Tag Archives: economic incentives

Why are real-time electricity retail rates no longer important in California?

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The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has been looking at whether and how to apply real-time electricity prices in several utility rate applications. “Real time pricing” involves directly linking the bulk wholesale market price from an exchange such as the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to the hourly retail price paid by customers. Other charges such as for distribution and public purpose programs are added to this cost to reach the full retail rate. In Texas, many retail customers have their rates tied directly or indirectly to the ERCOT system market that operates in a manner similar to CAISO’s. A number of economists have been pushing for this change as a key solution to managing California’s reliability issues. Unfortunately, the moment may have passed where this can have a meaningful impact.

In California, the bulk power market costs are less than 20% of the total residential rate. Even if we throw in the average capacity prices, it only reaches 25%. In addition, California has a few needle peaks a year compared to the much flatter, longer, more frequent near peak loads in the East due to the differences in humidity. The CAISO market can go years without real price deviations that are consequential on bills. For example, PG&E’s system average rate is almost 24 cents per kilowatt-hour (and residential is even higher). Yet, the average price in the CAISO market has remained at 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour since 2001, and the cost of capacity has actually fallen to about 2 cents. Even a sustained period of high prices such as occurred last August will increase the average price by less than a penny–that’s less than 5% of the total rate. The story in 2005 was different, when this concept was first offered with an average rate of 13 cents per kilowatt-hour (and that was after the 4 cent adder from the energy crisis). In other words, the “variable” component just isn’t important enough to make a real difference.

Ahmad Faruqui who has been a long time advocate for dynamic retail pricing wrote in a LinkedIn comment:

“Airlines, hotels, car rentals, movie theaters, sporting events — all use time-varying rates. Even the simple parking meter has a TOU rate embedded in it.”

It’s true that these prices vary with time, and electricity prices are headed that way if not there already. Yet these industries don’t have prices that change instantly with changes in demand and resource availability–the prices are often set months ahead based on expectations of supply and demand, much as traditional electricity TOU rates are set already. Additionally, in all of these industries , the price variations are substantially less than 100%. But for electricity, when the dynamic price changes are important, they can be up to 1,000%. I doubt any of these industries would use pricing variations that large for practical reasons.

Rather than pointing out that this tool is available and some types of these being used elsewhere, we should be asking why the tool isn’t being used? What’s so different about electricity and are we making the right comparisons?

Instead, we might look at a different package to incorporate customer resources and load dynamism based on what has worked so far.

  • First is to have TOU pricing with predictable patterns. California largely already has this in place, and many customer groups have shown how they respond to this signal. In the Statewide Pilot on critical peak period price, the bulk of the load shifting occurred due to the implementation of a base TOU rate, and the CPP effect was relatively smaller.
  • Second, to enable more distributed energy resources (DER) is to have fixed price contracts akin to generation PPAs. Everyone understands the terms of the contracts then instead of the implicit arrangement of net energy metering (NEM) that is very unsatisfactory for everyone now. It also means that we have to get away from the mistaken belief that short-run prices or marginal costs represent “market value” for electricity assets.
  • Third for managing load we should have robust demand management/response programs that target the truly manageable loads, and we should compensate customers based on the full avoided costs created.

Commentary on the “The Road from Serfdom”

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Danielle Allen writes eloquently in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly in the “The Road from Serfdom” about how too many Americans rightfully feel disenfranchised today and many of the reasons why they feel that way. Her description of how we got here is well worth the read. However, she misattributes the roles of economists (and lawyers) and errors in their recent prognostications on how economic progress would unfold.

Allen blames much of the current economic woes on the rise of economists in policymaking. She talks about how economists superseded lawyers in that role, implying that lawyers were somehow better connected to society. The real transformation happened several decades earlier when lawyers took over from the broader set of general citizenry. Just as she identifies how economists (of which I am one) are trained to think in one fashion, lawyers are similarly taught to think in another way that tends to focus on identifying constraints and relying on precedent. Lawyers are also taught that the available solutions require directives through laws and contentious conflict resolution. Lawyers are rarely instructed in how actual institutions work, contrary to Allen’s assertion–lawyers usually learn that as on-the-job training. In fact, it is economists who developed institutional economics that studies the role of such organizations. Economists arrived to propose solutions that could work through incentives and choice and negotiated solutions. So we traded one set of technocrats for another set. Perhaps we have not done well by either set, but we also should not ignore why we chose those professions guide us.

