I recently argued that the regulated utility is not likely to enter a “death spiral”, but that the regulated utility business model is indeed under pressure, and the conversation about the future of that business model is a valuable one. One area of pressure on the regulated utility business model is the market for residential …
Should Regulated Utilities Participate in the Residential Solar Market? Read More »
The conversations about the “utility death spiral” to which I alluded in my recent post have included discussion of the potential for “grid defection”. Grid defection is an important phenomenon in any network industry — what if you use scarce resources to build a network that provides value for consumers, and then over time, with …
“Grid Defection” and the Regulated Utility Business Model Read More »
Unless you follow the electricity industry you may not be aware of the past year’s discussion of the impending “utility death spiral”, ably summarized in this Clean Energy Group post: There have been several reports out recently predicting that solar + storage systems will soon reach cost parity with grid-purchased electricity, thus presenting the first …
The “Utility Death Spiral”: The Utility As a Regulatory Creation Read More »
Over the past week it’s been hard to keep up with the news about Uber. Uber’s creative destruction is rapid, and occurring on multiple dimensions in different places. And while the focus right now is on Uber’s disruption in the shared transportation market, I suspect that more disruption will arise in other markets too. Start …
The Political Economy of Uber’s Multi-dimensional Creative Destruction Read More »
A couple of years ago, I was transfixed by the research from Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie highlighted in their TedX video on the future of nuclear power. [youtube=http://youtu.be/AAFWeIp8JT0] A recent IEEE Spectrum article highlights what Dewan and Massie have been up to since then, which is founding a startup called Transatomic Power in …
Building, and Commercializing, a Better Nuclear Reactor Read More »
Ben Powell at Texas Tech has an essay on water scarcity at Huffington Post in which he channels David Zetland: But water shortages in Lubbock and elsewhere are not meteorological phenomena. The shortages are a man-made result of bad economic policy. … Droughts make water scarcer, but by themselves they cannot cause shortages. To have …
The Wall Street Journal recently opined against President Obama’s nominee for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman, Norman Bay, and in the process took a modest swipe at subsidies for wind energy. The context here is Bay’s action while leading FERC’s enforcement division, and in particular his prosecution of electric power market participants who manage to run afoul …
The Spin on Wind, Or, an Example of Bullshit in the Field of Energy Policy Read More »
Jeremy Jacobs and Hannah Northey at Greenwire report “Appeals court throws out FERC’s demand-response order“: A federal appeals court today threw out a high-profile Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order that provided incentives for electricity users to consume less power, a practice dubbed demand response. In a divided ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the …
Crain’s Detroit Business reports: A solar power work group in Michigan is making progress discussing the possibility of expanding the current utility-sponsored solar incentive program …. But the real question is whether DTE and Consumers will voluntarily expand their programs — as environmentalists, manufacturers and solar installers have been asking the state to require for job …
The New York Attorney General (AG) had an op-ed in the New York Times presenting a curious mix of resistance to change, insistence on regulating new things in old way, acknowledgement that web-based businesses create some value and regulators can’t always enforce rules intelligently, and sprinkled now and again with the barely disguised threat that regulators will not …
New York Attorney General Grapples to Regulate New Web-based Businesses in Old Ways Read More »
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