I may try to get a version of this published somewhere other than my blog comments
what should I add/answer before letting it go wider Oops! Is OPower the next Solyndra? Non-prices for non-production. I just became aware of a company, what we in DC call a Beltway bandit, Opower, that has grown rapidly since 2007, when many other companies have shrank or folded. Presumably since they were founded in 2007 the "O" is not a paen to Barack Obama, though the company has close ties to him - he visited recently and published an endorsement of them on the White House website,<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-clean-energy-jobs> and they have in turn donated a lot of money to him. Here's what founder Alex Lasky says about Opower in his TED bio: *Opower works with more than 80 utilities on three continents, and serves over 15 million customers. Since its launch in 2008, it has cumulatively saved utility customers more than $200 million and 2 terawatt hours (TWh) of energy -- enough to power a city of more than a quarter million people. It's all through a powerful combination of behavioral science, data analytics and good marketing.* <http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8GL18DDpEkQ/UlLzvnHfsOI/AAAAAAAAKTo/V_wgVgP9AxY/s1600/opower.jpg> It's privately held so it may be harder than with publicly traded companies to figure out how they make money. (For example do utilities purchase Opower services because they are covered by green subsidies or green tax credits, but would not without those programs?) Paradoxically what they mainly do is work for government sponsored utility monopolies, helping them get "customers" to buy less, to "save" energy. One of their two founders even gave a kindergarten level (props and all) TED talk on it. Inverting a title from Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, you could say that their business plan is *NON-Prices and NON-Production*. They seek to create websites and other social media, door hangers, mailings, etc. that encourage people to purchase less electricity - the 15 million customers now receiving Opower reports (how many resources do these mailing use?) supposedly have dropped their power consumption 2.5% (though some people who used much less power than their neighbors have reportedly starting using more after discovering that they were unusually frugal). They claim research shows that prices and budgets don't lead people to conserve power, and neither do guilt trips and environmental preaching. But engaging competitiveness, by telling people their neighbors' have superior talents at saving energy by turning off lights or using fans instead of air conditioning does have bigger impact, according to Opower. It's Ayn Rand's *The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution*, but with new millionaire hipster nerds instead of unwashed Occupy protestors. It's hard to say where there money comes from (green subsidies? green tax credits? contracts with utility monopolies), but you can see where they spend it. Everyone there donates to Democrats and only to Democrats, $35,000 in 54 donations since 2010 (not including spouses' donations). Here's the search from OpenSecrets: Donor Lookup: Opower| OpenSecrets<http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.php?capcode=ng56h&name=&employ=OPower&cand=&state=&zip=&all=n&old=n&c2014=Y&c2010=Y&c2012=Y&sort=N&page=2#.UlLvlBySqL4.blogger>. Obama and other politicians visit their Arlington offices. If one scratched, it might smell a little Solyndra-y or even ENRON-y (the old employer of Paul Krugman, this tribe's fave economist). This campaign donating is clearly an investment. Having President Obama speak at Opower, endorse them, and post his speech on the White House website helps them get venture capital and deal with regulators, maybe even get special treatment from regulators, in the states and countries where they operate. If you search their twitter feed and tweets about them you find some interesting stuff. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is a fan. You also find geeky statist "green" flaks saying things like it is great that Opower is going to help America cut down its energy use to the level of the British, apparently absolutely clueless that the British don't generally have need of air conditioning, and that other countries that use less energy, from France to Cuba, are countries where people are poorer and don't have air conditioning or adequate heating, live in small houses and apartments, or live with many generations packed into one dwelling. Americans are 9th by energy usage per capita, with the top 8<http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=81000> being wealthy countries that are either hot most of the year or that have very cold and long winters Americans and Australians generally live<http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house> in homes over 200 square meters, while many Europeans live in homes under 100 square meters. I also am not sure anyone if this crowd knows that energy prices, from gasoline to electric bills, may be higher in those other countries -- in part because here in the U.S. Opower's political co-religionists populate the local utility rate commissions that both prevent competition in utilities but also set rates low so that (1) power is "affordable" to more consumers, who then buy more electricity, and (2) utilities disinvest, deferring maintenance and upgrades (for example in Washington, DC, and its suburbs, where every major storm knocks out power for tens of thousands of people, who get their power from overhead power lines running between limbs of century old trees). By encouraging consumers to use less power, instead of to demand cheaper power, new power sources, or even renewable power sources, Opower incentivizes and fossilizes the status quo, with dirty power and decaying infrastructure. One wonders if a future look at OpenSecrets will show lots of donations from founders Alex Lasky, Dan Yates, and their employees, to Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who created a fake shell company to take green subsidies and build no actual green technology products, while obtaining fraudulent US Visas for any Chinese investors in his ventures. http://insomniaclibertarian.blogspot.com/2013/10/oops-is-opower-next-solyndra-non-prices.html -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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