“Artificially low electricity prices offered by renewable generators in Texas have led to bankruptcy for non-renewable generators, including Panda Temple Power, Energy Future Holdings, and Exelon Generation Texas Power.”

While sellers offer special promotions, negative prices in electricity markets make no sense except in the context of renewable energy subsidies. ERCOT explains the anomaly:

Market prices tend to go negative when there is low consumer demand and the thermal generators that have chosen to remain online cannot be backed down further to allow the available, lower-cost wind generation to serve consumer demand. In situations like this, some wind generators will be curtailed to balance generation with load. In these cases, since wind is the marginal generation, it sets the market price, which may be low or negative. In 2017, system-wide negative pricing occurred during 64 hours; in 2018, as of August, during 30 hours.

“Wind and solar generators often are low bidders in the [ERCOT] market not because their capital, operational, or marginal costs are lower. Their bids reflects special tax subsidies that result in the ability to underprice relative to the competition.”

Renewable energy generators are driving other, more reliable sources of energy out of the Texas electricity market. The reason is straightforward. Renewable generators often undercut the prices of their competitors by selling electricity below their costs, and even their marginal costs, to gain market share.

In many ways, this behavior is similar to predatory pricing, one of the classic “anticompetitive” behaviors in antitrust theory. But unlike in free markets where predatory pricing is difficult and rare, government intervention has uniquely set up intermittent wind power to ruin the economics of reliable, conventional power.…

“Public and regulatory pressure continues against LEEDCo. Freeing the fresh-water lakebed from a billionaire foreign developer using US taxpayer dollars is Step One. Step Two is bringing New York Governor Cuomo’s green fantasy back to earth.”

This Thursday, September 17, 2020, the Ohio Power Siting Board will revisit the LEEDC0 decision of this May that placed significant environmental conditions on the project.

For years, MasterResource has followed the LEEDCo (Lake Erie Energy Development Corp) offshore wind application, what is now owned by Icebreaker Windpower, Fred Olsen Renewables. The massive-sized 6-turbine 20.7 MW project offshore Cleveland has produced a decade of controversy and false starts, and no electricity, with generous DOE funding underwriting the futility.

LEEDCo is on life support. The Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) approved the project in May subject to 33 conditions, the most significant being the turbine blades must be “feathered” or shut down at “night” (usually dusk to dawn) during the eight months of migration of many species. …

“Offshore wind is not cost-effective, and the forecasts of rapidly declining costs through increasing economies of scale are unrealistic. Absent continued subsidies … it is unlikely that any offshore wind facilities will be developed.”

“The experience with offshore wind projects in Europe over the last decade has demonstrated that newer, larger turbine technologies have been accompanied by significant reliability and maintenance issues, causing the amount of electricity that these turbines generate each year to decline by almost half over 10 years.”

An important data source for offshore wind is a new study by Jonathan Lesser, “Out to Sea: The Dismal Economics of Offshore Wind,” just released by the Manhattan Institute.

This major study reviews the history of offshore wind, the subsidies to date in the Northeastern U.S.,…