Seattle.BloggersPub

The Northwest Energy Coalition has just published a great primer on one of our favorite systemic solutions: decoupling utilities’ profits from their energy sales. Decoupling is an obscure but crucially important innovation that supercharges natural gas and electric power (and water) utilities’ incentive to help their customers conserve. Basically, it’s a pricing plan that ensures utilities still profit even if their customers buy less energy from them.

Several additional utilities in the Northwest have won decoupled rates from regulators: NW Natural in Oregon, Cascade Natural Gas in Oregon and Washington, and Spokane’s Avista—all for natural gas; and, for electricity, the Idaho Power Company.

The addition of these new utilities to the ranks of the decoupled is very good news, because the efficiency and climate protection gains that decoupling unleashes are a very big deal

We’re looking for someone new to join our family!

Speaking of
tracking the reasons Puget Sound’s roads and transit
package failed–here’s a chance for Puget Sound residents to put in your two cents about the
Proposition 1 vote and where to go from here.

Take Sound Transit’s survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/soundtransit

You can let Sound Transit hear your voice
on transportation solutions in the region, congestion pricing, the taxes we pay
for driving (and the costs we don’t pay), and other fascinating things (well, we think they are fascinating!) you read
about here on the Daily Score.

Nice redesign. It’s liquid! Yay. Heh…anyway, the actual podcast is pretty good too.

I really liked Tim Anderson’s post in response to a Zoho blog post that I’ve seen circulated a lot about why they chose JavaScript vs. Flash. I’ve definitely been guilty of JavaScript vs. Flash debates in the past but I thought Tim did a good job of making all of us look a little silly. […]

At some point you just have to stop and go with what you have. Amen.

So awesomely cute. I’m pretty sure they must be brought to live by Meomi Design. Very nice work!

When Ted blogs something like “There is some big AMF news coming in December” my email and IM always gets a bit more traffic. I’m not going to spoil the secret, but you should be excited. I have the full briefing about it tomorrow but it’s been a project a while in the making so […]

We’re on the list! W00t!

The New York Times has an article today about the Zune 2.0. I was just chatting with a couple of friends last night who are thinking about going to work on the Zune team so it was kind of serendipitous and I felt chatty. I’ve got a big long post for sometime soon about Microsoft’s […]