“Artificially low electricity prices offered by renewable generators in Texas have led to bankruptcy for non-renewable generators, including Panda Temple Power, Energy Future Holdings, and Exelon Generation Texas Power.”

While sellers offer special promotions, negative prices in electricity markets make no sense except in the context of renewable energy subsidies. ERCOT explains the anomaly:

Market prices tend to go negative when there is low consumer demand and the thermal generators that have chosen to remain online cannot be backed down further to allow the available, lower-cost wind generation to serve consumer demand. In situations like this, some wind generators will be curtailed to balance generation with load. In these cases, since wind is the marginal generation, it sets the market price, which may be low or negative. In 2017, system-wide negative pricing occurred during 64 hours; in 2018, as of August, during 30 hours.

“Wind and solar generators often are low bidders in the [ERCOT] market not because their capital, operational, or marginal costs are lower. Their bids reflects special tax subsidies that result in the ability to underprice relative to the competition.”

Renewable energy generators are driving other, more reliable sources of energy out of the Texas electricity market. The reason is straightforward. Renewable generators often undercut the prices of their competitors by selling electricity below their costs, and even their marginal costs, to gain market share.

In many ways, this behavior is similar to predatory pricing, one of the classic “anticompetitive” behaviors in antitrust theory. But unlike in free markets where predatory pricing is difficult and rare, government intervention has uniquely set up intermittent wind power to ruin the economics of reliable, conventional power.…