“The answer to ensuring a reliable and affordable supply of electricity in Texas is not more subsidies, it is less subsidies. It is getting politicians out of the electricity business.” (Bill Peacock, below)

“The conundrum is that the greater the overall share of renewables in the energy mix, the more customers will have to spend on these largely redundant backups.” (Financial Times, below)

Economists have warned against central planning where a government monopoly is invoked and decisions are made from the center. Free-market analysts also long warned Texas that the government-enabled takeover of the grid with wind and solar (dilute, intermittent all) would cripple the ability of the reliables (gas-fired, coal-fired, and nuclear) to make the grid stable and secure, short of ‘Acts of God.’

But Acts of Political Man won out, and the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021 happened.…

Ed. Note: In mid-2019, MasterResource published a post on a notable political capitalist in the history of the energy industry, the late James E. Rogers, longtime CEO of Duke Energy. With that company’s rolling blackouts (“load shedding”) over Christmas weekend for a half-million customers “for the first time in the utility’s history“, it is worth remembering the damage done to free markets and electric reliability by the political track chosen by one executive. (The post is reproduced below with minor edits.)

At 41 [in 1988], [James Rogers] was named CEO of PSI Energy Inc., a small, financially troubled Indiana utility. Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, he supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. “Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,” he said later.

This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turns a quarter-century old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP27’s recent failure making COP28’s prospects look grim.

Palmisano’s memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded. The story of Enron as the darling of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.…

My LinkedIn account was reinstated, so I must be extra polite and stay scholarly with my politically incorrect, intellectually defensible views. Wish me luck! (below)

At LinkedIn, I have vigorously but politely engaged critics in the energy/climate debate with both posts and comments. LinkedIn, by way of background, is a business/employment online service owned by Microsoft. Started in 2003, the social media site involves 830 million professionals from more than 200 countries and territories, according to Wiki.

In the last year, I upgraded my LinkedIn membership and began following dozens of organizations with differing views (United Nations Environmental, Climate Professionals, etc.). I have 2,600 followers and have attracted several thousand views to some of my posts. Given that some of these post are picked up by the mega-site WUWT, the world’s most viewed website, this is good reach.…