[Ed. note: Previous posts at MasterResource have documented the landowner and budgetary problems of the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ) transmission line.]

The cost of building transmission for expensive wind power in Texas is coming in nearly 40 percent higher than initially promised. Instead of $4.9 billion, as estimated in 2008, the transmission lines are now expected to cost $6.8 billion, according to a report prepared by the RS&H infrastructure consulting firm for the Texas Public Utility Commission.  This amounts to approximately $800 per household in the state, or at least $5 per month per ratepayer.

Cost Gaming

The report states several factors caused the initial underestimate of transmission line construction costs. For example, the initial estimate assumed transmission lines would be built in direct, straight lines from point to point.…

I am part of an online event hosted by The Economist magazine debating the proposition:

This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.

I am opposed. Defending the motion is Matthias Fripp, Research fellow, Environmental Change Institute and Exeter College, Oxford University, who defends renewables from the premise that “we must reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 in order to avoid dangerous risks to the environment and ourselves.”

With my opening statement, I began with a recent observation by the rising UK intellectual star Matt Ridley and continued with the timeless insight of William Stanley Jevons. Readers of MasterResource know Jevons well from previous posts, but I wanted to make sure to put him front and center of this debate to awaken his homeland that he ‘refuted’ renewables nearly 150 years ago.…

“While of course the wind farm may be one of those projects with such overwhelming policy benefits (and political support) as to trump all other considerations, even as they relate to safety, the record expresses no such proposition.”

– Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts v. Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Court of Appeals (DC Circuit), October 28, 2011.

Earlier this year, Industrial Wind Action Group (home) wrote how turbines sited within fifty miles of U.S. radar installations are now disrupting our navigation aids and impairing U.S. national security.

FAA and military radar experts in the field are well aware of the compromises to radar resolution caused by poorly sited turbines. But with the debate surrounding energy policy dominated by politics and money, they’ve bowed to the pressure.

Last week we learned of another project that poses safety risks.…

The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, recently wrote in his weekly Public Editor column about the trustworthiness of Robert Bryce, the nation’s leading energy journalist who has graduated to being a top energy public policy scholar, period. (Hard work, smarts, attention to detail, and open-mindedness earns the latter designation.)

In The Times Gives Them Space, but Who Pays Them? (October 29, 2011), Brisbane laid out a controversy that is worth reviewing. The question is: Does a writer’s paid association disqualify him or her as a reliable source of public policy analysis and opinion?

Here is how Brisbane asks and answers it.

PEOPLE don’t just argue about what is written on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. They argue about who is doing the writing and why.