Michael Giberson Pat Wood, the former FERC chairman and former Texas PUC chairman, was interviewed recently by The Texas Tribune. Wood is surely one of KP‘s favorite ex-regulators, so of course we’re linking to the interview. Here’s just one bit: Wood: … There is also a lot that can be done, particularly on the energy …
Michael Giberson Steve Mufson at the Washington Post reports: President Obama proposed measures Tuesday to step up oversight of energy markets and boost by tenfold the penalties for market manipulation, in an effort to blunt political pressure over the 20 percent increase in gasoline prices since the beginning of the year. [Links in source.] Not that the administration has …
Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Union of Concerned Scientists released an analysis estimating the MPG equivalence of electric vehicles. The point of the analysis is this: taking as given an objective of greenhouse gas emission reduction, how do electric vehicles compare to internal combustion vehicles in that dimension? To do such an analysis requires comparing …
Michael Giberson Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an essay by Austan Goolsbee in which he advocates reducing the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Even better, he suggests a rule by which the SPR could be managed in a transparent fashion: aim to be able to replace 90 days worth of imports from non-North American …
Reducing the Size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Read More »
Michael Giberson In general, in public policy analysis, you’d like to judge ultimate success or failure of a program by its net results, by actual benefits less the costs involved in achieving those benefits. Admittedly sometimes benefits are hard to measure, but ultimately the point of a policy change is to bring about some improvement …
Measuring Success by How Much You Spent on the Program: A Renewable Energy Example Read More »
Michael Giberson From time to time a promoter of wind power will encourage the U.S. to follow Denmark’s lead and aim for a much higher levels of wind power on the grid. (Recently Denmark’s legislature established a goal of attaining 50 percent of its energy from wind power by 2020.) A working paper by Johannes …
Michael Giberson The Gulf Coast Power Association meetings earlier this week included a debate over the future of resource adequacy within the ERCOT power system. Debate moderator Eric Schubert, BP Energy Company, introduced the issue with a critique of capacity market structures that is heavy on its reliance on Hayek’s knowledge problem. It is a …
Rto Forward Capacity Markets Are Unlikely to Succeed Read More »
Michael Giberson An article by Sarah Kent in the WSJ, “Gulf in oil prices may set up market for a fall,” takes notice of wide gap that has emerged between the current price of oil on the world market and the futures price of oil a few years into the future. A variety of explanations …
Current Oil Prices: Scarcity Rents, Political Unrest, Inflation Hedging, or Speculation Read More »
Michael Giberson A brief mention, for those of you keeping track of Giberson media appearances at home, of a brief appearance in a brief story on natural gas supply issues on last Friday’s Marketplace radio news program. As the story says, natural gas industry expectations were rewritten in the last decade. (But of course you …
Natural Gas “Expectations Were Rewritten in the Last Decade” Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Fracking and energy self-sufficiency is the topic of the week at the Becker-Posner blog. Becker’s contribution provides a stream-of-consciousness overview that is consistent with the past fracking discussions here; it touches on fuel source competition, the quest for self-sufficiency, the environmental impact of fracking, and the likely effects of fuel export regulation. I’m …
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