Monthly Archives: September 2018

Why the CPUC has it wrong on the PCIA

Leave a reply

Nick Chaset is the CEO of East Bay Community Energy which is a community choice aggregator (CCA) that serves Alameda County. He also was Commission President Michael Picker’s chief advisor until last year when he left for EBCE. He explains in this article how two proposed decisions that the CPUC is considering are fundamentally wrong and will shift cost onto CCA customers. (I testified on behalf of CalCCA in this proceeding. I’ll have more on this before the Commission’s scheduled vote October 11.)

Figure 1 – CPUC’s Proposed Resource Adequacy Value vs. True Market Values

image3_irdjgcc

Figure 2 – GHG Premium Value Missing from CPUC Proposed Decision

image1_pg37r4r

Figure 3 – Falling Utility Rates as Customers Depart Filed in Their ERRA Rate Applications

image2_ebxv9kg

 

MIT tries to resurrect nuclear power

4 Replies

6e0c32214e80ee9f4fbabf2e4ffe6fcd

I received a notice of a new MIT study entitled “The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World” which looks at the technological, regulatory and economic changes required to make nuclear power viable again. A summary states

The findings are that new policy models and cost-cutting technologies would help nuclear play vital role in climate solutions. Progress in reducing carbon emissions requires a broad range of actions to effectively leverage nuclear energy.

However, nothing in the summary reveals the paradigm-shattering innovation that will be required to make nuclear power competitive with a diverse fleet of renewables plus storage that would achieve the same goals. The cost of a solar plant plus storage with today’s technology still costs less than a current technology nuclear plant. That alternative fleet would also provide better reliability by diversifying the generation sources through smaller plants and avoid any radiation contamination risk.

The nuclear industry must clearly demonstrate that it can get past the many hurdles that led to the recent cancellation of two projects in the southeast U.S. Reviving nuclear power will require more than fantasies about what might be.

Dunning gets it wrong again on VCE

Leave a reply

vce_logo_color_white-border

Valley Clean Energy Alliance (VCE) was in the Davis opinion columns this weekend again. First, Bob Dunning wrote another column in the Davis Enterprise that mischaracterizes the switch to VCE from PG&E as “mandated” and implies that local government didn’t trust Davis citizens to make the right choice. Then, David Greenwald wrote a column in the Davis Vanguard on how Dunning had ignored the authorization of the development and formation of VCE and is late to the game.

In both cases, the distinction between the choice to form VCE made by city councils and the Board of Supervisors after substantial study  is not distinguished from the choice that electricity ratepayers now have as to which entity will serve them. Previously, Yolo County ratepapers had no choice as to who should serve them–it took the formation of VCE to create that choice. If Dunning has a problem with that even offering that choice in the first place, then that’s a much more fundamental problem. But he is not being so transparent in his opposition, with is either disingenuous or ignorant.

I wrote the following email to Bob Dunning (I had an earlier letter to the editor already published in the Enterprise, that I also posted on this blog and the Davis Vanguard.)

You complain that somehow you’ve been “mandated” to sign up with Valley Clean Energy Authority. Yet you fail to ask the question “why was I mandated to sign up with PG&E all of those years?” Why does PG&E get a free pass from your scrutiny?

Instead now, you actually have a choice. We trust that you will make the right choice, whereas before you had NO choice. And you are not “mandated” to join VCE. You can act to switch to PG&E if you so choose. What has changed is the starting point of your choice. The default is no longer PG&E—it’s VCE. There’s nothing wrong with changing the default choice, but we have to start with a default since everyone wants to continue to receive electricity. (The other option is like they did with long distance service in the late 1980s with random assignment as the starting point, but that seems too much bother.)

 Send me your answers in your next column.

As to the Vanguard, I posted:

I think your column misses the fundamental point–contrary to everything that Dunning writes, we DO have a choice–it’s just that the starting point (default) isn’t what he wants. He prefers that the big corporations get the favored pole position.

 

Fixing college admissions

6 Replies

103932551-gettyimages-94953697-530x298

Harvard is being sued by a group of Asian-American students for discriminating against them through affirmative action admission standards. The Trump Administration is joining on their side. I have been troubled by the reliance on standardized tests and inflated GPAs as appropriate metrics for college admission. I propose two solutions to both of these problems:

  1. Colleges and universities should create mission statements about what the university wants to accomplish through educating students. These statements should go well beyond just saying “a well-rounded individual who is prepared for a career.” It should state that it wants a set of alumni that positively impact their communities in a number of dimensions (some not easily quantified) in a manner that improves social well being in a manner chosen by the university’s policy makers. This will require developing a consensus among those policy makers (e.g., the Board of Regents), but it will prompt a larger debate about the purpose of a college education that is badly needed right now.
  2. The colleges and universities should then conduct at least two statistical/econometric studies to determine the mix of traits that it wants in its student body to accomplish its objectives:
    • The first one would establish what preparation will lead to the most likely academic success in that college. This would completely eliminate the need for standardized tests. The key is that most colleges have an extensive set of data on the GPAs of their students, the high schools that they went to and their GPAs in high school (along with other academic data). The study (a regression)  would regress the college GPA on the high school GPA weighted by the high school (this adjusts for differences between high schools) plus a specific set of other academic / extracurricular data. This would be socio-economic blind. But most importantly, these results would NOT be the singular admission standard. It would be just a measure of likely academic success that could help identify how to deploy resources for those students once they enroll.
    • The second would evaluate how alumni impact their communities. This would rely on data about alumni on occupations, income, community activities, rate of return to certain communities based on socio-economic status, and community well-being. Alumni characteristics would include incoming socio-economics traits, study major, college GPA, extracurricular activities, and other factors thought to be important. This study (again, likely econometric) would measure the relative impact on community well-being (or other chosen objectives) of admitting students with certain characteristics and likelihood of certain majors and academic performance. For example, it might show admitting a student from Watts with a lower predicted GPA has a bigger community impact than admitting another from Beverly Hills with a higher GPA.
    • The desirable traits found in the second study would be used with the results of the first study to set admission policies in a fairly transparent way. A third study might assess what mix of student body traits is most likely to achieve the mission statement objectives. That could further help make the admission process more transparent.