“Clearly the work of the U.S. Government laboratories played a crucial role in wind resource assessment and critically needed impetus to technology development―a role the private sector viewed as either too risky or representing an inadequate business opportunity. NREL has led and nurtured wind technology toward commercial viability since the 1970s and, in my view, this work represents one of the best return-on-investments in energy technology ever made by Uncle Sam.”
– Jim Dehlsen, the founder of Zond Energy Systems (2003)
Enron might have saved the US wind industry in the mid-to-late 1990s. It began with its purchase of Zond Energy Systems in late 1996. At the time, Zond was in financial trouble, and its main domestic competitor, Kenetech, was in worse shape and would soon declare bankruptcy.
With Enron’s capital (and reputation at the time), the renamed Enron Wind Corp.…
Continue ReadingPrinceton scientist Michael Oppenheimer calls The Climate Hustle movie “dangerous.” Bill Nye, The Science Guy, gently mocked in the movie, Climate Hustle, says: “It’s not in the world’s interest.” (For more reviews, see here.)
Climate Hustle, the soon-to-be iconic culture-busting documentary that previewed last evening in theaters around America, pops gaping holes in the anthropogenic climate change monolithic narrative. It bares all about the issues that the other side does not want to raise, much less debate.
To read Michael Oppenheimer’s bio, you might assume he knows a thing or two about climate change. However, his condemnation of the movie, Climate Hustle, is curious as well as downright bizarre. Climate Hustle, after all, is full of humor, some slapstick, possibly “most important movie of the year,” and as rousing a debunking of climate change hysteria as possibly we have seen.…
Continue Reading“Expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be throwing good money after bad. Instead of remaining a valuable asset mired in the political swamp, the SPR can be turned into an entrepreneurial asset. The reserve can be privatized by selling off either the entire operation or its individual parts.” – RLB (1991)
Good analysis on empirical matters, even from long ago (a quarter-century in this case) must stand the test of time.
It is regular fare at MasterResource to document the false claims of energy Malthusians (neo-Malthusians) from the 1970s until the present (now in their fifth decade!). And from time to time, MasterResource produces analyses from the past by free-market scholars for their relevancy and accuracy for current energy debates.
The example below, from 1991, is a quarter-century old. It concerns the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a forgotten, obsolete oil stockpile that could disappear tomorrow and not be noticed by the market.…
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