The mistakes that economists made were not as simplistic as Allen describes. She points to a claim that economists did not understand how disruption would impact specific communities and what two decades of disruption would look like in those communities. As contrary examples, I wrote here about how climate change will impact communities, and about how we need to compensate coal mining communities as part of our reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and even the shaky foundations of benefit-cost analysis.  Instead economists did not foresee two important transformations since the 1970s. (Economists made a similar mistake after the fall of the Berlin Wall, failing to acknowledge that markets need well functioning institutions and laws to facilitate beneficial transactions.)  The first was that agglomeration of knowledge industries (technological and financial) would be so geographically intensive and that these industries would accrue so much wealth. The second was that Americans would become so much less mobile, both geographically and socially. There are many social and policy factors that have led to these trends, but these stories are much more complex than Allen describes. No one could have foreseen these unprecedented changes that have shattered the lives of too many people that have remained behind in communities emptied of economic purpose.

That said, identifying the rise of the ideologies of Nobel Prize winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (who were economists) as a key source of our conundrum is accurate. Allen does not discuss the parallel rise of the fantasies of Ayn Rand that fueled the mythologies of Hayek and Friedman. Rand’s work was a surprising path for spreading those ideologies, particularly given how bad her writing was. We now have a core of elites who believe that they somehow are “self made” with no outside help and even overcoming the “parasites” of society. That will be a difficult self image to overcome.

Housing can’t escape economics

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One aspect of the debate over housing policies is whether increased housing supply or some type of demand management will mitigate create a more affordable housing market. Davis is one of the centers of this debate, where strict load growth controls has led to lower income households being closed out of the market. But contrary to assertions by those who want direct interventions, the housing market isn’t immune from economics.

One problem is that critics in Davis of relying on market mechanisms work from the false premise that the housing markets across the region were all in equivalent equilibriums in 2010, immediately after the Great Recession. The fact is that the Davis housing market, due to a combination of its restrictive housing policies and education value premium, had not declined as much in price as other communities in the region. The amount of surplus housing stock that was available in 2010 had a wide variation across many cities. So of course the towns which were hit the hardest in 2008 have typically had higher price appreciation since 2008, no matter what their housing policies have been.

Here’s a few studies that support the proposition that housing supply and demand drive prices:

CPUC proposes radical restructuring of PG&E

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104778251-gettyimages-861000956In PG&E’s safety order institution investigation (OII), outgoing CPUC President Michael Picker (along with senior administrative law judge Peter Allen) has put on the table four dramatic proposals to address governance and incentive issues at the utility. These proposals are:

  1. Separating PG&E into separate gas and electric utilities or selling the gas assets;
  2. Establishing periodic review of PG&E’s Certificate of Convenience and Necessity (CPCN);
  3. Modification or elimination of PG&E Corp.’s holding company structure; and
  4. Linking PG&E’s rate of return or return on equity to safety performance metrics.

The OII originally was opened to investigate PG&E’s management of its natural gas infrastructure, but the series of electricity-sparked wildfires reinfused the OII with a new direction. The proceeding has been a forum for various dramatic proposals on how to handle wildfire-related issues and PG&E’s subsequent bankruptcy filing.

 

Moving beyond the easy stuff: Mandates or pricing carbon?

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Meredith Fowlie at the Energy Institute at Haas posted a thought provoking (for economists) blog on whether economists should continue promoting pricing carbon emissions.

I see, however, that this question should be answered in the context of an evolving regulatory and technological process.

Originally, I argued for a broader role for cap & trade in the 2008 CARB AB32 Scoping Plan on behalf of EDF. Since then, I’ve come to believe that a carbon tax is probably preferable over cap & trade when we turn to economy wide strategies for administrative reasons. (California’s CATP is burdensome and loophole ridden.) That said, one of my prime objections at the time to the Scoping Plan was the high expense of mandated measures, and that it left the most expensive tasks to be solved by “the market” without giving the market the opportunity to gain the more efficient reductions.

Fast forward to today, and we face an interesting situation because the cost of renewables and supporting technologies have plummeted. It is possible that within the next five years solar, wind and storage will be less expensive than new fossil generation. (The rest of the nation is benefiting from California initial, if mismanaged, investment.) That makes the effective carbon price negative in the electricity sector. In this situation, I view RPS mandates as correcting a market failure where short term and long term prices do not and cannot converge due to a combination of capital investment requirements and regulatory interventions. The mandates will accelerate the retirement of fossil generation that is not being retired currently due to mispricing in the market. As it is, many areas of the country are on their way to nearly 100% renewable (or GHG-free) by 2040 or earlier.

