Lynne Kiesling This summer, corn prices are high. Drought, extreme weather, and other factors combine to increase corn prices, and one of those factors is the federal ethanol mandate/renewable fuels requirement implemented over 20 years ago (as an oxygenate requirement) and extended in 2005. Roger Pielke Jr. points to a Purdue research paper that suggests …
Can We Finally Get the Ethanol Mandate Monkey off of Our Backs? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Some arguments and ideas catching my eye this morning: At their Why Nations Fail blog this morning, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point out that central planning predates Marxist ideology historically, and is an instrument that political elites use to control and “extract resources from society”. At the Huffington Post, economist Ben Powell …
Lynne Kiesling Starbucks is having an internal energy efficiency competition among its stores. The goal for each store: reduce energy use by the most during a 30-day period, starting from last Wednesday. 10 stores are involved, and while the article is not specific, it looks like they are all in Washington state. The goal is …
Michael Giberson Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s recently published 2011 Wind Technologies Market Report (pdf) provides a fairly focused look at wind power industry developments. Among the insights: At the same time [as the European debt crisis began creating trouble for some lenders], new banking regulations took hold, driving considerably shorter bank loan tenors (institutional lenders, meanwhile, continued …
Financial Regulations Add Burden to Wind Power Projects Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University have a new Mercatus working paper that is a careful and thoughtful critique of the rationale, the methodology, and the outcomes of federal energy efficiency regulations. Using standard Pigouvian externality theory, most environmental regulations are based on the “market failure” rationale …
Michael Giberson Four-and-a-half years ago I relayed on these pages Xcel’s announcement of its Smart Grid City project. It was exciting stuff, I thought, and I said it “should prove to be a very useful project.” (See also Lynne’s post on a NYT‘s article discussing the project.) It has proven useful, but not entirely in …
Michael Giberson Consumers remain wary of attempts to manipulate energy markets, but it can be hard for consumers to tell when markets are being manipulated. For example, JP Morgan has been accused of manipulating the California ISO power market, but the company denies the accusation. The markets are complicated, the regulatory filings in the complaint …
I want to believe that the level of discourse on matters of importance in our nation’s capital is higher than that exhibited in the National Journal’s energy blog collection of opinions on the case for the Production Tax Credit. I want to, but evidence pulls me toward oblivion.
Michael Giberson The significance of the “rebound effect” remains a matter of some debate. (The rebound effect is the frequently observed tendency for energy efficiency improvements to increase consumer use of the now more efficient good or service). Recently the Institute for Energy Research published Robert Michaels’s survey of rebound effects. In the study, Michaels concluded: Properly …
Michael Giberson One of the federal government’s first oil conservation ideas, initiated during the Ford presidency, was Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulation. Mostly the goal was to reduce U.S. consumption of oil as a way to reduce oil imports, though ancillary environmental benefits were also anticipated. Regulatory analysis of CAFE regulations over the near …
Federal Government is Trying to Fix Your Car-buying Mistakes Read More »
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