“Learning is a process, not a destination. Bret Stephens should reconsider his reconsideration to educate his readers on the benefits of CO2 enrichment and positive weather/climate trends (including global lukewarming). And do it in such a way that instead of trying to fire him, the alarmists have to answer (not duck) the hard questions about their position.”

The intellectual case against climate alarmism and forced energy transformation has always been strong. Recent events have made this case stronger with more data contradicting climate model projections. The statistics of extreme weather events and global (luke)warming are hard to ignore. In addition, the “fat tail” of worst-case, extreme warming have been scaled back in the mainstream literature. All this is good news and an antidote for ‘climate anxiety’.

Given all this (isn’t this typical of neo-Malthusian scares?),…

“By facilitating decentralized coordination instead of imposing specific outcomes, the institutions designed in Texas became the most market-oriented in the country, and the most likely to be resilient and adaptive in the face of unknown and charging economic, technological, and environmental conditions.”

– Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, eds. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (AEI: 2009), p. 3.

The Texas electricity debacle of February 2021 stands as the greatest failure in the history of the power industry–if not any other industry in America. Hundreds dead and many tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary expense led one system architect, Robert Borlick, to lament:

I have to admit, the ERCOT blackouts have shaken me. The amount of physical damage and human suffering they caused is astounding. Obviously, the ‘market’ failed to provide the service reliability that customers expected and deserved.

“I am fearful that electricity will be turned from an affordable, thoughtless necessity into the opposite.”

“Electricity would/should be inexpensive enough where folks don’t want to hassle with saving a dollar here or there [via a ‘smart’ meter] if it requires any sort of thought or potential inconvenience.”

The wolf is at the door with electricity–and it has virtually nothing to do with the free market but a lot to do with government intervention guided by experts/regulators, and planners. Call it analytic failure and government failure, not market failure.

Background: Forcing intermittent renewable energy on the grid has compromised reliability directly and indirectly. Directly, wind and solar disappear at the peak. Indirectly, renewables with the lowest marginal cost (but highest average cost) displace the reliables, natural gas but also coal and ruin profitability margins otherwise.…

So even though renewables can provide a benefit in lowering the overall clearing price for energy, there will come a point – if we have not already reached it – where there will be so many wind and solar resources bidding into the RTO markets that marginal clearing prices no longer benefit customers … [by making] dispatchable-on-demand generation resources needed for system reliability unable to survive economically. (Bernard McNamee, below)

A recent article at RealClear Energy by former FERC commissioner Bernard McNamee, “Why Marginal Pricing in Wholesale Electric Markets May Need Reform” (June 20, 2021) recognizes a problem with regulated pricing that results in a very inconvenient truth: renewable energy has blown up the neoclassical planning model for electricity in the Texas ISO (Independent System Operator). And it is hurting reliable generation in the RTO (Regional Transmission Organization) regions as we speak.…