Ed Note: The Great Texas Blackout five years ago, the worst energy debacle in US history, was misinterpreted as a ‘market failure’ by the mainstream press (and faux classical liberal Lynne Kiesling). This repost stands today as it was written three years ago.

Electricity specialists at the University of Texas at Austin recently revisited the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021. The op-ed, “Two years after its historic deep freeze, Texas is increasingly vulnerable to cold snaps – and there are more solutions than just building power plants” (The Conversation), spreads the blame and recommends more government planning, not less.

The authors want to let wind and solar continue to “saturate” the market and regulate (via “smart meters”) usage in your home and business to save the grid.…

Ed. Note: Five years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas post-Uri has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.

It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences. Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:

If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.” 

Ed. note: This post by Josiah Neeley, originally published at MasterResource in November 2012, predicted the decline of reliable (dispatchable) power a decade before Storm Uri, the subject of yesterday’s post. Meanwhile, climate/renewable activists such as Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle) was calling out the ‘fossil fuel-supporting Chicken Littles‘. Tomlinson (et al.) misinterpreted the event by focusing on the physical ‘why’ instead of the economic ‘why behind the why’ (here, here, and here).

“It is well known that Texas is undergoing a major challenge in maintaining resource adequacy due to improper price signals; less well known is that a significant portion of the problem can be laid directly on the doorstep of subsidies for wind generation.”

The federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), which currently provides a $0.022/kWh subsidy to qualifying renewables, is set to expire at year-end.…