Many 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.

Ed note: Power shortages in California in 2020 and Texas in 2021 have exposed the limits to renewable energy for a reliable grid. The post below complements prior analysis here and here.

“The apparent difference between SDG&E [no blackouts] and PG&E [blackouts] can be attributed to the greater proportion of decentralized green power cooperatives in PG&E’s service area that relied on a greater percentage of green power.”

The anti-energy environmental lobby concluded that natural gas-fired power plants failed during California’s blackouts last summer and should be phased out. But empirical investigation reaches an opposite conclusion, questioning the future of dilute, intermittent energies.

Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and the California Environmental Justice Alliance in the article “Gas Is Failing in California: Time to Move On” (Utility Dive: April 16, 2021) accuse the Wall Street Journal and gas “industry voices” of fear-mongering about renewable’s role in the state’s blackouts during the region’s southwest summer heat wave of 2020.…

“Soon enough, citizens and voters will wise up to the false promises and cronyism of political energy. MasterResource will be an intellectual resource to help win the day for the master resource and the human ingenuity behind it.”

There is life outside of energy research and related public policy. I discovered some of it during the last ten days with limited responsibilities on the avocation/vocation front. But it is time to re-engage–and take time to look back and forward.

A Look Back

MasterResource, “a free market energy blog,” just turned twelve years old. In our inaugural post (December 26, 2008), I wrote:

We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items.

“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.…