“From time to time a statute gets written with a really good intention but reality does not follow that intention. That’s why we’re looking at these rules and regulations from a common-sense approach, we’re looking to get the best result we can.”

– DOE Secretary Rick Perry, quoted in Politico, July 16, 2019.

“According to Consumer Reports, the highest-ranked was an electric heat pump water with an average price of $1,200 (twice that of the runner-up gas water heater) and an average annual operating cost of $240. Second place was an apparently ordinary gas water heater with an average price of $600 and an average annual operating cost of $245.” (below)

On July 11, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) and request for comments on a petition by the natural gas industry (a.k.a.…

Bradley has tackled a vast and dynamic energy landscape through the big prism of Enron. He was wise to include necessary contexts for 15 chapters of markets and personalities. Navigating FERC deregulation orders over a decade was a fearsome writing task, done well. Pipeline and power plant deals at home and abroad; solar, wind, and other alternative energies, the list goes on. Politics in Austin, Washington, DC, and foreign capitals. Enron was everywhere.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. has written a very important book about Houston’s most controversial company. This is the first of a two-volume corporate biography chronicling the rise, fall, and aftermath of Enron; his tetralogy has already produced a book on worldview (Capitalism at Work: 2009) and prehistory (Edison to Enron: 2011).

Few observers have been as ideally located to chronicle this modern-day version of a Greek tragedy.…

There was shock, surprise, and humor in the media when Trump not only denounced wind “mills” for intermittency, lack of predictable value, property losses, and bird kills but also topped his discussion with

“They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Is President Trump correct in his five critical points? Even the last one? Or is it possible, as Trevor Noah suggested, turbines might be the only things that don’t cause cancer.

1. Intermittency

Electricity must be consumed the moment it is produced. Storage to allow deviations is prohibitively expensive in all but the rarest of settings. And it has always been this way.

Trump said, “Honey I’d like to watch TV tonight: are the turbines working?” And then his quotation from the Washington Republican fundraiser:

“Is the wind blowing?…

“Veering from this original intent of regulation — driven by overreaching politics — risks regulators’ ability to achieve their core objective of protecting consumers…. Unfulfilling these core obligations constitutes what I and others consider regulatory failure that raises doubts on the social desirability of public utility regulation.”

“… subsidies — often the result of increased politicization — can be unfair to funding parties (namely, ratepayers), economically inefficient, and unfair to competing energy sources.  One common bizarre practice is for electric utilities to subsidize their customers to use less of their service via energy efficiency initiatives….”

Public utility regulation falls within the lexicon economic regulation with its main objective to protect consumers from  the monopoly power of a utility. The presumption is that public utilities provide essential services that require strong service obligations and price controls.…