Plant Boondoggle (Georgia Power’s Vogtle 3 & 4)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 18, 2021

“In a press release today, Georgia Power announced that the long delayed Plant Vogtle expansion will be delayed even further. Unit 3, which has just finished a critical testing cycle, is now expected to be in service in the second quarter of 2022, and Unit 4 in the first quarter of 2023.”
– The Augusta Chronicle, July 29, 2021.

In “Vogtle News,” a website from Georgia Power, a wholly owned subsidiary of Southern Company, all seems swell with progress updates. But the real truth is that the construction of Plant Vogtle 3 & 4 is a boondoggle that has all but sidetracked nuclear as a major electric generation source for the foreseeable future.

It’s a mess. Original contractor Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt in 2017, which left the AP1000 (‘passive design’) project with Southern Nuclear, a subsidiary of the Southern Company.…

Too Much Oil: Revisiting the 1930s Texas/Oklahoma Bonanza (throwback Tuesday)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 17, 2021

“The supply of oil from [East Texas] was so great that at one time crude oil sank to 10 or 15 cents a barrel, and gasoline was sold in the East Texas field for 2 1/8¢ a gallon. Enforcement by Texas of its proration law was extremely difficult.”

Okay, this is Throughback Tuesday, not Thursday. But some energy history is good from time-to-time on any day of the week. And here in the summer of 2021, with oil prices swinging a bit on a lot of different news, it might surprise the reader that the traditional problem here in the U.S. has been too much oil, not not enough.

Here is the story in the 1920s/1930s as recalled in an antitrust suit under the Sherman Act, United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co.…

“Energy Facism” (Rothbard 1974 speaks to us today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 16, 2021

“When the black day of August 15, 1971 arrived, we free-market economists predicted that shortages of all sorts of products would result from the price control…. On the day of the freeze, everything seem[ed] to be functioning smoothly, and so the general mood [was] one of euphoric success.”

“When Tricky Dick imposed Phase I in August, 1971, price inflation was proceeding at something like a rate of 4% per year. Now, after 4 1/2 ‘phases’ of varying degrees of price dictation, and continued monetary inflation by the government, we are suffering a price inflation rate of something like 10% per year.”

August 15, 1971, was the day that President Richard Nixon shocked the country, and indeed the world, with a price control order. Everything—all goods and services, as well as wages and interest rates—were frozen for 90 days.…