Search Results for: dynamic pricing

The Challenge of Retail Electricity Restructuring: Dynamic Pricing and Enabling Technology

Lynne Kiesling Here’s one reason why I’ve been so incommunicado for the past few weeks: Retail Electricity Deregulation: Prospects and Challenges for Dynamic Pricing and Enabling Technologies, a paper for the new Searle Center Annual Review of Regulation at Northwestern University. Here’s a teaser from the introduction: Optimistic expectations from the 1990s restructuring changes have …

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Don’t Like New Power Lines? How About Using Dynamic Retail Pricing Instead?

Lynne Kiesling Today’s New York Times has an article about a possible new transmission project from northern New York southeast into Orange County (registration required). Here’s the deal: for the past decade there has been increasing anxiety about the ability of the existing high-voltage transmission network to support the increasingly distributed commercial transactions that have …

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Next Restaurant: Pricing and Ticketing Innovation Redux

Lynne Kiesling Last May I wrote about Next, a new restaurant in Chicago from chef Grant Achatz and his business partner Nick Kokonas. In that post I focused on the two innovations in the proposal: selling tickets concert style rather than having a reservation system, and using dynamic pricing for reservations/tickets at different times on …

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More on Dynamic Electric Power Prices for Residential Customers in Illinois

Michael Giberson In the comments on yesterday’s post, “Dynamic electric power prices for residential customers in Illinois,” Matthew Scallet, a Power Smart Pricing program administrator, offers a few more details on the savings by customers: As far as savings are concerned, the average savings for our entire customer base is 13% since the beginning of …

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Dynamic Electric Power Prices for Residential Customers in Illinois

Michael Giberson From the Danville, Illinois Commercial-News, a report of a two-year old dynamic power price program for residential customers of Ameren in Illinois: The program offers customers the ability to track in real time, via the Web, the day-ending regional commodity price of electricity. And as the rate fluctuates, participants can adjust their usage …

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Apple’s New Itunes Pricing and Drm-free Songs: the Results of Competition

Lynne Kiesling Yesterday Apple announced two changes to its iTunes policies: they are introducing price discrimination, and they are removing DRM copy protection from the songs sold through iTunes. Resulting from extensive negotiations between Apple and record companies, these are two long-anticipated and welcome changes, and they are the consequence of competition in two different …

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Will Dynamic Retail Power Prices Help the Environment?

Michael Giberson Rich Sweeney, at Common Tragedies, raises the question “Is dynamic pricing green?” Riffing off of Lynne’s article in Smart Grid News and a complementary post here on Knowledge Problem, Rich acknowledges that dynamic pricing for retail power can encourage load shifting away from peaks and may even reduce consumption overall. But, he suggests, …

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Pricing and Technology Combine To Help Consumers Manage Energy Costs

Lynne Kiesling Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal had an article by Rebecca Smith that discussed some of the most innovative residential electricity service offerings in the country. She accurately points out how the combination of dynamic pricing and innovative end-user technology can empower residential customers to observe their actual electricity use, control their own behavior, and …

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Residential Real-time Pricing in Illinois in 2007 and Beyond

In April the Illinois legislature passed legislation (and in June Governor Blagojevich signed it) requiring electric utilities to consider and evaluate the use of dynamic pricing to enable customer demand response. This legislation also directed the Illinois Commerce Commission to use benefit-cost analysis to evaluate whether such pricing and metering would lead to net benefits. …

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