Vacuum-tube valley

 Silicon valley didn't transition directly from fruit orchards to silicon chips.  Vacuum tubes took center stage for a while.

Here's a California historical landmark on the NE corner of Emerson Street and Channing Avenue in Palo Alto, commemorating the Federal Telegraph Company, founded by radio/electronics pioneer Cyril Frank Elwell (August 20, 1884 – 1963), who graduated from Stanford in 1907.

Texas electricity market design: replace ERCOT experts with political appointees

 The Texas Tribune has the story:

Overhaul of ERCOT board could replace experts with political appointees  By MITCHELL FERMAN

"AUSTIN, Texas -- During February's deadly winter storm, Gov. Greg Abbott and many state lawmakers quickly criticized the Electric Reliability Council of Texas because several members of its large governing board reside outside of Texas.

"Many of the out-of-state board members are experts in the electricity field, but resigned following criticism of the agency's oversight of the state's main power grid during the storm that left millions of Texans without electricity for days in freezing temperatures.

"State lawmakers are now trying to change the way ERCOT is governed by requiring members to live in Texas and giving more board seats to political appointees - changes that experts say may do little to improve the power grid.

"One former board member who resigned after the storm, Peter Cramton, criticized legislation for politicizing the grid operator's board.

"These people would be political types without electricity expertise," he told The Texas Tribune.

The Texa"s House has already approved House Bill 10, which would remove independent outside voices on the ERCOT board and replace them with five political appointees. The governor would appoint three of those people, while the lieutenant governor and speaker of the House would each appoint one. None of the appointees would be required to be electricity experts. The only requirement is that appointees live in Texas."

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Other posts on ERCOT.

Texas gas and electricity

 The electric power system failure in Texas following severe winter weather continues to draw commentary (and may eventually draw politically actionable conclusions).  The supply chain of electricity proved complex: e.g. some electric generation depended on natural gas supplies that themselves required electricity.

Here are some recent entries.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas:

Cost of Texas’ 2021 Deep Freeze Justifies Weatherization. by Garrett Golding, Anil Kumar and Karel Mertens

"Though the cost of annual preparations for extreme and relatively infrequent weather events has proven difficult for policymakers and industry to justify, the shocking aftermath of the February freeze and the resulting widespread power outage demand a careful re-examination. Our analysis indicates winterizing for extreme winter weather events appears financially reasonable.

...

"Temperatures dipped into the single digits and lower across much of Texas overnight on Feb. 14. Electricity demand surged as critical equipment failed at several power plants. Wind-farm output—already low due to diminished wind speeds—declined further as ice accumulated on turbine blades. Electricity generation declined yet again when gas-fired power plants were unable to procure needed gas supplies. Nearly 4 million Texas customers—representing more than 11 million people—lost power during the Arctic blast (Chart 1).

"While industry sources report gas production difficulties occurred because of wells and other such installations freezing, the bigger disruption began when power was cut to the wells, processing plants and compressor stations that move the gas into and along major pipelines serving power plants. During the storm, 38 of Texas’ 176 gas processing plants shut down due to weather conditions and electricity service disruption. Texas natural gas production dropped 45 percent Feb 13–17.

"This created a death spiral for electricity generation."

*************

Here's Peter Cramton in the Dallas News:

Natural gas producers hit the jackpot during the power outages, but they failed Texas The electrical grid is only as reliable as its fuel supply.  by Peter Cramton

"starting on Feb. 11, the storm exposed every Texas county and much of the Midwest to frigid temperatures. Gas field equipment froze, and gas production began falling on Feb. 12, according to the Energy Information Administration, ultimately dropping 45%. Outages from gas-fueled power plants were double what planning models forecasted in the extreme-storm scenario. (Renewable resources, wind plus solar, performed better than expected during the storm.)

"With a deep drop in electricity supply and a sharp increase in demand, the system operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, could not balance supply and demand without ordering controlled outages of about one-third of the system to prevent a catastrophic blackout. Those power cuts exacerbated gas delivery failures to many power plants.

