“It’s unfortunate that the Georgetown [100 percent renewable] experiment went so quickly from being a success story to being something of a cautionary example,” said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.

“Gore wasn’t available for an interview with E&E News last week to discuss the electric situation in Georgetown [Texas].”

It was supposed to be green and cheap, a 25-year fixed-price contract for solar and wind beginning in 2018. Instead, as one news story in October 2019 reported: “After losing tens of millions of citizens’ money on a green energy gamble, city officials are trying to escape their self-inflicted mess.” How? By filing a lawsuit against its solar provider Buckthorn Westex to cancel its 25-year contract. A countersuit by Buckthorn followed.…

“No, frozen wind turbines are not mainly to blame for the massive power outages in Texas. But renewable energy subsidies are.”

“The greatest danger that Texans now face is the political establishment’s continued unwillingness to challenge the renewable-energy lobby. If that happens, the result will be more of the same: increased cost of electricity and decreased reliability of the electric grid. 

Well, that didn’t take long.

The same day Texas started experiencing blackouts in the midst of an unprecedented winter storm, critics started pointing to markets as the problem. Wednesday’s Dallas Morning News ran a Bloomberg Wire story that claimed “The extreme cold appears to have caught Texas’s highly decentralized electricity market by surprise.”

Yes, Texas has experienced significant power outages. But it is not alone. PowerOutage.us shows that Oregon, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia–all with highly regulated electric grids–have also experienced significant outages. …

For the future Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, growing up in Penge, South London, the atrocious weather meant that his bricklayer father was laid off work and no money came in. “There wasn’t enough food to go round, so he’d hit a couple of us, send us to bed without any dinner,” one of Bill’s brothers recalled. ‘Get to bed, don’t argue!’”

The rationing coupons that still had to be presented for everything from eggs to pieces of scraggy Argentine meat, from petrol to bed linen and “economy” suits, seemed far more squalid and unjust than during the war.

It’s a winter snow/ice emergency across Texas, where the state’s electricity planners have failed millions of consumers, particularly in energy-capital Houston.

Amid the frozen wind turbines and disincentives to reliable, baseload generation (coal in particular), our prosperity will pull us through.…

“… to a significant extent man commands as well the very destiny of this planet where he lives, and the destiny of all life upon it.”

“In order to have both environmental quality and an improving standard of living, we will need to develop new clean energy sources and to learn to use energy more efficiently.”

– President Richard Nixon (February 8, 1972)

Government grows with emergencies, real or imagined. There have been wartime emergencies, such as World War II. And there have been Malthusian ’emergencies’–as in resource exhaustion in the 1970s and climate change today.

Forty-nine years ago today, amid a natural gas shortage (from long-standing price controls), and with tightening oil markets (from his price controls), President Nixon gave a “Special Message to Congress Outlining the 1972 Environmental Program.”…