“The [Federal Energy Regulatory] Commission’s recent progress in promoting competitive wholesale energy markets has the potential to be undone as a result of this well-meaning, but misguided Rule.”
– FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller, “Demand Response Compensation in Organized Wholesale Energy Markets,” Order No. 745 (2011).
Renewable energy subsidies are at the forefront of the public policy debate with constant talk of “green” jobs and the looming expiration of the production tax credit, a familiar subject at this blogsite. But qualifying renewables get other subsidies too, such as accelerated depreciation and state-level must-buy mandates.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), regulating interstate electricity, is arguably subsidizing another favorite “green” resource – the practice of energy abstinence called “demand response.”
FERC Order Nos. 745 and 745-A established, for the first time, a uniform compensation scheme for demand response in organized electricity markets.…
Continue ReadingThe Sierra Club’s war on coal, since joined by its war on gas, is really a conflict against industrial progress. Reliable, affordable energy is a ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, and the enemy has wanted to take it ever since Paul Ehrlich et al. got going in the 1960s and 1970s.
The irony is that an honest Sierra Club executive back in the 1980s gave windpower its most infamous nickname, the Cuisinarts of the Air. Sierra Club members have resigned over the organization’s pro-wind policy, and grassroot environmentalists have tasted wind only to spit it out (here and here). And the Old Mare refuses to address devastating criticism about industrial wind, such as from Jon Boone here at MasterResource. [1]
Many examples of Sierra Club policy against environmentally superior dense energy can be chronicled.…
Continue Reading“I can’t downplay this. It’s obviously very exciting for us…. This is opening up a new chapter in Alaska’s oil and gas history that is literally starting today.”
– Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska. Quoted in Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Shell Begins Drilling Well off Alaska,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 2012.
Profit-seeking, consumer-directed business is proper, necessary, and heroic. Free-market-based energy enterprises (oil, gas, and coal) are quite unlike government-dependent (crony) businesses (ethanol, windpower, and on-grid solar). Ken Lay’s Enron is (was) a leading example of the latter; Koch Industries’ Charles Koch, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, epitomizes the former.
Shell has scaled back its (scarcely profitable) renewable energy investments and is back to its oil and gas roots. Its advertising is no longer about pie-in-the-sky energies and more about here, now energy.…
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