"The failure of gas-fueled power was the proximate cause of the Texas electricity crisis. Had the gas supply been reliable, the electricity shortage would have been far less severe. 

...

"Fixing the Texas gas market is no easy task. Its regulator, the Texas Railroad Commission, is a textbook example of regulatory capture. For decades, the commission has operated as an advocate for the oil and gas industry. This cozy relationship contributed to the Texas disaster because the lack of gas field and pipeline preparation for cold was a major cause of the electricity outages — and one that better regulation would have avoided.

*******

And here's the WSJ:

‘A Failure of Texas-Size Proportions’—State Debates How to Overhaul Its Power Market. February storm exposed flaws in laissez-faire electricity system; fixes promise to be complex and costly. by Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold

"Fixing the market promises to be as complex as it is costly. The challenge facing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state lawmakers is how to make the state’s deregulated power market more reliable, while limiting added costs that would make its electricity more expensive.

"Texas operates the nation’s only pure “energy only” electricity market, one in which producers are paid just for the power they sell, not the ability to deliver whenever watts are needed. All other deregulated electricity markets in the U.S. offer power generators some form of payment for being ready to produce power, to ensure the market has sufficient capacity to reliably provide an essential resource.

"For most of the past two decades, the Texas approach worked. It helped the Lone Star State keep wholesale power prices for much of the past two years at less than $30 per megawatt-hour on average, well below most other regional power markets.

"But a Texas grid that valued inexpensive power over reliability failed spectacularly during February’s winter storm and frigid temperatures, leading not only to crushingly high electricity prices, but power and water shortages that virtually shut down the state’s economy, and frozen pipes that caused widespread property damage."

Net capacity of generators, minute-by-minute

Postmortems on the Texas electricity market failure

 The weather related failures of the Texas electricity market have prompted a number of fairly rapid postmortems (if that's the right word for a market that has since been restored to working order for normal circumstances).

Perhaps the most authoritative of these is by Peter Cramton, the veteran market designer who was vice chair and an independent director of the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) board before resigning on February 24, 2021, at the request of Governor Abbott, along with the other non-Texan directors. 

Last Monday he posted a paper with his views on what happened and what improvements deserve consideration. A summary of the paper appeared in Utility Dive on Tuesday. The long piece covers more ground; the short article hits the highlights.

**************

Here's  a Q&A at the Yale School of Management, which goes intro some of the history of the market:

Why the Texas Power Market Failed, Q&A with Ed Hirs 

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Here's an op-ed from the Dallas Morning News, asking why the emergency prices weren't ended as soon as adequate supply was restored:

Why didn’t ERCOT put a stop to the massive electricity price spikes during the outages? Rather than allow power markets to return to normal, regulators kept prices at emergency level.  By Rob Snyder

***************

And these two posts, with different perspectives by different commentators, the first by a sociologist and the second by a geographer and a political scientist, appear on the University of Chicago's Stigler Center blog Promarket:

The Texas Blackouts and the Problems of Electricity Market Design  BY GEORG RILINGER, March 24, 2021

and

The Texas Power Failure: How One Market Model Discovered Its Natural Limits  BY EVE VOGEL, STEVEN K. VOGEL March 25, 2021

Electricity supply and electricity politics in Texas--an interview with Peter Cramton

 The veteran market designer Peter Cramton was among the members of the Board of Directors of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) who live outside of Texas and were asked to resign last week, following the winter storm that left many Texans without power, or with unexpected, very high electricity bills. ERCOT is the independent system operator, charged with running the network minute to minute.  

He's interviewed by Texas Public Radio:

Former ERCOT Board Member Says ‘Toxic Politics’ Spurred Resignations After Texas Grid Failure  Texas Public Radio | By Dominic Anthony Walsh

"Peter Cramton is an economics professor at the University of Cologne and the University of Maryland. He has expertise and experience in complex market designs, including electricity and radio spectrum markets. He served as an “independent director” on the board of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) from 2015 until last week.

