Search Results for: "Ken Lay"
Relevance | DateDenton, TX: Grid Reliability Sinks Renewables
By Wayne Lusvardi -- August 4, 2021 No CommentsMany 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.
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.…
Continue Reading“Off Target”: Bad Economics of the Climate Crusade (mitigation not supported by mainstream analysis)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 30, 2021 No Comments“Although advocacy of aggressive climate-change policies is often draped with the mantle of science, mainstream economists who follow the scientific literature have shown that the popular 1.5°C policy target will pose costs that far exceed the benefits, and that the emission reductions flowing from strict adherence to the 1.5°C target would be worse for the world than doing nothing at all.” (Murphy and McKitrick, below)
Adaptation, not mitigation, has long been the answer of climate economics for climate policy. In fact, at lower climate sensitivity estimates, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are thought to be a positive externality, in the jargon of economics, not a negative requiring government correction.
A new study by Robert P. Murphy and Ross McKitrick, Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5C Climate Ceiling, explains this to professional economists and the climate intelligentia alike.…
Continue ReadingField Notes on the Futile Climate Crusade
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 27, 2021 1 Comment” … there can be no near term CO2 solution without changes to the Chinese plan. It will only get worse, while we impose increasingly harsh penalties on others with diminishing returns.”
“Thanks captain obvious on the China data point. What’s your beef? Tariffs? Counter-veiling duties? Unequal market access? Pretending to be middle income country? Human rights? Corruption? Market manipulation? Disdain for property rights? Closed-competition? State-control. Or, something else? What exactly are you getting at?”
Imagine if you could listen in to what the climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists are really thinking. Behind closed doors, with their hopes and fears in the open, one commiserating with the other. Some lifting up others. And trying to prevent defections to a lost cause amid a sea of ecological tradeoffs and contradictions.
It is not easy being green.…
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