“Artificially low electricity prices offered by renewable generators in Texas have led to bankruptcy for non-renewable generators, including Panda Temple Power, Energy Future Holdings, and Exelon Generation Texas Power.”

While sellers offer special promotions, negative prices in electricity markets make no sense except in the context of renewable energy subsidies. ERCOT explains the anomaly:

Market prices tend to go negative when there is low consumer demand and the thermal generators that have chosen to remain online cannot be backed down further to allow the available, lower-cost wind generation to serve consumer demand. In situations like this, some wind generators will be curtailed to balance generation with load. In these cases, since wind is the marginal generation, it sets the market price, which may be low or negative. In 2017, system-wide negative pricing occurred during 64 hours; in 2018, as of August, during 30 hours.

“Wind and solar generators often are low bidders in the [ERCOT] market not because their capital, operational, or marginal costs are lower. Their bids reflects special tax subsidies that result in the ability to underprice relative to the competition.”

Renewable energy generators are driving other, more reliable sources of energy out of the Texas electricity market. The reason is straightforward. Renewable generators often undercut the prices of their competitors by selling electricity below their costs, and even their marginal costs, to gain market share.

In many ways, this behavior is similar to predatory pricing, one of the classic “anticompetitive” behaviors in antitrust theory. But unlike in free markets where predatory pricing is difficult and rare, government intervention has uniquely set up intermittent wind power to ruin the economics of reliable, conventional power.…

“In Green Party terms, acceptable energies are wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. Nuclear is out as much as oil, natural gas, and coal. So is ‘dirty clean energy,’ defined as ‘biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels.'”

Yesterday’s post examined the Green Party’s climate platform for the 2020 election. The Green Party’s Emergency Green New Deal joins Biden’s Green New Deal and the OAC/Sanders Green New Deal, each is designed to eliminate fossil fuels and go to a new (really old) energy future.

In Green Party terms, acceptable energies are wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. Nuclear is out as much as oil, natural gas, and coal. So is “dirty clean energy,” defined as “biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels.”…

“Enact a Fee & Dividend system on fossil fuels to enable the free market to include the environmental costs of their extraction and use…. The carbon fee [tax] will initially be small, a dime per kilogram of carbon [1000x = $100 per metric ton], to avoid creating a shock to the economy. The fee will be increased by 10% each year….”

“[The US will] pay for adaptation to climate change in countries with less responsibility for climate change. Provide a carbon neutral development path for those countries that can no longer be permitted to develop in the same way we did—by burning cheap fossil fuels.”

The Green Party does not seem so radical anymore. Back in 2016, their climate/energy plank could be derided as soured pie-in-the-sky. But since the Green New Deal (GND) of 2019, it is pie in the face.…