Offshore wind took another small step forward last week when US Wind was announced as the provisional winner of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's August 19 auction of development rights to nearly 80,000 acres off of Maryland.  The price?  $8.7 million. According to the BOEM press release, and other reports the few million to be ponied up by US Wind (or by its Italian parents, Renexia and Toto S.p.A.) is more than was bid for offshore leases in Virginia and Massachusetts and apparently is justified by the substantial financial carrot established by the O'Malley administratio...

A recent article in August’s Best’s Review, The Rise of the Super Models, by Kate Smith (not Kate Upton, sorry), caught our eye.  A lot is going on in the world of computer catastrophe modeling.  First, demand by insurers and reinsurers is up and modeling firms are “broadening the scope of risks and regions that they model, with RMS, AIR Worldwide and CoreLogic EQECAT all set to release new models this year.”  Among other things, all of the top 3 modeling firms are releasing U.S. inland flood models.  This blog has been hard on FEMA and the Corps of ...