“It is time to do now what was not done in 1999 in Texas. First, deregulate the electricity market, do not re-regulate it under a new regime. That means removing public utility regulation of rates and other terms of service, as well as end the franchise protection over geographical territory.”
The Texas Electric Utility Restructuring Act of 1999 is approaching a quarter-century. And what a mess has resulted from the misnomer “electricity deregulation.” A monopoly wholesale market under mandatory open-access rules is central planning pure and simple. The idea that a ‘competitive’ retail market rescues a governmental wholesale market from the knowledge problem and politicization (per Lynne Kiesling, Michael Giberson, etc.) has been turned upside down in Texas and elsewhere.
I was reminded of this upon reading a 500-word commentary from Doug Sheridan on LinkedIn.…
Continue ReadingEd. Note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnighly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete Newsletter for this post can be found here.
Greed Energy Economics:
*** Don’t believe the renewables myth: Wind and Solar are not cheap
Chinese manufacturers dominate wind power, taking 60% of global market
Unreliables: Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
*** Video: Assoc Prof Simon Michaux – The quantity of metals required to manufacture just one generation of renewables
*** Carnage of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction Elsewhere acceptable to Wealthy Countries
Unreliables (General):
*** Residents vs Town Council re Solar and Wind Facilities
*** Green Breakdown—The Coming Renewable Energy Failure
*** The Grid as an Energy Weapon — Massive Lithium Storage Centers Spread
*** The Prophet of Power Density
*** There is no green ‘transition’ to renewable energy.…
“The border tax adjustment would be hugely complex given the international supply-chain system, leading to an increase in the attendant bureaucracy even if the regulatory bureaucracy is reduced in size.”
“The CLC proposal is poor conceptually and deeply unserious.”
Six years ago, economist Ben Zycher, the John Searle chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), published an analysis that rings true today–if not more true. “The Deeply-Flawed Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax,” subtitled “’Conservatives’ Endorse the Broken-Windows Fallacy, Reject Evidence and Rigor,” outlined the arguments that once-proud Resources for the Future would not.
Zycher’s piece employed Economics 101 to refute a proposal from the Climate Leadership Council, the Baker-Shultz ‘Carbon Dividends Plan’, that attempted to fool Republicans and conservatives that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a pollutant that the U.S.…
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