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Oct 11
Love4

Phony Avoided Cost Models in a Free-Agent Market

By Energy Rant No Comments
The last two posts, Nuclear Power over the White Rabbit and the Clean Power Plan Corpse, demonstrated the fruits of an undiversified baseload fleet of power generation. Electricity prices, which were so low during most of my career that few cared about them, are soaring as natural gas - the basket in which all eggs lie - has become a global fuel. I predicted this as recently as 2017; Reverse Diversification Coming to a Utility Near You. Solar, wind, and storage will never compete with thermal baseload power generation in our lifetimes. I’m covering three things in this post due…
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Dec 07
Love0
Rabbit Holes and Electric Rates

Rabbit Holes and Electric Rates

By Energy Rant No Comments
Last week as I began writing the second DRIPE post, I started down an electric-utility-pricing rabbit hole. I pulled back and saved it for this week – rabbit hole, botfly larvae, and all. Now is a good time to play a card dealt to me a few weeks ago. An article in the Ohio Capital Journal described the latest efficiency bill that unanimously passed a House committee and included a precious quote from the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel: “The free market can create the efficiency effects of the legislation, without handing over millions to utility companies along the way.” Wrong, for…
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Jun 10
Love0

Energy Policy – Stay in Your Lane, Bro

By Energy Rant One Comment
Ohio lawmakers are again at the beck and call of deregulated power producing titans as they pass a nuclear and coal plant bailout at the expense of energy efficiency. They also dumped mandates for renewable resources. Almost simultaneously, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) published this brand new report, which compares levelized cost of electricity from existing nuclear plants to that of new wind and solar generation, transmission, and required backup resources. It may explain why Ohio lawmakers did what they did. The word “may” is used because I am firmly convinced the political class is mostly clueless regarding regulated…
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Jun 25
Love0
graphic of bread table

Guest Post: Want to know the value of a free lunch, comrade? Stand in the bread line.

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week’s Energy Rant is courtesy of guest writer, Brian Uchtmann, Evaluation Engineer at Michaels Energy. Energy efficiency programs remind me of a joke about economists; here is my version for evaluators. Feel free to use this joke at your next party. Two energy efficiency program implementers and an evaluator go on a deer hunt. In the distance, they see a magnificent buck. The first implementer aims and fires. The evaluator yells “Missed, way too high!” and jots down a few notes. The second implementer lines up and shoots. The evaluator yells “Missed, way too low!” and adds an entry…
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Jun 04
Love0

From 1985 With Lov(ins) – Prescient Predictions

By Energy Rant No Comments
As I get older, I’m more interested in old stuff, especially how our ancestors lived, the challenges they faced, and the technologies they used. As I mentioned last week, our ancestors needed to be more creative than we are today. They had to use their brains or work tirelessly to serve customers to be successful (some of this is still required today). Today, we simply make an algorithm to grind numbers to optimize processes. Compare the toil and ingenuity required to launch and  build Facebook compared to Boeing, Ford, IBM, McDonald’s or Hilton. The efforts and ingenuity required to build…
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Nov 27
Love0

Connecting on Climate Change

By Energy Rant No Comments
The day before Thanksgiving, news and talk shows were chattering about topics to avoid at the Thanksgiving table. Topics included Trump, Hillary, Russia, Russia, Russia, a lot of U.S. House Representatives and Senators, Hollywood, NFL players, and in-laws, to name a few. I think you could easily add climate change to the list. It would probably be easier, and more socially acceptable, to discuss Charlie Rose’s peccadillos than climate change.There is a middle ground for climate change. It is occupied by 0.8% of the population. To come to solutions for issues like this, each side has to actually believe the…
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Sep 22
Love0

Utilities and Using Less – Making the Abstract Concrete

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Utility Stuff 2 Comments
The utility business is fascinating and bizarre to me, and this can only mean I’m a hapless, pathetically boring person.  But that is what it may look like to the uninformed.  It’s like soccer, baseball, or Indy car racing.  If you don’t like these games/sports, you just don’t get it. First off, from business and investor perspectives, utilities are not growth stocks, and they haven’t been for decades.  Essentially, they are like US treasuries.  I learned this in a 1989 personal finance class.  Geezers invest in utilities for the steady dividend.  Clearly, I wasn’t interested in a paltry 7% yield…
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Aug 20
Love0

Tea Party On, Dudes

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Utility Stuff No Comments
Jeff Erickson of Navigant Consulting presented an interesting paper at last week’s American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Summer Study for Buildings.  The title was, “Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Battle over Energy Efficiency.”  I thought it was just clever (aka bait and switch) advertising, but the presentation featured, almost exclusively, how the free market, small government tea party and the profit-bad, regulation-good occupiers might view energy efficiency. The tea party would favor consumer choice for incandescent light bulbs and gas guzzlers over government regulation of these common, and other uncommon for that matter, consumer goods. …
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Dec 01
Love1

What’s the Game?

By Energy Rant, Renewable Energy One Comment
Hypothetical:  Our company has about 40 employees.  We’re going to split into 4 teams and have a tournament.  What’s the game?  We have cyclists, runners, a guy who thinks he can play golf, a guy who throws hammer but not when I’m around, skiers, people who fish, people who hunt, play cards, Sudoku, video games, Frisbee golf, and play board games.  We’ve played softball games (poorly) when the economy was good. We have people who were born when I was in college.  We have people who were in college before I was in the first grade.  Female, male, burley, squirrelly,…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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