“[Texas] energy infrastructure, overseen by agencies whose top priorities seem to be keeping the energy markets happy, gets neglected. Such neglect, deadly as we have seen, is a crime — or it ought to be.” (Houston Chronicle editorial board, April 4, 2021)

The grand failure of Texas’s power grid under legislative/regulator/expert control is a case study in political economy.

The mainstream narrative combines an Act of God (weather) with private-side failure (non-weatherization). But electricity, while mostly under private ownership, is one of the most highly regulated industries in the U.S. It does not operate in an unhampered market.

Don’t blame God or Market Man–blame the system, the regulated system. Many posts at MasterResource have laid blame, brick-by-brick, on contrived versus real free markets and, more generally, on anti-fossil-fuel planning.…

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.…

“One wonders what might have happened if over the last 20 years or so investors and generators had not been chasing the $21 billion worth of subsidies and benefits they received by building renewable generation in Texas.”

“With economics being about the unseen, not only the seen, it is fair to imagine a more robust, resilient power sector without the grand distraction of integrating intermittent renewables and otherwise ‘decarbonizing.'”

Much debate has ensued since Texas’s rolling blackouts last month in the face of an historic winter storm.

Poor winterization, lack of integration with the national grid, bureaucrats, deregulation, Enron (Ken Lay), and frozen natural gas pipelines have been targeted by politicians and media pundits.

However, the mainstream does not discuss the central player, renewable energies, except to say wind and solar were not the cause.…

“There are far too few heroes and far too many failures in the history of presidential energy politics.”

Who can claim to be a true energy President from a pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, pro-free-market perspective?

Which U.S. heads qualify for an anti-energy label for violating economics 101–and endangering the health and welfare of all of us who rely on the MasterResource?

Of the 30 or so candidates in the Lincoln-to-Biden era (the first commercial oil well dates from 1859), just a few names compete for the best, while many more vie for the worst.

Two Best: Trump and Reagan

The best two from a classical liberal perspective are Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. A third candidate just does not come to mind, certainly in the modern energy era.…