Big Tech & Lessons from the Energy Crisis

Show Notes 

Big Tech 
Salem Center events on the Big Tech: 

• Is Big Tech Too Big?

Additional notes/context/links: 

• Steve mentioned Facebook’s role in violence in Myanmar.  Here’s more detail on Facebook’s role in inciting the violence from this NY Times article.
• One of Greg’s talks on free speech 

Electricity Crisis 
Salem Center events on the Texas Electricity crisis: 

• Does Texas Value Reliable Energy
• Forget About What Broke:  Why Poor Policies Made Texas Blackouts Inevitable  
• Exploring Tradeoffs in the Texas Energy System 

Additional notes/context/links: 

• A Wall Street Journal article about the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) raising electricity prices to $9,000 a megawatt hour.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-power-regulators-decision-to-raise-prices-in-freeze-generates-criticism-11614268158.  Typically, prices are quoted per kilowatt hour (1/1000^th of a megawatt hour).  In Texas the average price of electricity before the crisis was $0.1139 per kilowatt hour (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a) – which is $113.9 per megawatt hour.  Reuters notes that “[o]ne megawatt typically provides enough power for 200 homes on a hot summer day.” (https://www.reuters.com/article/texas-power-summer/update-1-after-winter-crisis-texas-power-grid-assures-will-meet-record-summer-demand-idUSL1N2LN27Q) 
• Carlos mentioned a paper that shows that the cost of natural disasters hasn’t increased.  In Bjorn Lornberg’s piece “Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119981) he cites John McAneney et al.’s 2019 paper “Normalised insurance losses from Australian natural disasters: 1966-2017”  (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17477891.2019.1609406)