William Taylor
Graph of the Day: How home batteries might benefit houses without solar - The Dismal Science
May 13, 2015 •
I’m pretty excited about the Tesla Powerwall, the home battery that was announced recently. People mostly think about home batteries as being important for solar. For residential solar, most of your generation is during the day when you aren’t home, so it gets sold back into the grid and therefore relies on the whatever the […]
Quote of the Day: Garner on the Greens - The Dismal Science
Oct 04, 2014 •
Duncan Garner is a bit of a stirrer, but he pulled out some interesting numbers in his article yesterday arguing the Greens should move to the centre: The Greens talk poverty and social justice, but the poor aren’t listening – and they’re certainly not voting for them. Look at these telling statistics from the poorest electorates in […]
Crowd funding, Trade Me and Network Externalities - The Dismal Science
Aug 19, 2014 •
Very exciting news last week that New Zealand’s first two equity crowd funding platforms have been licensed. See PledgeMe’s (henceforth PM) blog announcement here and Snowball Effect’s (henceforth SE) FB announcement here and the FMA’s announcement here. Exactly what role crowd funded equity will play in NZ is going to be very interesting to watch: […]
Uber surge pricing: “Sugar coated poison”? - The Dismal Science
Jul 30, 2014 •
A quite sensationalist headline on stuff this morning… “Uber app ‘sugar-coated poison’ – cabbies“. The head of the Taxi Federation is telling us that Uber is evil. Now Uber is a big threat to the traditional taxi business model so take these comments with a grain of salt. Particularly the fact that: The app is […]
Costs and (or lack of) benefits of transport projects - The Dismal Science
Sep 10, 2013 •
Auckland Transport Blog have put up a post today discussing the costs and benefits of the planned transport projects in Auckland that the government is backing. I’ll discuss that in a second, but first there is something I want to get off my back regarding the assessment of transport projects. BCR ratios (aka CBA by […]