Michael Giberson Tom Konrad examines the question, “Will PACE financing damage the mortgage market? PACE is “Property Assessed Clean Energy” financing, a financing mechanism through which cities sell bonds and then loan the proceeds to property owners to improve building energy efficiency. As noted here previously, I’m not opposed to the PACE approach to investments …
Michael Giberson From Michael Hiltzik, in the Los Angeles Times, “The false promise of Hoover Dam.” Hiltzik provides a good summary of the political promises and pretenses that allowed the dam to be built in the first place. He then examines the competing demands for the current and future use of the dam. I liked …
Michael Giberson In Arizona, solar power installation company SolarCity has been told it must be regulated as a public utility if it employs a financing arrangement it has developed, a “solar services agreement,” to sell its services to non-profit entities. Usually SolarCity builds solar power systems and provides financing and ongoing monitoring services, but doesn’t …
When Should a Solar Power Installer Be Treated Like a Regulated Public Utility? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Why is it so difficult, in terms of politics and transaction costs, to define and enforce property rights in fish? If we fail to do so, some important fish species are likely to go extinct due to overfishing, such as the bluefin tuna. Migratory fish like the bluefin pose the biggest policy challenges, …
Overfishing and the Impending Collapse of Fisheries Read More »
Michael Giberson Even before the current oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico it was well understood that drilling offshore sometimes results in spills. The current oil spill in the news has brought the idea of spills to the attention of many, many more people, people who don’t usually think too much about these things. …
Oil Spills, Movie Stars, Robot Unicorns and Regulation Read More »
Michael Giberson Texas did it again, it achieved it’s target for new renewable power generation capacity years ahead of schedule. And so, of course, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is essentially irrelevant to growth in wind power, the Texas RPS is increasingly held up as a success and model …
Michael Giberson At the Freakonomics blog, James McWilliams offers a review of sorts of Robert Bryce’s new book Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. McWilliams reports that the book is “a sustained attack on our irrational infatuation with wind and solar power.” Part of Bryce’s “sustained attack” …
Per Capita Energy Consumption Has Declined in the United States Read More »
Lynne Kiesling On Friday at Environmental Economics, Tim Haab wrote about the implications of New Source Review for innovation in a regulated industry, and how to represent it in the standard Pigouvian model (do go read the whole post, it’s very useful). The basic question is this: does the stifling of innovation that results from …
Electricity Generation, New Source Review, and Waste Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday Google announced that their ever-growing sustainability strategy now includes investing in wind generation. Although they pursue these opportunities through their philanthropic arm, they claim that they are looking for meaningful returns on their investments in addition to their sustainability impact: To reach a clean energy future, we need three things: effective policy, …
Lynne Kiesling I love this story; it’s like Knowledge Problem + Aguanomics = individual choice, efficiency, conservation, and elegance. Water conservation is a large and growing concern, in large part because our public policy does such an abominable job of creating a framework/market design to send good scarcity signals to diverse individual users, and to …
Technology + Dynamic Pricing Conserves Water Too (duh) Read More »
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