Dana Blankenhorn

The Renewable Energy Sweet Spot is Storage

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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While most attention in renewable energy is focused on solar panels, or wind turbines, or the use of pine pellets and algae for fuel, the real sweet spot is in storage.

Imre Gyuk , energy storage program manager at the Department of Energy, says it's not just because solar and wind are intermittant. It's also because an increasingly computer-driven society requires cleaner power.

You know this in your own life. If you have a desktop PC, chances are you have a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) sitting under your desk, or at least a “power conditioning” power strip next to you – maybe both. Spikes can damage critical components.

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

The Fourth Riding of the Ku Klux Klan

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Historians think of the KKK as having three great “ridings.”

The first, right after the Civil War, was designed to overcome Republican Reconstruction. The second, early in the last century, was designed to enforce Jim Crow in the South and racial segregation in the north. The third, in the 1950s and 1960s, was a deliberate reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Historians will write that we are currently in a fourth riding, and ironically it's the Party of Lincoln, the Republican Party, that is now the KKK party.

Most analysts are too polite to say this. Even black analysts are usually too polite to say this, perhaps because many such analysts, like Al Sharpton, have been welcomed into the chattarati and are no longer subject to it. You get some wealth, get some comfort, see the Klan riding off toward someone else's house and you got to figure, hey I got mine. (Right, Dr. Carson?)

The Great Deception of David Stockman

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I know that liberal economists like Paul Krugman want to dismiss David Stockman's latest book, The Great Deformation as the work of a “cranky old man”

But it's not. It's the finest form of political jiu jitsu. And it's dangerous stuff, very dangerous.

Stockman, who was briefly a Reagan budget director, and who was then made wealthy by Wall Street, reveals here that his heart is in the Austrian economics brought to this country by followers of Ludwig von Mises.