"At his final board meeting, he said, “ERCOT was flying a 747. It had not one, but two engines experience catastrophic failure. (ERCOT) then flew the damaged plane for 103 hours before safely landing in the Hudson. In my mind, the men and women in the ERCOT control room are heroes.”

Here are some bits of the interview:

Dominic Walsh: Could you help me understand your role as an “independent director?” And does it make sense for some of the independent directors to live out of state? There's a lot of controversy around that.

Peter Cramton: What’s unusual is that we have a hybrid board that consists of “affiliated directors” that are affiliated with a particular stakeholder group. There's complete transparency on that, who they're affiliated with. And it is completely balanced. There are four affiliated directors representing the supply side, and there are four affiliated directors representing the demand side. So those are the two sides of almost every market — supply and demand, production and consumption — and there is a perfect balance. Then there's the “independent directors.” There's five independent directors, and the independent directors can have no association with either side of the market. The challenge with independent directors is: It's hard to find people that have the technical expertise, and (are) independent of the market participants. Now, here's the problem: So, one natural thing is you could say, "Well, you know, it's important that the directors live in Texas." Well, then you’d just be imposing another constraint. So, if we say, "OK, now you have to be independent from all market participants. You have to live in Texas. And you have to be an expert in a highly technical industry…" The reality is it's going to be very difficult to find people that fill all of these.

Walsh: So far, you've described a bunch of advocates for various sectors, and a bunch of experts. It sounds slightly more technocratic than democratic. So, where is the accountability to the public — the democratic element of the board?

Cramton: Absolutely. So, it's critically important. And that is the Public Utility Commission of Texas. So, there's a Public Utility Commission that consists of three commissioners, and they provide that oversight. And in fact, that oversight is incredibly important. So, for example, it's the Public Utility Commission that is responsible for the more delicate decisions that are made in the market. And the Public Utility Commission has oversight over all the market rules. What about a renegade Public Utility Commission? You know, who's watching them? Well, who's watching them: that's the legislature and the governor. The commissioners serve largely for the governor and legislature. And if they're doing something that the governor, the legislature does not like, then the governor and legislature can take action to replace the commissioners or whatever other action they want. So that's the continued hierarchy in this governance structure, and that's all within Texas.

Walsh: Why did you resign? It sounds like you're a big fan of ERCOT and their mission. It sounds like you think ERCOT performed well throughout this. Why did you and other members of the board ultimately resign?

Crampton: We resigned, in short, because the politics are toxic right now. The governor and legislature suggested that we resign. And we basically took him up on that. And so that is the reason that we resigned. So, I think the best way to put it is: We were on the boat. And we were — we didn't leave the sinking ship. We were thrown off the boat. But we're all good swimmers, so I'm sure we'll all do just fine. And quite frankly, because of the toxic politics, we're not the ones that are — for me, I'm a professor. I'm an expert in electricity market design. And I'm not an expert in delicate politics.

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Here's a story from the Texas Monthly on the Texas power grid that also discusses some of the political players:

The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold.  Those in charge of Texas’s deregulated power sector were warned again and again that the electric grid was vulnerable.  by Jeffrey Ball

Peter Cramton on the retail electricity market in California

 Peter Cramton* is an astute observer of electricity markets.  Here's his op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Commentary: My monthly electric bill in Texas would be $250. In California, it is $1,000. Here’s why.

Here's the first paragraph:

"Rolling outages may appear to be a symptom of climate change. Extreme heat and intermittent renewables certainly challenge electricity markets. But these challenges can be met with good market design. The California market has flaws that make California electricity more expensive and less reliable than it should be. Fixing these flaws should be a priority."

and here's the final paragraph:

"California illustrates that good intentions do not necessarily produce good policy. Good policy is designed from what we know about markets and human behavior. Good policy is the only way to provide reliable electricity at least cost"

*"Cramton is a professor of economics at the University of Cologne and the University of Maryland, is an independent board member of ERCOT, the electricity operator in Texas. The views here are his own and not those of ERCOT or ERCOT’s board."

