“Maybe in her Presidential Address (if enough people have read this critical post) she will be compelled to broach the subject of Public Choice and Electricity Planning. And maybe include a mea culpa that she finds herself admitting from time to time. Here’s hoping….”

The strange intellectual case of Lynne Kiesling–the technocratic ‘classical liberal’ championing a government planned, monopolistic electricity market–continues. Think seven Independent System Operators (ISOs) and Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that regulate the in-and-out and pricing of grid electricity over multiple utility areas.

Public Choice Society Meeting

Next week is the 61st annual conference of the Public Choice Society, a stellar organization that applies Economics 101 to governmental institutions. “Methodological Individualism … Rational Choice … Politics-as-exchange.” A great tradition, a great conference ahead….

But … Kiesling is presiding as President of an 80-session, 220-presentation conference without a session in her pet area, governmental electricity planning.…

“The Kiesling/Giberson (et al.) narrative is a call for more government. MORE wind. MORE solar. MORE Batteries. MORE central planning to correct prior. And rationing from ‘smart meters’ to forgive all that came before. Think Big Brother, the Electricity Road to Serfdom.”

Three years ago this month, a prolonged, extensive cold snap did the unthinkable to Texas’s huge electricity grid. The shared narrative from proponents/apologists of forced energy transformation (‘Energy Transition’, ‘Decarbonization’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘Green New Deal’, ‘Virtual Power Plant’) focused on the failure of natural gas infrastructure as the cause of the debacle, a sort of “market failure” from “an Act of God.” The cancer in the system, intermittent wind and solar ($66 billion worth), was forgiven, and central planning of the state’s grid by Austin politicians, regulators, and administrators was treated as a neutrality.…

“Lynne Kiesling is a technocrat whose theories come alive in the governmental domain. She believes she has melded the free market and government planning in electricity. By playing classical liberal in other respects, she has fooled many free market types, while collecting many academic positions for her contra-capitalist views.”

Statism in classical-liberal garb is the story of electricity specialist Lynne Kiesling. This post documents her exchange with Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental studies at the CATO Institute. She shows her style but avoids the fundamental arguments of markets-versus-government in electricity. My interpretation of Kiesling as contra-capitalist concludes this post.

This exchange occurred with a post by Todd Snitchler, head of the Electric Power Supply Association.

Fisher (to Kiesling): in a recent piece you attempt to reconcile designed markets with a Hayekian approach.…

“Myth One: There is a fossil fuel funded effort to stop clean energy”. Fact: there IS a lot of fossil fuel money in the renewable energy space. But 100% of it goes to the PROPONENTS of renewable energy like the Sierra Club and Michigan Conservative Energy Forum. And the vast majority of renewable energy developers in Michigan are fossil fuel entities themselves.

How should government-enabled projects that deprecate the environment be handled by local opponents? This is a debate with two sides. Michael Giberson argues that private property rights trumps the taxpayer in such cases. I argue that government intervention to block government intervention regarding projects on private land is justified. (Debate here.)

Ideally, this controversy would be bypassed by a separation of government and energy. And it should be.…