The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).
A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.
Some of the more important articles in this issue are:
Wind Executive Interview: Wind Energy is Just a Subsidized Experiment
Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources
Australia Finds Out that Wind Energy Doesn’t Really Work
LTE: Wind Project opposed for Many Good Reasons
Bats Save Billions in Pest Control
The Right to Know: Releasing Wind Turbine Bird & Bat Death Data
Are We Considering All the Costs For Wind Projects?…
Continue Reading“Perhaps the most distressing characteristic displayed by the pushers of soft energy was the intellectual poverty of their grand designs, their impatient dismissal of all criticism, their arrogant insistence on the infallible orthodoxy of their normative visions.”
“There is little doubt about the origins and the real message of soft energy dogma: the roots are in the muddled revolts of young Americans in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the goal is a social transformation rather than simply a provision of energy. The latter fact explains the widespread appeal of soft energy sources among zealous would-be reformers of Western ways.”
Vaclav Smil is one of the leading energy scholars of our day. He has, time and again, tried to inject energy reality into energy fantasy. Some of his previous posts at MasterResource (see here) include ‘The Limits of Energy Innovation’: Timeless Insight from Vaclav Smil and the five-part Power Density Primer.…
Continue Reading“The evolution of variable energy pricing is a market outcome and should continue to replace the old fixed demand change and variable energy-rate designs. The power industry is in transition away from regulatory mechanisms toward market mechanisms for setting retail rates.”
The electricity market has undergone a revolution that is still evolving. Large end users’ power purchasing practices must adapt to the way the power market is changing in order to remain competitive in their own markets. An understanding of this market’s development provides insights into the future features of the retail power market and how customers can best respond to the next phases of its development.
Traditionally, a utility’s rates reflected its own fixed and variable costs. The utility’s fixed costs (principal and interest payments on capital, primarily) were recovered in demand charges. …
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