Austin Metric

Renewable Energy is Unlikely to Force Grandma to Eat Catfood

AE Energy Mix

The Austin-American Statesman published a story arguing that the push for more renewables in the source energy sold by Austin Energy (AE) is "partially" to blame for higher bills.  The story quotes advocates for the poor and elderly expressing concern about these individuals' ability to pay.  Because of the story's …

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WTP4mania!!! Who won the big WTP4 debate?

WTP4mania!

There were hundreds of people at Palmer Center's freezing Exhibit Hall No.2 on Thursday night, all waiting for a bigtime policy rumble between proponents and opponents of WTP4's existing development schedule.

Let's look at the highlights...

Demand Projection

Stephen Coonan of Alan Plummer Associates and the author of the …

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Laying Down the Law on the WTP4 Cacophony

Over at his newish blog, Jonathan Law politely points out that WTP4 opponents, conservationists and I are sort of full of it.  He writes:

Unfortunately, opponents of this plan have chosen a convenient sticking point – the statistical methods employed – as the basis of their objections.  These objections shouldn’t be …

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Austin Should Keep a Public Energy Utility

Over at the Austin Post there are two great pieces on the budget by contributor Marius.  In one of them, Marius provides interesting evidence that  our police expenditure is not optimal for response times relative to peer cities.  In another, Marius makes the case for privatizing Austin utilities. Marius concludes …

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Interpreting the Plummer Water Demand Estimate

Austin Contrarian with how discussions of projections and "regression" seemed to be unfolding.

As I anticipated, the demand modeling uses linear regression of one independent variable: population.  However, to my surprise, the r-squared is high. For example, the sole population independent variable explains about 75% of the variation in peak …

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