Where's our Andrew Leonard

BEST ECONOMICS BLOGS?

CurrencyTrading.net has published their list of the Top 100 economics blogs. It's a bit odd. The main categories include Greg Mankiw, Tim Worstall, Cafe Hayek, and the Club For Growth. Aside from the Club for Growth, all those sites feature fine economic thinkers, but they're resolute conservatives, ad they bring those assumptions to their economics. Their liberal counterparts like Brad DeLong and the Angry Bear, however, are ghettoized into a "liberals" category, which also includes, inexplicably, The Wall Street Journal blog. And Megan McArdle escapes both the "conservative" and "libertarian" and is just "economic policy." It's all a bit odd. My understanding of the economics profession is that it's much less tilted to the right than the public face of the economics profession, but I've never really gotten a good explanation as to why liberal economists have let their discipline be painted as an adjunct of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Posted by Ezra Klein on February 22, 2008 9:14 AM

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=

2008&base_name=best_economics_blogs#comments

The link for "the solar power industry is pushing back hard..." takes you to the Borenstein study as does the link "study pooh-poohing..." I was hoping to read the push back for its analysis of the Borenstein study.

Northern California has some of the most expensive electricity in the country (about $0.15/kwh) at least where PG&E is the power company. A 10KW solar system thus pays back at $9/day (assuming the equivalent of 6 hours of full sun a day), or about $3200/yr. If the subsidized price is about $20,000, it pays for itself in about a decade (compared to investing the money at 5% interest).

She wanted AZ to become the Persian Gulf of Solar Power. See it also has to do with how much you consume. In Botswana - actually a rich a country by any standard, they probably consume quite a bit. Like AZ where it costs $400/month to AC your house.

(About reviving a state as an alternative energy powerhouse.) Everybody seems to be saying this.

is no solution. it just shifts the problem into the future.

we are certainly going to exhaust all fossil fuels. we are certainly going to rely on re-newables. let's start now, while the process will be relatively painless.

the utility of solar panels on rooftops is nearly economical now. it is possible to run an electric car, and your home, off the roof, right now. the 'nearly' will transform to 'very' in the near future with improved cell and battery technology.

this diffused power production has social benefits as well: no/little line loss, and damage limitation.

anyone who says solar cells on home tops is valueless must initially be assumed to have an income from coal miners.

If a huge solar thermal system does make sense, then hurrah for APS in AZ/NM which has just announced that in collaboration with the Spanish company Solana, it will have exactly such a system online by 2011. ...Providing the solar tax credits remain available.

in part a matter of "doing the right thing" but also as a hedge against future price spikes and service failures that might be anticipated as the energy infrastucture ages and exceeds capacity.

Similarly, solar fuel in Berkeley is a "luxury" but consider the rolling brown outs of a decade ago .. consider true "black outs" of several days duration that some regions experience.

Where I live -- Rockies -- 2 energy sources (electricity and propane) are sensible, but many people have gasoline powered generators "just in case" -- the consequences of being without power during or after a blizzard are just too serious.

Having low maintenance auxilliary sources are a "luxury" that could come in very handy in a normal year and could be lifesaving following a catastrophe.

Also missing in comparing Botswanna to Berkeley is "redundancy" ... that luxury factor, again, and yet ... when you consider the billions in overdue infrastructure maintenance American systems are operating under and the opportunity to "start from scratch" ... those passive low-maintenance "green solutions" make even more sense. The cost of moving the coal to the high-efficiency plant may skyrocket, even if the cost of the coal remains neutral (doubtful as that would be in reality).

Wrt costs ... I noted this week at my local Safeway that my staple square box of frozen spinach is not $1.49 ... it stayed at about $1 for a decade or so until about 8 months ago when I noticed it had bumped $0.20 ... now imagine a freezer delivery truck filled with thousands of these boxes, each now $0.50 more than they were a year ago ... starts to look like "real money" .. who's it going to?

It's not suitable for manufacturing applications (you'll never see a solar powered smelter or 100-ton press) but we don't manufacture anything anymore so that's a moot point. For running your home or office it's perfect, if still a little expensive. Same goes for wind. Large scale implementations are problematic if you don't have thousands of square miles of desert laying around, but as solar cell efficiency increases rooftop installations become a better and better value proposition.

One area that seems to go completely unexplored is the usage of waste heat. Not only do we allow an incredible amount of energy to escape from our appliances, we often pay to evacuate that heat instead of re-using it and use even more energy in the process.

When they talk about alternative energy in Michigan they almost certainly mean geothermal, which they have in abundance and which can be used in a lot of applications where solar and wind just aren't practical.

As for where the extra 50 cents per box of spinach is going, it appears that it's going to Iraq. Milk has skyrocketed around here, up to $7 per gallon in stores where they no longer subsidize it themselves as a loss leader. Food prices are up 12% nationwide. All of this points to less farm subsidies, and since we know the federal budget certainly isn't shrinking and the money has to be going somewhere, the obvious choice is the biggest money pit in the history of the world. But you can feel warm and fuzzy about the fact that some former Iraqi procurement officer has put your 50 cents to good use, and that his kids will be much better off for having attended Swiss schools.