“No fracking, no fracking, no fracking. All of a sudden [Biden] gets a nomination, he says, ‘There’s got to be fracking.’ For Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota … your energy jobs are gone if they get in. Just remember I said it.”

– Donald Trump, “Donald Trump White House Rally Speech Transcript October 10: First Event Since COVID Diagnosis.”

Consistency applies to Donald Trump and his energy positions unlike his rival. As such, the American Energy Alliance, the advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research, has endorsed Trump for reelection.

But there are disappointments and room for improvement with Trump energy policy. Ethanol’s continuing grip on the transportation market continues under his watch. Protectionism that reaches the energy industry (steel pipe for pipelines, for example), should be relaxed.…

Given the obvious harm caused by the renewable energy industry’s pricing practices on grid reliability, not to mention other competitors, can regulators find predatory pricing in violation of antitrust law?

Politically correct renewables have become the energy de jour of many politicians, regulators, environmental groups, and members of the public. As such, there is little political will to take on the renewable energy industry. Antitrust regulators have long demonstrated great selectiveness in what companies they target for enforcement of potential violations.

Perhaps the most important reason can be garnered from the Federal Trade Commission’s explanation of predatory pricing:

Can prices ever be “too low?” The short answer is yes, but not very often. Generally, low prices benefit consumers. Consumers are harmed only if below-cost pricing allows a dominant competitor to knock its rivals out of the market and then raise prices to above-market levels for a substantial time.

“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.…