“The supply of oil from [East Texas] was so great that at one time crude oil sank to 10 or 15 cents a barrel, and gasoline was sold in the East Texas field for 2 1/8¢ a gallon. Enforcement by Texas of its proration law was extremely difficult.”
Okay, this is Throughback Tuesday, not Thursday. But some energy history is good from time-to-time on any day of the week. And here in the summer of 2021, with oil prices swinging a bit on a lot of different news, it might surprise the reader that the traditional problem here in the U.S. has been too much oil, not not enough.
Here is the story in the 1920s/1930s as recalled in an antitrust suit under the Sherman Act, United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co.…
Continue Reading“By the end of the book, I could no longer shake the feeling she just might be right on the big thing. RTOs may be producing an increasingly fragile grid.”
Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid is a likeable, sometimes irritating book. Or maybe an irritating, sometimes likeable book. I cannot decide. Angwin’s book offers an introduction to and assessment of the Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that since the late 1990s have come to coordinate use of the transmission grid for about two-thirds of the electric power consumed in the United States.
Her view: RTOs are dominated by insiders who skew the system their direction at every chance, reaping profits while shirking responsibility for reliability. As a result we have an increasingly fragile, unreliable grid.
When Angwin’s book was published in 2020 it may have seemed alarmist.…
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