“The golden era of American energy is now underway.” (President Donald Trump, The White House, May 14, 2019)
… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. (President Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, LA, May 14, 2019)
Who has been the most free-market energy President in U.S. history? In modern times, Ronald Reagan comes to mind. He decontrolled crude oil and petroleum products in his first week of office (January 1981), although Jimmy Carter’s phase-out of such regulation had just six months to go. Reagan did some other things to undo a decade of energy statism but fell short of his election goal of abolishing the US Department of Energy. [1]
Enter Donald Trump.…
Continue ReadingBy making federal certification more politicized, interstate natural-gas pipelines have had to spend additional money to defend their position, courts have become more burdened, and environmentalists have spent large sums of money…. These costs would seem to overwhelm any benefits: Demanding that FERC considers climate change is destined for failure.
The U.S. natural gas industry has enjoyed a great run over the past decades, continuing its stellar history upon the end of wellhead price controls several decades ago. The transition of interstate gas transmission to mandatory open access was also successful, freeing the commodity from public-utility regulation to introduce real-time scarcity pricing.
The natural gas sector has contributed greatly to the U.S. economy by creating quality jobs and reducing household and business energy bills on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.…
Continue Reading“Open-cycle (peak) gas plants are the most common asset used to backstop wind and solar intermittency. However, as the wind and solar capacity increases, the incentive for a private company to invest in such assets declines to the point where the operator of the electric system must provide a subsidy to the construction of gas plants capable of providing electricity on very short notice.”
A number of utilities are trying to become 100% carbon free in their production of electricity by relying on renewable sources of energy.
I am not at all certain what this means. Often the only sources of renewable electricity are wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, and, to a much lesser extent, geothermal. (Iceland is the only country relying on geothermal.)
Both wind and solar energy suffer from what is known as intermittency, because winds have a nasty habit of suddenly dying or springing up, while the sun will disappear behind clouds and provides no power at night.…
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