Ed. note: This post by Josiah Neeley, originally published at MasterResource in November 2012, predicted the decline of reliable (dispatchable) power a decade before Storm Uri, the subject of yesterday’s post. Meanwhile, climate/renewable activists such as Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle) was calling out the ‘fossil fuel-supporting Chicken Littles‘. Tomlinson (et al.) misinterpreted the event by focusing on the physical ‘why’ instead of the economic ‘why behind the why’ (here, here, and here).

“It is well known that Texas is undergoing a major challenge in maintaining resource adequacy due to improper price signals; less well known is that a significant portion of the problem can be laid directly on the doorstep of subsidies for wind generation.”

The federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), which currently provides a $0.022/kWh subsidy to qualifying renewables, is set to expire at year-end.…

Ed. Note: This week features four posts on the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021, the greatest mal-coordination in U.S. energy history. Today’s introduction is followed by 1) a blackout prediction that came to pass; 2) the fallacy of market failure; 3) a 2025 MasterResource blog recap of the debate; 4) a 2025 IER blog recap of the debate.

Market failure or government failure? The Great Texas Blackout of February 2021 (five years ago) is a case study that will forever be in debate. Why? Because the counterfactual–a real free-market in electricity–was not present (versus ERCOT et al. statism).

Still, never before had a “market failure” of this type occurred in the U.S. electricity market, not even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the free-market era) when the technology to prevent blackouts was much more primitive.…