation issues in the Waxman-Markey bill, and yesterday Tim Haab picked up the conversation thread. They are both focusing on the welfare and efficiency implications of the proposal to allocate permits to …

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A New Paper, and Presenting It at Conferences This Week

Lynne Kiesling My co-author David Chassin and I have a new working paper available at SSRN from the GridWise Olympic Peninsula testbed demonstration project: Beneficial Complexity: A Field Experiment in Technology, Institutions, and Institutional Change in the Electric Power Industry This paper presents and analyzes the results of a recent field experiment in which residential …

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Coal in a World of Cheap Natural Gas

Michael Giberson Natural gas has become cheap enough relative to coal that some gas-fired electric generators are able to underbid baseload coal generators.  Market-based switching from coal power to gas has increased demand for gas by three billion cubic feet per day according to a Merrill Lynch analysis cited in the Wall Street Journal today. …

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