“Rob, you certainly have the right to participate in the discussion but it is clear to me (and others) that you do not understand how the ERCOT market actually functions. Instead you spout off free market economic theories without getting down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems. In the real world the devil is in the details.” (Robert Borlick, below)

“Rob, why are you shilling for the natural gas industry?” (Borlick, below)

Welcome to the political economy of electricity from the expert/planner viewpoint. Electricity is different. Its complexity requires central planning/regulation. The free market does not work. Ergo, free-market theories do not apply.

Bottom line: Experts/planners/regulators/politicians must get “down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems.”

Previous posts (here and here) have chronicled my interaction with electricity planning experts in the wake of the Great Texas Power Blackout of February 2021.…

“The physical operation of the grid can be separated from the economic decisions of what power is generated, transmitted, and sold at wholesale or retail in terms of quantity, cost, and price.”

“Mistakes by ERCOT or the PUCT or Texas legislature make my point–this is a planning failure, not a market failure. Not physics but economics. A historian is weighing evidence about this either being a market or government failure. It is a government failure writ large.” (Bradley, below)

Electricity is different. Power flows must the centrally managed. Ergo, regulators and politicians must manage the grid.

WRONG. The physical operation of the grid can be separated from the economic decisions of what power is generated, transmitted, and sold at wholesale or retail in terms of quantity, cost, and price. Companies themselves, vertically and horizontally integrated, what might be called electricity majors, is the opportunity cost of the present regulatory regime.…

“And, frankly, libertarians like you who have supported Trump bear blame for this crap too. You have NO ground to stand on today having enabled this seditious shitty excuse for a human being….” (Steve Horwitz to Rob Bradley, Facebook, January 6, 2021)

“For me, one of the most tragic results of the Trump phenomenon has been to cause good, decent, reasonable classical liberals (libertarians, the good ones, not the zealots, you know what I mean) to yell at each other in anger and frustration.” (Peter Lewin, Facebook, January 8, 2021)

Amid the Capitol violence of Wednesday January 6, Peter Lewin, a notable Austrian-school economist and respected classical liberal, posted on Facebook about the “out of control zealots…. Mob Hysteria ready to explode….” Exchanges followed. I asked some rather civil questions including this one:

I’m not condoning the violence, just trying to put it in perspective…..

“The private sector will never do the amount of fundamental research that society’s interests require because you cannot tell in advance the nature of fundamental research…. The companies can’t tell whether there’ll ever be any return.”

– John Holdren, December 2017 Interview.

Less than one year ago, John Holdren, Obama’s beginning-to-end science adviser, and now Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, spoke of his concerns about Trump energy policy in a Climate One podcast from San Francisco.

Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added):

Government R&D as Savior

Holdren: “Well I think the biggest damage that the Trump administration is doing is first of all reducing or proposing to reduce very drastically investments in clean and efficient energy research and development by the government.…