A quick look back at the politics of electricity markets

This, from the RTO Insider, which bills itself as "Your Eyes and Ears on the Organized Electric Markets."

Former FERC Chairs Reminisce, Sound Off at EBA

"The Energy Bar Association closed its annual meeting last week with a panel discussion with five former FERC chairs whose terms collectively spanned two decades. The former chairs offered entertaining anecdotes about the past while expressing pride over the growth of competitive markets — and frustration over forces they said threaten them."

A sociologist looks at the design of electricity capacity markets

The discussion among sociologists of the "performativity" of economics is taking more sophisticated note of market design.  Here's a recent paper from the journal Social Studies of Science.

Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation
Daniel Breslau
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Abstract: Recent work on the relationship of economics to economic institutions has argued that economics is constitutive of economic institutions, and of markets in particular. In opposition to economic sociology, which has treated economics as a competing disciplinary frame or an ideology, the ‘performativity’ literature takes economics seriously as a set of market-building practices. This
article demonstrates the compatibility of these perspectives by analyzing the role of economics
in the politics of market formation. It presents a case study of the formation of a new institution:
capacity markets connected to wholesale electricity markets in the United States. The case
demonstrates how economic framing shapes the politics of markets by imposing a specific set of
terms for the legitimate conduct of the struggle over market rules.

Cramton^3 on market design

IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca Piazza San Ponziano 6, Lucca Italy
 October 4-6, 2011

 THREE LECTURES ON MARKET DESIGN
 Peter Cramton
 Professor of Economics, University of Maryland




During the week of 3 October 2011, Professor Peter Cramton will present a series of three lectures on market design. The emerging field of market design applies auctions and matching to solve resource allocation problems. The lectures focus on auction design, the branch of market design where money is used to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Within auctions, the paper examines applications involving government regulated resources. Who should use the scarce radio spectrum and at what prices? How should electricity markets be organized? How should financial markets be regulated? And how should governments procure health care goods and services? All of these are important questions in major industries. Researchers in market design have made substantial progress in answering these questions over the last seventeen years. The efforts, although at the forefront of theory have been closely tied to practice, and involved interdisciplinary teams of economists, computer scientists, and engineers, all working to solve real problems. Despite this rapid progress, the field holds much promise to provide better answers in even more complex economic environments over the next two decades. The rewards to society from improved markets will be immense.



 Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - 2 pm
 Electricity Market Design and Climate Policy

 Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 2 pm
Spectrum Auction Design

Thursday, October 6, 2011 - 2 pm
Medicare Auctions: A Case Study of Market Design in Washington, DC

Crisis response and organization

Companies that manage big facilities like power plants do a certain amount of planning for emergencies, as do local authorities. But when disasters rise beyond a certain level, national leaders become involved. They may of course not have relevant expertise, and may even lack access to relevant information.

The NY Times has a very interesting article about some of the organizational (and organization design) issues that impeded the Japanese response to the nuclear power plant failures that accompanied and amplified the recent earthquake/tsunami disaster: In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust

"At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles."
...
"At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.


"A onetime grass-roots activist, Mr. Kan struggled to manage the nuclear crisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanisms established by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.


"Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close, overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barely exchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators. 
...
"Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them.


"This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.


"If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s early projections that radiation from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Mr. Kan’s own party. Mr. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they were fleeing."

The market for electricity

As the supply of electricity changes in response to growing numbers of wind turbines, there's more need to be able to store electricity: Wind Drives Growing Use of Batteries

"In New York and California, companies are exploring electrical storage that is big enough to allow for “arbitrage,” or buying power at a low price, such as in the middle of the night, and selling it hours later at a higher price. In the Midwest, a utility is demonstrating storage technology that can go from charge to discharge and back several times a minute, or even within a second, bracing the grid against the vicissitudes of wind and sun and transmission failure. And in Texas, companies are looking at ways of stabilizing voltage through battery storage in places served by just one transmission line."

