“… communications between different regulatory agencies as the event approached were inadequate. Transparency regarding the location of natural gas supply infrastructure was atrocious.”

“Currently Texas is #1 in the nation in terms of existing wind capacity. It is also #1 in terms of planned capacity additions for wind and solar, and #2 in the nation for planned battery capacity additions. However, there is little-to-no planned capacity addition for other forms of dispatchable generation. This could become an issue for reliability.” (Baker Institute, study, below)

There is not only government failure in the quest to address market failure. There is analytic failure in identifying market failure that government is empowered to correct. Restated, problems attributed to markets are often the result of prior government intervention on close inspection.

This is true with some classic examples in the energy field, from the origins of public utility regulation of electricity to oil overproduction under the ‘rule of capture’, stories for another day.…

“Although many may think the New England region is immune to an energy crisis past summer, winter peak demand is the issue.”

“New Englanders are largely unaware that the light at the end of the clean energy transition tunnel is not a train, it’s a blackout.”

Europe is facing an existential crisis – having sufficient affordable heat and electricity this winter for its populations. People are not only suffering ahead of winter’s arrival, but the likelihood of people dying because of this crisis is growing.

A similar challenge is being faced in many U.S. power markets. Can the worst of the potential outcomes be avoided, or are we on a path that will only worsen for our residents?

Warnings …

In May of this year, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) commissioner Mark Christie said the country was “headed for a reliability crisis.”…

“Imagine if the media was reversed on the climate/energy issue, supporting and promoting a free-market, classical-liberal position. They could look at my boxes of files from the Enron days (1990s) and produce an exposé, Enron Knew.”

Back at Enron Corp., I had “email wars” with the company’s climate lobbyist, John Palmisano, the author of the infamous “This agreement will be good for Enron stock” Kyoto Protocol memo. Enron had at least a half-dozen profit centers that stood to benefit from CO2 restrictions, inspiring the activism that led Jeremy Leggett [The Carbon War (Penguin: 1999), p. 204] to identify Enron as “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.”

The Palmisano/Bradley exchanges concerned regulating and pricing carbon dioxide. I was against; Palmisano for.…

“In its Ahab-like focus on harpooning ExxonMobil, the BBC missed an opportunity to explore the enormous challenges involved in replacing fossil fuels. The costs of ignoring those challenges may well be tragically put on display this winter when Europeans face freezing temperatures with nothing but BBC-approved power systems to keep them warm.”

In Episodes 1 and 2 of its three-part documentary, Big Oil vs The World, the BBC succeeded only in demonstrating its own bias. Time and again, viewers were presented with only one side of a many-sided issue. Episode 3 is no exception. This episode’s main narrative is that, for years, oil companies have touted natural gas as a clean alternative to coal, but poor execution has largely offset the benefits.

Per unit of energy generated, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal.…