Michael Giberson An article on the barriers to combined heat and power plants from Forbes: Utilities that want to can often hit projects with repeated delays. [Neal Elliott of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy] describes the sort of scenarios he’s seen. “Require an interconnection study, takes 60 days, present the study, 60 days …
Combined Heat and Power Plants Killed by Gratuitous Delays Read More »
Michael Giberson The marginal cost of generation from a wind power generator is essentially zero, which means once the generation is installed you pretty much want to use every bit of wind power generated. A problem, of course, is that wind-based generation is not particularly dispatchable. You don’t tell it when to run, you just …
Wind Power and Real-time Pricing: Mutual Benefits Read More »
Michael Giberson Recently, William Hogan gave a presentation at IDEI and the Toulouse School of Economics titled Electricity Market Design: Coordination, Pricing and Incentives, or, as he more colloquially puts it early in the talk, “Electricity market pricing, and how to think about it.” The 42 minute video is available from the EU Energy Policy …
Electricity Market Pricing and How to Think About It Read More »
Michael Giberson What is the current and future state of regional wholesale electricity markets? FERC wants to know, and so it has assembled a panel of experts to appear at a July 1, 2008, technical conference to be held at the Commission. All interested persons are invited to attend, and there is no registration required. …
Current and Future State of Regional Wholesale Electricity Markets Read More »
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 …
The Importance of Energy Storage for Integrating Renewables Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The Economist has an article this week on the energy efficiency and reliability-enhancing characteristics of intelligent appliances, with the catchy title of “fridges of the world, unite!”. They discuss the GridWise Olympic Peninsula Testbed project in which I participated, although they focus on the frequency control aspect of the project and not on …
Economist on Intelligent Appliances and Energy Efficiency Read More »
Michael Giberson Rich Sweeney, at Common Tragedies, raises the question “Is dynamic pricing green?” Riffing off of Lynne’s article in Smart Grid News and a complementary post here on Knowledge Problem, Rich acknowledges that dynamic pricing for retail power can encourage load shifting away from peaks and may even reduce consumption overall. But, he suggests, …
Will Dynamic Retail Power Prices Help the Environment? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling There are a couple of very interesting recent solar developments that have substantial economic implications. First, the blue sky stuff: courtesy of Slashdot, a team of researchers in the Netherlands have demonstrated avalanche effects in semiconductors that can be used in solar cells (here’s the original article). Avalanche effects mean that instead of …
Lynne Kiesling One of the things I like about publication is that I don’t ever seem to lose that childlike fascination that Steve Martin had in The Jerk when he saw his name in the phone book and declared “I’m somebody!” With that same childlike fascination I am pleased to announce that you can now …
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 …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive