Texas and Europe don’t have a lot in common. But when it comes to government support for renewable energy, the Lone Star state has followed the same course as many European nations.

In the late 1990s, while the European Union was urging member nations to adopt targets for the percentage of their energy produced from renewable sources, Texas enacted a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandating that the state’s competitive electric providers buy a minimum 2,000 MW of qualifying renewable energy by 2009. The purchase mandate was part of a broad electricity restructuring bill sponsored by Enron Corp., parent of Enron Wind Corporation, a story detailed elsewhere at MasterResource.

The Texas Legislature, with the support of Governor Rick Perry, later increased the RPS to 10,000-MW by 2025. Texas met this target for installed wind capacity in 2010, a full fifteen years ahead of schedule.…

Last December, Texas governor Rick Perry, speaking at a Houston fundraiser, sadly noted how President George W. Bush had lost his way in Washington, D.C. His good friend had compromised his principles and left the nation in a lurch, however unintentionally.

But then the governor launched into his Texas-is-great stump speech that included kudos to windpower, a new large industry (no) thanks to a legislative mandate requiring that Texas electricity retailers purchase qualifying renewable energy. (Wind is the most economical of the qualifiers.) The 1999 mandate, enacted with the crucial help of Enron lobbyists, was increased in 2002 with a powerful wind lobby at work. And so at  the point of a gun, Texas became the leading windpower state in the country, passing California along the way.

So it was not surprising that last Saturday night Gov.…

“… I also know this credit won’t go on forever. It was never meant to, and it shouldn’t…. I have expressed support in the past for a responsible, multi-year phase out of the wind tax credit. But…”

– Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an original author of the 1992 Production Tax Credit (PTC)

Special government favor has propped up solar power since the 1970s and wind power since the early 1990s. One decade turning into the next, the (not-so) “clean energy” lobby has repeatedly made promises that their technologies are, or soon will be, competitive with electricity generated from natural gas, petroleum, or coal.

Documentation of this failure is well reported here at MasterResource and by the Institute for Energy Research. This particular post reproduces in large part a 2015 piece by the American Energy Alliance (IER), “Wind Fail: 20 Quotes for 30 Years of False Hopes.”…

Ed note: The following repost of “BP’s Fall From Grace“(December 2010) by Kevin Mooney is testament to the energy realism of Exxon’s Lee Raymond over the image-over-substance approach of John Browne of BP and Ken Lay of Enron. The lesson is clear: false causes and political correctness result in wasted resources and ecological loss. Part III tomorrow (Part I was yesterday) concludes this week’s tribute to the top integrated oil major leader of his generation.

Once simply called British Petroleum, BP transformed its corporate identity into an international ‘green energy’ company with a sunburst logo and the tag line “Beyond Petroleum.” Environmental groups applauded when BP’s CEO gave credence to alarmist global warming assertions. Little did they know that the company’s rhetorical overtures to green causes deflected attention away from its reckless and irresponsible practices that jeopardized worker health and safety and ultimately resulted in death and devastation in the Gulf of Mexico.…