Lynne Kiesling Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really …
Lynne Kiesling You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes …
Lynne Kiesling Rob Bradley has an Econlib essay on Enron, and it’s a good one. He focuses on Enron’s particular form of crony corporatism, its ability to take advantage of regulatory complexity, and the lessons that we should carry forward from the experience: Enron was essentially a political company, not a free-market one. Ken Lay’s creation …
Lynne Kiesling After a long and contentious series of battles over the past three decades, two of the original coal-fired steam turbine power plants in Chicago powered down at the end of August. The Fisk plant and the Crawford plant were the last two coal-fired power plants in operation within a major U.S. city, and …
A Proposal for Fisk Power Plant: Museum of History and Industry Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro …
The Lifx Lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of Things to Electricity Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As a coda to my previous post on wireless induction charging, there’s a Kickstarter out right now for Everpurse, a wireless charging purse for iPhone 4. The battery pack in the purse has to be charged from an AC adapter, but it will charge a phone as long as it has charge.
Lynne Kiesling Since the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla (have you contributed to his museum yet?) we’ve dreamed of wireless transmission of electricity, including wireless charging of devices. Tesla’s magnetic induction experiments gave us proof of concept almost 140 years ago, so where are the wireless chargers? We were promised wireless charging! Jessical Leber at …
Lynne Kiesling I am attending an electricity markets workshop that we are holding here at Northwestern, about which I’ll have more to say later, but for now I wanted to capture a quotation of the day (apologies to Don Boudreaux for using his meme): The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping …
Lynne Kiesling Today in Technology Review, Jonathan Koomey has an interesting analysis of computational energy efficiency. We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law — Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years — but I did not realize that Moore’s Law is also borne out in improvements …
The Internet of Things and Computational Energy Efficiency Read More »
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 …
Innovative Retail Competition: is It Finally Starting … and in Chicago? Read More »
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