Economics

Toby Considine on Retail Electricity Issues

Lynne Kiesling Toby Considine is a must-read on the conceptual issues underlying this challenge: how do we use communications technology and data standards at interfaces to enable decentralized coordination and emergent order in electricity distribution and retail electricity markets? Seriously, he’s been my go-to guy since I met him at the GridWise Architecture Council constitutional …

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Choice and Competition Protect Consumers of Healthcare … and Electricity

Lynne Kiesling Matt Welch does a sharp and thorough textual exegesis of parts of President Obama’s speech to Congress on healthcare (health care?) last night, in his article on the accusations of lying that are flying around Washington these days. Matt’s final paragraph struck me, not just because I think he (and President Obama, in …

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Emergent Orders Are All Around Us, Especially in Cities

Lynne Kiesling Ron Bailey’s Hit & Run post, Ant Hills=Brains=Cities, reminded me of some really important, fundamental ideas that tend to get lost as we natter about financial regulation, health care regulation, climate regulation … Emergent orders abound, and occur at all sorts of different scales — molecular, cellular, all the way to complex social …

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Shane Greenstein on Remote Connectivity

Lynne Kiesling My colleague Shane Greenstein does very interesting work on industrial organization and networks in Internet-related industries. These insights also bubble up when he is reflecting on his personal experience in his recent family holiday travels, as related on his blog. Here he relates what they found on their recent travels to northern Wyoming, …

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Another Reason Why Retail Regulation is Obsolete: Atrocious Incentives

Lynne Kiesling While I am musing on the problems with the traditional regulatory model in electricity, as in my prior renewables feed-in reverse auction post, I am going to pile on (yes, it is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it’s the first day after a long holiday weekend, so cut me some slack, …

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Is a Reverse Auction Feed-in Tariff “Market-Based”?

Lynne Kiesling Proponents say yes, but I’m not convinced. Here’s the story: the California Public Utilities Commission is considering some regulatory innovations to increase the share of renewables in the state’s generation portfolio, including a reverse-auction procurement solicitation for the provision of renewable power: In what might be a world first, the California Public Utilities …

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Unintended Consequences, Hybrid Vehicles Edition

Lynne Kiesling As the demand for hybrid vehicles increases, the consequences of that increased demand flow through to markets for their inputs, some of which are finite natural resources themselves. Increased hybrid vehicle production raises the demand for rare metals, increasing their prices and threatening short-run shortages. Among the rare earths that would be most …

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You Heard It Here First, but Others Are Catching On: Social Media and Electricity Information

Lynne Kiesling Remember back in October 2008 when I wrote about Andy Stanford-Clark and his tweeting house? And in July 2009 when I wrote about the German company Yellow Strom and its applications to enable its customers to use Twitter and Google’s Power Meter to increase their electricity information and manage their consumption? Now, via …

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