“Our Founder and CEO John Berger reminds us why this event is so pivotal: Sunnova and our dealer partners are uniting to tackle the U.S. power demand shortage with American-made solar solutions.🤝”

Previous posts (here, here, and here) have detailed how a second-hander company, trying to be all things to all people, and living off of special government subsidies, was a liability parading as an asset. Sunnova was never profitable, and the only winners among the countless thousands involved with the company were founder and CEO John Berger (inflated salary and cashouts) and some other executives paid for misallocating resources.

Having been at Enron from the beginning to the end, and seeing the similarities of Enron and Sunnova (both went down with the lights on), and knowing Berger was a Ken Lay-alike, I gathered (below) some pictures of the company’s hyperbole in action.…

“Climate action is a cornerstone of our business strategy and our commitment to sustainability.”

“At Sunnova, we have worked diligently to embed responsibility, sustainability and risk management into everything that we do….. The transition to a net-zero economy is one that we are determined to realize. It requires innovation, bold action, thoughtfulness, and alignment with leading climate science, all without sacrificing affordability, resilience, and energy equity.” (2023 Sustainability Report)

Here are the (nauseating) highlights of the Houston-based rooftop solar leader, Sunnova Energy (NOVA). Once sporting a stock price in the 50s per share, it is now a penny stock, a story briefly told here.

Politically correct, economically incorrect, the business plan of Enron-ex CEO John Berger was all about living off of special taxpayer favors. And in the Enron tradition, its 95-page EGS report was all about imaging and political posturing.…

“On the 15th anniversary of the BP blowout, the real takeaway is that oil companies that think they are ‘beyond petroleum’ are value destroyers for shareholders and for the environment.”

Every April commemorates BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 2010). To the anti-energy Left, Deepwater Horizon is the epitome of oil-gone-bad, coming some 21 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It was not supposed to happen again, but ….

The sad facts of Deepwater Horizon will forever remain; the multiple failures behind the seafloor accident meticulously documented. But a paradox remains. Mighty BP, captained by John Browne, the leading “environmentalist” of the petroleum industry, created a corporate culture that resulted in lax safety and environmental protocols. By saving about $5 million out of $100+ million in drilling costs, the company ended up paying out in excess of $60 billion.…

Ed. Note: Four years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.

It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences.

Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:

If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.”