“Among the 867 findings extracted from the analysed publications [regarding offshore wind], 72% reported negative impacts, while 13% were positive.”
“The progressive expansion of OWFs [Offshore Wind Farms] to meet energy production objectives, including floating devices in deeper areas and farther offshore, faces relevant technical, economic, social, and ecological concerns worldwide.”
– “Reviewing the Ecological Impacts of Offshore Wind Farms,” npj Ocean Sustainability (2022).
Deep ecologists and rank-and-file environmentalists should shudder at the thought of industrial wind turbines talking over the coastal waters. The massive structures and electric cables to shore are bad enough. But the machinery’s low average-capacity factors and susceptibility to bad weather make for a very risky economic/ecological deal.
But economics scarcely matters to the Church of Climate. Carbon dioxide and fossil fuels are always worse.…
“By facilitating decentralized coordination instead of imposing specific outcomes, the institutions designed in Texas became the most market-oriented in the country, and the most likely to be resilient and adaptive in the face of unknown and charging economic, technological, and environmental conditions.”
– Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, eds. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (AEI: 2009), p. 3.
The Texas electricity debacle of February 2021 stands as the greatest failure in the history of the power industry–if not any other industry in America. Hundreds dead and many tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary expense led one system architect, Robert Borlick, to lament:
…I have to admit, the ERCOT blackouts have shaken me. The amount of physical damage and human suffering they caused is astounding. Obviously, the ‘market’ failed to provide the service reliability that customers expected and deserved.
“Totally forgotten in this transformation [to mandatory open access] was a simple removal of the regulatory covenant to allow a real free market and genuine entrepreneurial discovery process…. Instead, we were told the ISO/RTO model worked: the planners knew how to price for volume and for reliability with Texas as the national model.”
Classical liberal theory explains market coordination and governmental discoordination, even “planned chaos.” The same intellectual tradition notes the propensity of government intervention to expand from its own shortcomings. Electricity is no exception. The rise and fall of the Texas grid is a case study–just the opposite of what some claiming to be classical liberal thought (see yesterday’s post).
The history of electricity in the U.S. is supportive of an undesigned order, beginning with inventor Thomas Edison and his business protégé Samuel Insull in the 1880s.…