I also recently heard of attempts to create more flexible demand by fitting households with electrical heat storage units, that heat bricks when electricity is cheap, and power the household heating system off the stored heat.

The year in market design

Kidney exchange:
In fits and starts, kidney exchange is picking up. The biggest development this year has followed from Mike Rees' pioneering Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain.

Here's an end of year news story by Amy Nutt at the NJ Star Ledger which goes over some of the progress made this year, by a growing number of kidney exchange programs: Kidney donation chains provide life-saving chances for patients.

Ms. Nutt has been reporting on New Jersey area kidney exchange for a while; here are some of her previous stories.
Part 1: A gift of hope unfolds
Part 2: A dozen surgeries in 36 hours
Part 3: Donors and recipients meet
Kidney donations connect strangers in 'Chain of Life' forged by transplants

Kidney exchange got going in New Zealand and Australia.

School choice:
Some new theory and evidence from the design of the New York City high school match, and new design efforts in some American and European cities.

Labor markets
The job market for new economists, which is up and running as we speak, gave us a glimpse of some data on how it is working.

Auctions:
My Market Design colleagues have expanded into the rough diamond business.
Noam Nissan (in his review of the decade in algorithmic game theory) writes
"The second half of the decade saw much of the focus shift to “ad auctions” of various kinds, an application that obviously wins the “killer AGT application of the decade” award (rather than the spectrum auctions which seemed the candidate in the beginning of the decade). While the driver of ad auction research is certainly the internet advertising multi-billion dollar industry that has hired droves of AGT researchers, much of this work seems to focus on issues that are of basic theoretical interest in settings of repeated auctions, often departing from the basic models of dominant-strategy worst-case analysis, vying for more delicate models that capture the desired issues better (and in so also influencing the rest of algorithmic mechanism design.)

Electricity
Operating electricity markets made progress around the world.

Regulatory capture in French electricity market

David Jolly reports in the NY Times: France Resists a Power-Monitoring Business

"Two weeks ago, the French Energy Regulatory Commission, the C.R.E., decided that Voltalis, a company that installs electricity management devices in homes and businesses and then manages their use, would have to, in effect, pay power producers for the power that it saves. "

Plug-in hybrid cars, and the retail market for electricity

The news is full of plug-in hybrid cars, i.e. cars with both an electric and a gasoline powered motor, which can be recharged overnight from your household electric outlet. See e.g.MIT's Technology Review on First Plug-in Hybrid to Be Sold in the United States or the AP onAuto industry on plug-in hybrids and electric cars, which begins

"Several automakers are developing plug-in hybrid vehicles and electric cars that could help meet President Barack Obama's goal of putting 1 million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015. Many industry officials say the goal is a worthy one but will be difficult to meet. "

One difficulty not discussed in these articles is how retail electricity is sold. If your electricity bill is like mine, it consists of charges for power consumed, and charges for delivery and maintainence of the network. That is, you are charged both for the variable cost of the electricity you use, and a share of the fixed cost of the infrastructure. However, and strangely, you are charged for both by the kilowatt hour of electricity you use. That is, for each kilowatt hour, you pay an electricity part and an infrastructure part (and you can see this because your electricity utility is now required to offer its delivery service to multiple providers...)

This has some strange consequences, not least of which is that it makes additional electricity usage much more expensive than it would be if you instead were charged an access fee to cover your share of the infrastructure (including the peak load generating capacity), and a separate energy usage fee. Then the marginal additional kilowatt would be cheaper. In that case it might be economical for you to buy an electric car that would charge itself by being plugged in overnight, or even heat your home with electricity.

Design of electricity markets (and salute to Bob Wilson)

For roughly the retail price of 1200 kilowatt hours of electricity, you can buy the Elsevier book Competitive Electricity Markets: Design, Implementation, Performance . (It seems to have been out for almost a year, but I've just noticed it now...)

