Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.

There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…

W. S. Jevons in his early day recognized a central problem of windpower for powering machinery–intermittency. The wind does not always blow, and it cannot be known when this will occur, making an even flow of power (as from conventional sources) impossible short of cost-prohibitive battery backup.

What about the other renewables of the day: water power, biomass, and geothermal?…

The most important book ever written on energy economics was published in 1865 by William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Company). This classic is out of print but available in its entirety on the Internet. It is well worth reading. The book marks the birth of an entire discipline, and Jevons’s remarkably sophisticated treatment of energy sustainability remains pertinent today. In a real sense, the Biden approach to energy was refuted by the insight of W. S. Jevons almost 150 years ago.

Jevons makes four points regarding windpower. …

Ed. note: The Great Texas Blackout four years ago triggered a social media debate that reconfirmed ‘classical liberal’ Lynne Kiesling as an advocate of centrally planned, highly regulated electricity. It also revealed a cadre of electricity planners who bristled at the argument that government failed, including Eric Schubert and Robert Borlick. The exchanges began a debate that led the author to write a free-market primer, Free Market Electricity, to resurrect the 1960s tradition of such names as Harold Demsetz, George Stigler, Milton Friedman, and Walter Primeaux.

Lynne Kiesling (above) came roaring out the gate on Blackout Day February 16, 2021. But ‘the queen of power markets‘ was wrong. The Electric Reliability Commission of Texas (ERCOT) was government–and at the center of the worst electricity crisis in history.…