Well, Slate got part of it wrong -- the Times story featured an iron ore
mine. Peak load pricing, though it has some merit, has much less than it
appears at first glance. The reporter, Matthew Wald, has a very short
rolodex, mainly featuring NRDC, to his loss.
The peak pricing freaks are a subset of the Amory Lovins crowd, with
techno-fixes substituting for political action.
Gene Coyle
Jim Devine wrote:
> from SLATE magazine (7/17/00):
> > The NYT leads with a trend story about how some utility companies are
> > now trying to use pricing to manage energy demand. The main examples: 1)
> > a power company paying--at a rate considerably lower than the cost of
> > buying electricity on the open market--a coal mine to shut down during a
> > day of high demand, and 2) paying customers a bonus for accepting into
> > their homes thermostats controlled (via the internet) by the utility.
>
> of course, the thermostat would be run using Windows 98, so that it would
> crash at least twice a day...
>
> strictly speaking the above isn't about the "market" as much as about the
> utility's "planning" of our lives.
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
