Search Results for: retail electricity competition

Permissionless Innovation in Electricity: the Benefits of Experimentation

Last Monday I was scheduled to participate in the Utility Industry of the Future Symposium at the NYU Law School. Risk aversion about getting back for Tuesday classes in the face of a forecast 7″ snowfall in New York kept me from attending (and the snow never materialized, which makes the cost even more bitter!), …

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Cochrane on Aca’s Unravelling: Parallels to Electricity

John Cochrane’s commentary in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, What To Do When Obamacare Unravels, provides a strong and thoughtful analysis of what a free health care market could look like. In his argument he accomplishes two important tasks: he lays out the extent to which the U.S. health care market is not a free …

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Starbucks’ Energy Efficiency Competition

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 …

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Innovative Retail Competition: is It Finally Starting … and in Chicago?

Lynne Kiesling This may be the beginning of what I’ve been arguing for over the past decade plus … today in Smart Grid News, Jesse Berst reports that Constellation Energy has teamed up with Best Buy to enable customers to come into the store, switch their retail provider, and buy home energy management devices (see …

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Electricity Restructuring and the Failure to Quarantine the Monopoly

Lynne Kiesling In 2011, roughly fifteen years after the passage of the first state-level electricity regulation restructuring legislation (in states like California, Pennsylvania, Maine, …), retail competition for residential customers remains anemic in most of the 15 states + DC that have implemented restructuring and allow retail choice. Lots of possible theories exist for such …

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Georgia Electric Consumers Want Competition to Help Protect Against Higher Prices, Just Like They Have for Natural Gas

Michael Giberson From WTVM-9: Latrese Brown, a Cusseta [Georgia] resident, gathered a group of people who believe Sumter EMC is ripping them off. “Not only mine but my entire community light bills are outrageous high, they’re more than our mortgages, more than our rent, more than our car note,” complains Brown. … The citizens of …

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The Revised History of Electric Competition in Lubbock

Michael Giberson At the time of the initial announcement that Lubbock Power & Light would acquire the distribution assets of competing electric utility Xcel within the city, leaving LP&L as a monopolist, I took note of several inconvenient statements about the benefits of competition included in official LP&L history.  (See “The (soon to be revised) …

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Texas Retail Electric Rates Remain Higher Than Neighboring States

Michael Giberson Over the weekend the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a long story detailing views on outcomes in the restructured Texas retail power market.  The newspaper story might be read as a kind of rejoinder to the view Lynne expressed as she announced the availability of the book on the Texas power market that she …

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New Book — Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story

Lynne Kiesling I’m pleased to announce the publication of a book on electricity restructuring in Texas that I co-edited with Andy Kleit. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story is unique among applied regulatory analyses in several ways, most notably that half of the authors are not academics, but are instead the actual policymakers who worked directly …

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