I haven't read it yet, but the first chapter looks worthwhile: it is by Hung-Po Chao, Shmuel Oren, and Robert Wilson, and is called "Reevaluation of Vertical Integration and Unbundling in Restructured Electricity Markets."

Bob Wilson is of course the dean of design, one of the pioneers not only of the design of electricity markets, but of auction design generally. Here are some of his papers. (And for those of you who come only recently to the economics biz, and don't know what a role model looks like, here is his cv.) Chao and Oren and Wilson seem to have published their first joint paper on electricity in 1986.

While I'm remembering, I'm reminded that Bob's students produced an online Festschrift in his honor in 2002, called Game Theory in the Tradition of Bob Wilson. Here are the first paragraphs of the introduction, which was written by Bengt Holmstrom, Paul Milgrom, and myself.

"One of the nicer events in academic life is when we pause to recognize a scholar whose work is unusually important and influential, whose work marks the start of a new tradition.

"When that scholar is also a great teacher and advisor, his students have the added pleasure of recalling his influence on them, and how it is reflected both in their own scholarship, and in how they teach and advise their own students. Students are the generations through which traditions are transmitted. This volume of selected published papers by Bob’s students, accompanied by new introductory essays, is a celebration of Bob’s tradition, by those of us who had the exceptional good fortune to receive it at first hand.

"And what is this tradition? Scholarship as varied and wide ranging as Bob’s defies easy characterization. He was among the first to recognize that it was going to be of the utmost importance for game theorists to understand how information is distributed and manipulated, concealed, and revealed. He was among the first to emphasize the importance in strategic calculations of players’ beliefs about what other players would do, even in situations that were not anticipated to arise. But what especially marks him as a leader among the great economists of his generation is his view of the role of theory. In his understated way, he wrote in the preface to his book Nonlinear Pricing: “The value of theory is its usefulness in addressing practical problems. . . ” And he went on to reflect on the role of practical problems in his own scholarly development: “. . . for the theorist, the problems encountered by practitioners provide a wealth of topics.”

"So, game theory in the tradition of Bob Wilson is game theory in the service of economics as a confident, practical, useful discipline. And research in the style of Bob Wilson is work that takes its inspiration not only from a wide reading and deep understanding of the work of other academics, but also from the ordinary stuff of economic life. In this spirit, Bob’s work has produced not only acute conceptual insights of great generality, but also advice about and solutions to knotty problems of strategy and design."

Market for electricity: Information and consumption behavior

One set of market design decisions involves what kind of information to provide to participants about other participants. Now that regulated utilities often have an interest in helping customers conserve electricity, one strategy has been to issue electricity bills that let customers compare their usage with the average of their neighbors, and with their most 'efficient' neighbors: Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy .

This seems to have a good effect. The article suggests that a big component of this effect is the competitive impulse. Of course there may also be a pure information effect; when you realize that people with similar size houses use less electricity, it may let you know that there may be ways to conserve energy that you aren't yet utilizing. (It might be hard to separate these effects in field data.)

Wind farms

It may seem strange for an entrepreneur to call for more government regulation, but when it comes to energy, that is what Mandelstam is doing. “As a student of history, you go back to a guy named Thomas Edison, and his first power plant, and the thing one has to point out is that the government and regulators have been integrally enmeshed in the energy business ever since it began on Pearl Street in 1882.” He points to Europe as an exemplar: “We were the world leader in wind. Europe overtook us quite a while ago and continues to beat us all the time because they got the public policy right.” Wise regulation, according to Mandelstam, and a thoughtful debate about energy policy is the best way to correct that. “Let’s line up all the subsidies of coal and nuclear power and oil and natural gas and wind — and let’s have a debate,” Mandelstam urges. “That hasn’t happened in the last eight years, and now, frankly, we’re paying the price for it.”

From the NY Times Sunday Magazine article Wind-Power Politics.