“This seems a little crazy. During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power…. You could … build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.”
Some 15 years ago, Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem commented on a strange phenomenon–negative pricing by wind power, where operators with very low marginal costs (the wind is free) were paying takers per KWh to gain big tax credits, mostly federal.
Giberson’s analysis (reposted below) identified the malinvestment and ‘big anti-conservation incentive’. But he did not focus on what cumulatively would result from this distortion: a wounded Texas grid from chronic low prices/margins knocking out thermal generation. The unreliables–via government privilege– knocking out the reliables (what Bill Peacock would call predatory pricing).…
The Library of Congress’s Oil and Gas Industry: A Research Guide lists
It is reprinted below as a quick look at Energy Leviathan. Needless to say, in a free market, with the separation of government and energy, with the military functions transferred to the U.S. Department of Defense, this alphabet soup would not exist.
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U.S. Regulatory Agencies
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the primary body that regulates oil and gas companies, although a number of other federal offices oversee specific components of the oil and gas industry.
BLM regulates federal onshore lands.…
“Preference for warmer regions has been a key determinant of internal population shifts in the United States and other industrialized countries in the post-World War II era. Internal migrations toward the Sunbelt have been eased by science and technology developments that, for example, cooled torrid summer air and controlled malaria in the South, and along the Gulf coast.” (National Academy of Sciences, below)
The mainstream media war against the green greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), cannot negate the most settled part of the climate change debate. Into the 1990s, it was accepted practice to present the scientific consensus of the beneficial qualities of CO2 on the planet. Given its relevance for today’s debate, it is worth revisiting the National Academy of Sciences, et al., Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1992).…