Ken Maize’s recent post arguing for a strong grid instead of a smart one made an important point: the Smart Grid is largely an assortment of tweaks and minor fixes that lets America’s utilities get by with the transmission status quo to cope with the growing demand and integration of intermittent renewables.

Policy should instead aim at a strong grid. Redundancies and “excess” capacity could better maintain reliability and lower delivered power costs in a world of monopoly utilities. It would also facilitate market transactions if competitive retail and wholesale power markets prevail.

Maize has well-founded concerns about how utilities in a smart-grid world will

1) administer their new gizmo-heavy systems;

2) justify the benefits that small consumers will get in return for higher bills, and

3) make up for the prospect for increased vulnerability to innocent or serious hacking.

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.…

Mel Brooks, in his classic comedy The Producers, schemed to make money by over-subscribing shares in a sure-to-fail play. Unfortunately for his character, the play became a smash hit, and all the investors wanted their payouts. Since he had sold well over 100% of the interest in the play, he was in a bit of a pickle.

And so it is with natural gas. Clean, easy to use, abundant—natural gas is everyone’s choice for our energy transition away from oil and coal for power generation, industry, homes, and now transportation. Enter oilman-turned-wind-promoter T. Boone Pickens, with a proposal to move U.S. heavy trucks strongly toward natural gas fuel (as compressed natural gas, or CNG). And to enable the offset, the electricity that is currently generated by such gas (about a 21% market share of power generation, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Annuel Energy Outlook 2009, Table 8) would be supplied by new wind farms, built mostly in the Plains States.…

[Ed. Note: This post, pays tribute to William Niskanen, a principled classical liberal born on this day ninety-one years ago. His view on climate change, in particular, refute the current views of the Niskanen Center, funded by foes of classical liberalism. (The peculiar, revengeful story of founder Jerry Taylor is told here and here.)

The longtime chairman of the Cato Institute, William N. Niskanen (1933–2011), was an academic at the University of California at Berkeley and UCLA; chief economist at Ford Motor Company; noted Public Choice economist; an influential member of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors (1981–85), and chair of the Cato Institute (1985–2008).

Bill and I shared the podium a few times on energy issues, and I admired his Enron project at Cato that resulted in two books, Corporate Aftershock: Lessons from the Collapse of Enron and Other Major Corporations (2003) and After Enron: Lessons for Public Policy (2005).…