But this and other mandates to date have not been consumer-facing. Renewables are filtered through the electric utility. Building and vehicle efficiency standards are imposed only on new products and the price changes get lost in all of the other features. Other measures are focused on industry-specific technologies and practices. The direct costs are all well hidden and consumers generally haven’t yet been asked to change their behavior or substantially change what they buy.

But that all would seem to change if we are to take the next step of gaining the much deeper GHG reductions that are required to achieve the more ambitious goals. Consumers will be asked to get out of their gas-fueled cars and choose either EVs or other transportation alternatives. And even more importantly, the heating, cooling, water heating and cooking in the existing building stock will have to be changed out and electrified. (Even the most optimistic forecasts for biogas supplies are only 40% of current fossil gas use.) Consumers will be presented more directly with the costs for those measures. Will they prefer to be told to take specific actions, to receive subsidies in return for higher taxes, or to be given more choice in return for higher direct energy use prices?

Will Amazon’s HQ2 pay off for New York?

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Even though I have conducted regional economic impact studies, I’m always a bit skeptical when a project is touted as a huge payoff for taxpayer investment. Amazon’s HQ2 is a case in point. New York is claiming a $24 billion net return over 25 years from the $3.6 billion in tax breaks, based on impact analysis done with the REMI economic model. I would be interested in a retrospective analysis on the impact of Amazon’s HQ1 in Seattle. The campus is fairly self contained and it should be fairly straightforward to track the growth of Amazon employment in Seattle since the last 1990s. Clearly, there would be uncertainty about how to attribute regional economic activity to Amazon activity, but we could see bounds on various factors such as jobs and tax revenues. We could then see a comparison against the estimates for New York City.

Reaganomics for fuel economy?

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I chuckled when I saw this article extolling how CAFE fuel economy standards should be replaced with “clean tax cuts.” One proponent said, “If you want more of something, tax it less.”

But apparently, these incentives work only one direction. “It’s very common, historically, for companies to not meet the targets and just pay the fines,” said Josiah Neeley, a senior fellow for the R Street Institute. However, the auto companies were not happy with a proposal to increase the penalty 155%.  Does that mean that the penalty got large enough to incent greater compliance?

Where Should All the Coal Miners Go? – Pacific Standard

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An interesting discussion about the failures and lessons for broad scale retraining programs.

My own thought is that we need to buy out the homes of displaced workers at the higher of either their purchase cost or the assessed value to facilitate moving to a new job location.

Source: Where Should All the Coal Miners Go? – Pacific Standard

How to misconstrue statistics in your favor: an example arguing against SB 32

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statebystatechangeinco2emissionrateThis blog post on Fox & Hounds is an example of how to take statistics of one cause-and-effect relationship and misapply them to another situation. In this case, this graphic above shows how GHG emissions have dropped dramatically in states that used to burn coal to generate electricity, but now rely much more on natural gas. The decline in coal emissions has occurred over the last half-decade due to the fall in gas prices and the increased stringency in air quality regulations. But more importantly, those states had higher emissions that California to start with because they have been laggards in protecting their environments. The chart shows that these states are finally starting to catch up! If anything, this supports adopting SB 32 as a follow on to AB 32!

Yet the blog post misconstrues this situation to argue that it’s the “free market” that somehow is generating these greater reductions, implying that California and Mississippi had started from the same place–which of course if far from the truth. Yes, the market push from natural gas fracking explains some of this, but California was already so far ahead due to its own efforts that it has less room to improve.

Watch for these types of misrepresentations. Understand the initial premises by the authors. Ask hard questions before you accept their conclusions.

Source: There’s a Better Way :: Fox&Hounds

Let’s end being NIGO’d in California

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I was struck by the juxtapose of these two items:

  • AquaMetal is building a new environmentally-friendly battery recycling plant near Sparks, NV. They considered California, but “In California, you put in your permit application, and six months later, someone tells you you filled out line 26 wrong.”
  • “(T)he Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) today awarded 23 state officials across various agencies and departments certificates of completion for the Lean 6-Sigma training program administered by GO-Biz which helps streamline permitting and make state government more business friendly.”

California has many progressive and necessary regulations, but the state does an awful job of administering them. Too often, the bureaucrats are too wrapped up in believing the process is actually important. Instead, they should be thinking about how they can ease the permitting and compliance process so that businesses can focus on achieving everyone’s goals.

A bureaucrat should be filling in the missing blanks rather than waiting for months to kick back an application. A friend noted the all too common “NIGO” response–“not in good order.” Being NIGO’d is not conducive to good business.