76 pages, 16 features & columns, 19 authors, ducks, baseball, virtual reality, 3 cartoons, and a crossword puzzle.
Energy Dept.’s EIA shines light on accusations its numbers are anti-solar.
This storm has been brewing for awhile. The Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, EIA, is supposedly anti-solar. Indeed, it's anti-renewables.
Even though EIA is chartered to be - and has been - consistently unbiased, as the energy policy debates of the day have swirled around. Even though EIA is an agency of the Obama administration, not known to be anti-renewables.
Lighting a lamp in Wichita was a pricey proposition.
Have a five-room house in Wichita, Kansas? In 1923?
A small interconnection with the grid allowed you to take up to four hundred watts at a time. Not a lot of electricity.
You paid your utility a dollar if you used ten kilowatt-hours over the course of a month. That's a dime per kilowatt-hour.
Now that's a little less than what you pay today for a kilowatt-hour in Wichita, about twelve cents. Though a dime was worth a whole lot more back then.
A dime in 1923 was like $1.39 today. So the cost for a Wichita kilowatt-hour in 1923 was effectively $1.39.
Before even utility business model 1.0
The Public Service Commission's chief engineer authored the report. It's:
"an analysis of the theories and principles of electric light and power rates... to devise a rate which will cause each individual consumer to pay in direct proportion to the cost of rendering him his required service."
A filing in a proceeding about utility business models? You might say that.
Except that the author was chief engineer of the Saint Louis Public Service Commission. Say what?
Except that the report was authored on August 25, 1910. A hundred and six years ago!
CPI-Electricity fell 1.3% while overall CPI rose 1%
The Consumer Price Index was published last Thursday for May 2016. Electricity? The CPI for electricity has fallen 1.3 percent over the twelve months ending May.
During the same period, the overall CPI has risen 1 percent. So electricity is significantly less expensive than it was a year ago.
The spread between the overall CPI and the CPI-Electricity is a measure of electricity becoming less expensive. The spread for May was 2.3 percent.
The spread is computed by subtracting the overall CPI, at 1 percent, less the CPI-Electricity, at minus 1.3 percent.
We have our second winner of the PUF Cross-Examination Award. The award goes to media and other statements that are so misleading they compel us to cross-examine.
Readers may recall the first winner. It was a July 5th article of the New York Times. The article, "Piles of Dirty Secrets Behind a Model 'Clean Coal' Project," implied a utility project in Mississippi has driven electric rates to unbearable levels.
Electricity’s Producer Price Index up just 3.7% from August 2004, while overall Consumer Price Index up 9.9%
Late last week, the feds dumped a wealth of August electric price data on our desk. This week, we’re filling you in, on what it all means for utility policy and regulation.
There’s too much to fit in a single column. See yesterday’s column for Consumer Price Index trends in residential electric rates, by region. Here today is another taste. To get the full story, catch all the columns this week.
Foundation story for our industry, with intrigues of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, Morgan and Bell
FERC’s treatment of rate of return for pipelines and electric transmission lines has been in the news recently. This reminded me of the plight of the very high-visibility and controversial rate-of-return and cost-of-capital witness.
This poor expert has the dubious distinction of presenting testimony on a subject in which everyone, in my decades of experience in public utility rate cases, has an opinion.
I am not kidding as I mean everyone.
The electric power industry is not new to the desire to have electric cars added to the grid.
A hundred years ago, legendary automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and equally legendary inventor and electric power industry founder Thomas Edison, two friends who fished and camped together in late life, considered manufacturing electric cars. They even developed a prototype jointly.
Check out this interview with Ford in the New York Times of January 11, 1914: