Fiction: “All signs are that cheap solar power is coming and that’s really good news”. — Ronald Bailey, Reason.

Fact: “California’s rollout of solar baseload power, advertised as cheap and otherwise worthy, failed despite a raft of government subsidies. Think rolling blackouts, time-of-use price spikes, and dropped green-related powerline fire disasters.” (below)

Fact: “Like running out of oil, solar predictions are perennial and wrong.” (below)

Ronald Bailey, a libertarian science writer at Reason Magazine online, has for years claimed that “unlimited free solar power” is the wave of the future.  Thus, it comes as no surprise that he has recently posed the question “Is King Solar Now the Cheapest Electricity Source Ever?”  His conclusion is yes, and “that’s really good news”.

To energy experts, this is new news.…

“Cal-ISO reported for August 14 … a sudden, unplanned 1,098-megawatt ‘forced’ loss of wind power on that day from the Alta Wind Energy Center in Tehachapi serving Southern California….”

“Cal-ISO formed a Western regional Energy Imbalancing Market in 2014 … to provide power during its daily ‘two-hour energy crisis’ at sunset when solar power cuts out (called the Duck Curve).”

Writing in Forbes magazine online, journalist Ken Silverstein claims that “Green Energy is Not Among the Culprits Behind California’s Energy Crisis”. Who is this author, and what is his logic and evidence?

Silverstein has written several non-fiction titles for Verso Books, a publishing house dedicated to radical leftism. He is one of the promulgators of the media myth that Enron caused the California Energy Crisis of 2001, notwithstanding the Enron officials who were convicted of accounting fraud.…

“If we believe that somehow the market is going to take care of this, that you put a price on carbon and everything will sort itself out, or that we can shame companies into doing it, then I think we’re kidding ourselves. This needs a very significant interventionist approach and all industries have to be part of the intervention.”

– Ben van Beurden, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell. Quoted in Akshat Rathi and Laura Hurst, “Look Who’s Talking About Zero Emissions.” (Bloomberg: June 9, 2020)

Enron’s Ken Lay. BP’s John Browne. Duke Energy’s James E. Rogers. T. Boone Pickens. GE’s Jeff Immelt. And now Shell’s Ben van Beurden.

Welcome to the swamp of political correctness when industry leaders morph into apologists for mineral energies and endorse open-ended government intervention for forced energy transformation from dense, reliable energies to dilute, intermittent ones.…

“Speaking truth to Greenout Power substitutes economic correctness for political correctness…. Go Chevron! The global and U.S. market share of fossil-fueled energy is 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively.”

The loaded title: “Chevron’s Answer to Climate Change Is to Keep Drilling for Oil” (August 13, 2020). The condemnatory subtitle from Bloomberg Green’s Kevin Crowley and Bryan Gruley: “The energy giant believes it can still wring years of profits from fossil fuels while its European rivals embrace renewables.”

Go Chevron! The global and U.S. market share of fossil-fueled energy is 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively. And these percentages could well increase, not decrease, due to strong consumer demand for dense, reliable energies–and taxpayer fatigue for inferior substitutes (wind, solar, ethanol, batteries/EVs).

Fossil-fuel optimism is not only realistic but a great story.…