My Christmas toy is a Kill A Watt, a cool little goober that you plug into an outlet to see how much electricity something uses. Today’s calculation: the desktop computer, despite being off, is responsible for about 2 percent of my average household electricity consumption. Die, vampire! With my power strip that has an off …
Continue reading ‘What I Learned Before the Sun Came Up This Morning’ »
I remain amazed at this graph from EIA: Consumption for the third week of December (the most recent available) jumped over the previous week, but it’s still 6 percent below the same week a year ago. Look at the right-hand tail on that graph! The price, meanwhile, is $1.44 per gallon below last year at …
I’ve never lived through deflation, and don’t much understand its implications, so I’m reading Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression. That got me wondering about the current numbers, which the St. Louis FRED site (“Better than Boing Boing!”) helpfully graphs for us: Blue includes energy, red is without. Click through to see it bigger.
We look up data and muse:
New Mexico State regulators approve expansion of rooftop solar incentives: New Mexico regulators Tuesday approved a major expansion of the state’s solar energy program, including provisions for solar installations on Albuquerque businesses. “We’re going to see a flowering of solar in this state,” said Jason Marks, a member of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Solar Power Edition’ »
Troy Simpson, the Journal video guy, has been doing a series with our energy conservation guru, Al Zelicoff. He just put together a nice “channel” collecting them all:
In my quest for intuitive ways of understanding the relative costs of various forms of energy, kudos to the Financial Times for this graphic (and also a good article to go with it): Hat tip Gernot at Env-Econ.
Nothing like a good ol’ economic collapse to get us on the using-less-energy bandwagon. Total energy consumption in the US is down 1.7 percent for the first 9 months of 2008, compared to the same period a year ago, according to EIA.
A couple of months ago in this space, a commenter responded to a post about economists favoring a carbon tax as a response to climate change by asking whether said economists were “liberal and socialistic”. The question is perhaps best answered by reference to former advisors to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan who favor …
Via Dessler and Revkin, an interesting interview with economist Gary Yohe that gets to the heart of the puzzle about gasoline consumption this year. Gas prices soared over the summer, but consumption dropped only a bit (on the order of 3-5 percent year-over-year). The question posed by critics of a carbon tax as a greenhouse …
Continue reading ‘Elasticities in the Short and Long Term’ »