Lynne Kiesling If you are a wine fan (oenophile if you’re feeling fancy) and you are not reading Dr. Vino regularly, you are missing a real treat. Dr. Vino is a political scientist who, in addition to having a good nose and good taste and a good palate, is an expert on the political economy …
Michael Giberson From Walmart’s contribution to a complaint against PJM filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday: Demand response initiatives can originate with a utility program, an ISO or RTO program, or by the customer for different reasons. Walmart has been one of the pioneers of demand response in addition to being a …
Walmart Says Iso Power Markets Offer Best Programs for Supporting Demand Response Read More »
Michael Giberson At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson points out that the human instinct for cooperation has good and bad consequences. A handful of recent articles in reaction to Frans de Waal’s new book, The Age of Empathy, and other writing on cooperation have treated it as a good thing, as a helpful counterweight to human …
Price Gouging and the “Dark Side of Cooperation” Read More »
Michael Giberson Geoff Styles (“Can Solar Compete?“) observes two reports from MIT’s Technology Review: one from August 2009 that says cost reductions achieved in the solar power industry “have made solar power cheaper than the natural-gas-powered plants used to produce extra electricity to meet demand on hot summer days,” and another from the September/October 2009 …
Solar Makes Financial Sense in Austin, if You Are Subsidized… Read More »
Michael Giberson At Rigzone: Governments should consider their strategic petroleum reserves a part of their arsenal to limit speculation in the oil market, according to a report issued Thursday by Rice University’s James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy. If the policy is to sell SPR oil into the market when prices get “too high” …
Should the Federal Government Use the Spr to Counter Speculators? Read More »
Michael Giberson From a press release by J.D. Power and Associates: Wide fluctuations in electricity prices during the past year have led to a decrease in overall customer satisfaction with residential retail electric providers in Texas, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Texas Residential Retail Electric Provider Customer Satisfaction Study released today. The study, …
Volatile Prices Decrease Consumer Satisfaction with Texas Competitive Retail Suppliers Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I am enjoying my Stockholm visit very much, despite the sticker shock while shopping and dining. The discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting are interesting and thought-provoking, including quite a bit of discussion of the incentive problems, and the moral/ethical problems, of the “Swedish welfare state” model. The Swedish model of health …
Don’t Follow the Swedish Health Care Model; Follow the Swedish Retail Electricity Model Read More »
Michael Giberson From the Wind Power Law Blog in New York, Clifford Rohde takes a break from wind power law to report on his shift to National Grid’s time-of-use rates, a move that required the utility to install a “smart meter.” (He chronicled the first part of this effort in April, shortly after mailing in …
A Customer’s View of National Grid’s Smart Meter Roll out Read More »
Michael Giberson Lon Peters has an article, “The Impact of FERC Orders on the Value of Bidders in PJM,” in the August/September 2009 edition of the Electricity Journal that tries to assess the effects of regulatory actions on the market value of publicly traded companies participating in the PJM wholesale power market. The analytical approach …
Peters: The Impact of Ferc Orders on the Value of Bidders in Pjm Read More »
Michael Giberson Feed-in tariffs waste resources and make it harder to meet Europe’s renewable energy goals according to a guest post by Omar Abbosh on the Financial Times Energysource blog, at least in the absence of a single, integrated electric power market in Europe. Abbosh, a managing director at Accenture, notes that generous feed-in tariffs …
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