“’The [Sunnova] summit [last November] was really part of the swindle,’ said Chris Pélissié, chief executive at Senga Solar, which is owed more than $680,000 by Sunnova. ‘None of us dealers knew we were playing chess until it was just too late’…” (below)
Previous posts at MasterResource (below) have chronicled the government-enabled rooftop solar industry, which is now in distress. Bankrupt Sunnova Energy heads the list, with others either bankrupt or struggling.
“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”
In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).
Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…
Editor’s Note: This book review was published just short of 20 years ago in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics [Vol. 8, No. 3 (FALL 2005): 93–95] by Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto.
“Austrian economists have so far contributed very little to energy studies…. This book could therefore go a long way in providing a new set of concrete economic examples and principles for use in classroom discussions.”
Despite its obvious economic and social importance, energy (broadly understood) is an understudied field. True, among academics, one can find several engineers and geologists, along with some economists, geographers, legal scholars, and political scientists, who devote much of their research efforts to devising and/or analyzing various energy-related technologies, supply sources, markets, and institutions.
By and large, however, very few individuals have tried to understand how all the various parts of the energy puzzle fit—or not—together, and much—if not most—of the public discussion of the issue is agenda-driven and ignorant of basic physical and economic principles.…