Michael Giberson Much of the smart grid promise (and hype) implicitly suggests that the benefits will be scooped up by high-income consumers. Who else is going to be buying “grid aware” washer-dryer sets with built in wi-fi connectivity integrated into internet-linked home energy managements system? Still, the benefits won’t be limited to big spenders hoping …
Michael Giberson Over the holiday NYTimes.com posted a story by ClimateWire reporter Peter Behr that does a pretty good job of describing the proposed Tres Amigas project (proposing to link the three main electric regions in the U.S. – Eastern, Western, and Texas) and surrounding issues. Among other things, the story provides a good short …
Michael Giberson A study of consumers’ responses to real time pricing, by Hunt Allcott, examines 2003 and 2006 data from the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Energy Smart Pricing Plan. Allcot observes: This is a particularly interesting time to be studying real time pricing. Most US households currently have electricity meters that simply record the total …
Is Real-time Pricing Worth the Trouble for Residential Customers? Read More »
Michael Giberson Over the weekend the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a long story detailing views on outcomes in the restructured Texas retail power market. The newspaper story might be read as a kind of rejoinder to the view Lynne expressed as she announced the availability of the book on the Texas power market that she …
Texas Retail Electric Rates Remain Higher Than Neighboring States Read More »
Michael Giberson The Wall Street Journal summarizes the news that you already know: the U.S. Department of Energy has become one of the biggest financial forces in the clean energy innovations business. The DOE hopes to lend or give out more than $40 billion to businesses working on “clean technology,” everything from electric cars and …
U.S Government Becoming Clean Energy Venture Capitalist Read More »
Michael Giberson Okay, so my title above is a little over dramatic, but the essence of the title remains. Previously, lacking high quality interval data on retail consumption, ERCOT has been allocating charges to retail energy suppliers based on load profiles – not exactly guesses, more like informed guesses. As distribution utilities in the competitive …
Ercot Begins to Settle Accounts Based on Data Rather Than Guesses Read More »
Michael Giberson Both of the Tres Amigas filings at FERC (see background) provide summaries of the anticipated benefits of the proposed interconnection between the Eastern, Western, and ERCOT interconnections. Each of the five kinds of benefits listed below seem plausible to me. While estimating the size of the benefits would require a lot of hard …
The Benefits of the Proposed Tres Amigas Interconnection Read More »
Michael Giberson A paper by Francesco Caselli and Guy Michaels, “Do Oil Windfalls Improve Living Standards? Evidence from Brazil,” takes a closer look at the how the resource curse works its anti-magic. (Ungated version here.) The abstract: We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find …
Digging into the Resource Curse: Research into Oil Revenue and Brazilian Municipalities Read More »
Michael Giberson Today Tres Amigas LLC submitted two filings to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, one seeking assurance from FERC that linking the ERCOT system to the proposed interconnection project would not subject ERCOT to FERC jurisdiction, and the other seeking authority to sell transmission services at negotiated rates. According to the filings, affirmative answers …
More Tres Amigas Interconnection Details Revealed in FERC Filings Read More »
Michael Giberson Ever wonder what a RTO power market design looks like? Here is one view, in the form of the 106-page “Mid Level Description” of the Southwest Power Pool market currently under development. (Note that the link is to a 1.4 MB zip file which contains the “SPP Future Markets Design/Energy and Operating Reserve …
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