Robert Michaels has specialized in electricity and natural gas over the decades, in addition to antitrust law. Professor of Economics at California State University, Fullerton, Dr. Michaels is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and has contributed many posts to MasterResource.
Q. Robert, you have spent decades in the regulatory fields of antitrust and of energy. How did it all begin?
A. Like so many of life’s better stories, it started with randomness. Around 1980 I moved from Washington, DC to the reality of a southern California mortgage. At the time I was working on the industrial organization of the mainframe computer market for some academic publications to help me get tenure at California State University, Fullerton.
I got a call from a former classmate about my possible interest in expert work in what would turn out to be a major antitrust case regarding an electric utility.…
Continue Reading“It is in the national interest to promote clean and safe development of our Nation’s vast energy resources, while at the same time avoiding regulatory burdens that unnecessarily encumber energy production, constrain economic growth, and prevent job creation.”
– President Trump, Executive Order (March 28, 2017)
Do you miss the prior Administration’s record on energy and climate–and push-back against environmental excesses otherwise?
With the Biden Administration scrambling to hoist an anti-consumer energy/climate agenda on Americans on short notice, it is important to keep the opportunity cost of free markets and America-first in mind.
Four years ago, President Trump signed into law one of the most libertarian, free-market executive orders in energy history, easily rivaling that of President Reagan’s oil price and allocation decontrol executive order of early 1981. Titled Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth, Executive Order 13783 began with this paragraph:
… Continue ReadingSection 1.
“The physical operation of the grid can be separated from the economic decisions of what power is generated, transmitted, and sold at wholesale or retail in terms of quantity, cost, and price.”
“Mistakes by ERCOT or the PUCT or Texas legislature make my point–this is a planning failure, not a market failure. Not physics but economics. A historian is weighing evidence about this either being a market or government failure. It is a government failure writ large.” (Bradley, below)
Electricity is different. Power flows must the centrally managed. Ergo, regulators and politicians must manage the grid.
WRONG. The physical operation of the grid can be separated from the economic decisions of what power is generated, transmitted, and sold at wholesale or retail in terms of quantity, cost, and price. Companies themselves, vertically and horizontally integrated, what might be called electricity majors, is the opportunity cost of the present regulatory regime.…
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