Pokalsky, Borlick, Kiesling: Capacity Markets Now Essential in Texas (central planning rethink)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 5, 2021 1 Comment

“Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic if no capacity market.” (Joe Pokalsky, here)

“I have stated earlier that the ERCOT market’s reliance on scarcity pricing did not foresee an environment with high penetration of zero-marginal cost resources. Back in 2005 I generically simulated an energy-only market to demonstrate how scarcity pricing would work. I never anticipated the mass introduction of renewables at that time.” ( – Robert Borlick, below)

“(oops!) There is now a need to revise the scarcity pricing framework in the light of recent events, and to reflect ever-changing market conditions.” (Lynne Kiesling, June 30, 2021)

There is a Texas-sized rethink going on with the PUCT/ERCOT model for electricity. The experts/planners presiding over the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021 are in the redesign mode, with some breaking away to advocate a major new pricing system.…

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Denton, TX: Grid Reliability Sinks Renewables

By -- August 4, 2021 No Comments

Many Denton customers were stuck with astronomical electricity bills under the green power “choice” plans.

Denton, Texas, population 140,000, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, received national media attention for its $9,000 per megawatt hour ($9.00 per kilowatt hour) electricity price spike during the February 2021 Texas Freeze power crisis

Although not reported by the media as such, it was an unintended consequence of naive green dreams and “environmental justice” gone wrong.

“Green” Energy Planning

Home to two universities and a junior college, Denton is a Progressive Left city that:

  • Banned fracking within its city limits (later reversed by Gov. Abbott)
  • Contracted for 180 megawatts from the Blue Bell Solar Plant
  • Recorded 40 percent renewables, partly by ending its contract with the now mothballed Gibbons Creek Coal Power Plant
  • Built its own natural gas power plant (2018) to provide backup power to its customers and sell the excess into the ERCOT grid.
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California Electricity Woes: More Intervention, Higher Prices, More Emissions (the back side of wind and solar)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 3, 2021 No Comments

“We’ll be setting up a mitigation program and new funds will be made available above and beyond our existing air quality funding that will mitigate those impacts.” (Liane Randolph, chair. California Air Resources Board, below)

“This huge list shows that if you mess up a grid, you have to try everything to hope to save the situation temporarily. In the proclamation: Air pollution rules–suspended. Ships in harbor—don’t connect to shore power, use your engines. Big industrial users—we’ll pay you $2/kWh not to consume energy. And yet, keeping a nuclear plant operating is not on the list.” (Meredith Angwin, August 2, 2021)

One intervention leads to another and yet another …. The ‘law of increasing intervention,’ as UK energy expert Colin Robinson coined it, is alive and well in the Golden State.…

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The Fear of ‘Cheap Energy’ Revisited (1989 quotations for today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 29, 2021 2 Comments

… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”

So what do Big Government, anti-freedom eco-activists really want?

This is the perennial question regarding nuclear power, which is really the only scalable low-to-no CO2-emitting choice for electrical generation. When recently asked this question by a political economist friend who only tangentially follows energy, I went to Google to find the Paul Ehrlich quotation above. And lo-and-behold, I found a whole article around it!

Paul Ciottin’s, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1989. It is certainly worth revisiting in its entirety some 32 years later.…

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Getting in the Houston Chronicle (back window better than nothing, I guess)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 28, 2021 No Comments Continue Reading

Field Notes on the Futile Climate Crusade

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 27, 2021 1 Comment Continue Reading

Anger in the Climate Patch: Exchange with a Climate Alarmist/Forced Energy Transformationist

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 26, 2021 6 Comments Continue Reading

Ohio Eviscerates Preferred Siting, Accelerated Permission for Wind/Solar Developers (communities win!)

By Sherri Lange -- July 22, 2021 12 Comments Continue Reading

“The Electric Windmill” (Part II)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 21, 2021 No Comments Continue Reading

“The Electric Windmill” (hippy energy, circa 1979)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 20, 2021 1 Comment Continue Reading