Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.
It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad. It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.
Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk.…
Continue ReadingRichard Larrick and Jack Soll have started a nifty website to promote their message that the conventional “miles per gallon (mpg)” metric is actually misleading and counterproductive for climate change and energy policy objectives. In their words:
MPG tricks people’s perceptions. Replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 50 MPG (about 100 gallons per 10,000 miles). MPG obscures the value of removing the most inefficient cars. A 14 to 20 MPG improvement saves twice as much gas as a 33 to 50 MPG improvement.
What to do instead? Rather than measuring distance per volume of fuel, Larrick and Soll recommend measuring volume of fuel per unit of length:…
Continue ReadingOne of the major problems in policy-making is wishful thinking, in particular a tendency to assume that people will act the way the policy-maker wants. (Military and even corporate planners also suffer from this weakness, and it is arguably the principle weakness in socialist economics.) This presumption is particularly evident when issues of morality—real or perceived—are involved, as in the case of many environmental policies.…
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