Lynne Kiesling
The New York Times has an : consumers are substituting out of low fuel economy cars and into high fuel economy cars.
With gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon, consumers are overwhelming dealerships with demand for the littlest vehicles in the showroom.
Mr. Libby said that the tiny Honda Fit is on a dealer’s lot an […]
Michael Giberson
Arnold Kling has :
One of the issues that [Russ Robert’s didactic novel, The Price of Everything] raises–the very first one, in fact–is the morality of raising prices when something becomes scarce, such as flashlights after a weather disaster. Russ makes the standard case for allowing the price to ration the scarce resource, but I […]
Lynne Kiesling
1. Peugeot and Mitshubishi enter an electric car alliance, striving toward plug-in hybrid vehicles. The same article notes that Bosch and Samsung have entered into an alliance to develop better lithium-ion batteries.
2. ; from a speech at a Google/Brookings plug-in hybrid conference last week:
Ford Motor has joined General Motors in calling for direct US […]
Lynne Kiesling
Toyota seems to be taking what I think of as a portfolio approach to our vehicular future, as described in :
The company’s ambitious “low-carbon” agenda includes cranking out 1 million hybrids a year and eventually offering hybrid versions of every model it sells. In the short-term, Toyota says it will produce more fuel efficient […]
Lynne Kiesling
There has been much discussion in free market circles about market-based solutions to global warming that minimize the threat that big government poses to property rights. But less attention has been paid to the threat that greenhouse gas emitters themselves might pose to private property. This is the issue that Jonathan Adler, Professor of […]
Lynne Kiesling
The Economist has an in which I participated, although they focus on the frequency control aspect of the project and not on the price-responsive capabilities of the devices.
The most advanced project is the brainchild of the American Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Last year it completed the first residential trial […]
Lynne Kiesling
Check out this cool Financial Times article on Dutch use of operations research to optimize their train network and timetable.
Imagine trying to create a system detailing the precise movements of 5,500 daily train services, thousands of pieces of rolling stock and all the personnel needed to run a railway network (a typical day on […]
Lynne Kiesling
There are a couple of very interesting recent solar developments that have substantial economic implications. First, the blue sky stuff: courtesy of ). Avalanche effects mean that instead of having a 1:1 relationship between a photon and an electron, in which 1 photon releases 1 electron, it’s physically possible in these nano-scale semiconducting materials […]
