“When the black day of August 15, 1971 arrived, we free-market economists predicted that shortages of all sorts of products would result from the price control…. On the day of the freeze, everything seem[ed] to be functioning smoothly, and so the general mood [was] one of euphoric success.”

“When Tricky Dick imposed Phase I in August, 1971, price inflation was proceeding at something like a rate of 4% per year. Now, after 4 1/2 ‘phases’ of varying degrees of price dictation, and continued monetary inflation by the government, we are suffering a price inflation rate of something like 10% per year.”

August 15, 1971, was the day that President Richard Nixon shocked the country, and indeed the world, with a price control order. Everything—all goods and services, as well as wages and interest rates—were frozen for 90 days.…

“By the end of the book, I could no longer shake the feeling she just might be right on the big thing. RTOs may be producing an increasingly fragile grid.”

Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid is a likeable, sometimes irritating book. Or maybe an irritating, sometimes likeable book. I cannot decide. Angwin’s book offers an introduction to and assessment of the Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that since the late 1990s have come to coordinate use of the transmission grid for about two-thirds of the electric power consumed in the United States.

Her view: RTOs are dominated by insiders who skew the system their direction at every chance, reaping profits while shirking responsibility for reliability. As a result we have an increasingly fragile, unreliable grid.

When Angwin’s book was published in 2020 it may have seemed alarmist.…

Many Denton customers were stuck with astronomical electricity bills under the green power “choice” plans.

Denton, Texas, population 140,000, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, received national media attention for its $9,000 per megawatt hour ($9.00 per kilowatt hour) electricity price spike during the February 2021 Texas Freeze power crisis. 

Although not reported by the media as such, it was an unintended consequence of naive green dreams and “environmental justice” gone wrong.

“Green” Energy Planning

Home to two universities and a junior college, Denton is a Progressive Left city that:

• Banned fracking within its city limits (later reversed by Gov. Abbott)
• Contracted for 180 megawatts from the Blue Bell Solar Plant
• Recorded 40 percent renewables, partly by ending its contract with the now mothballed Gibbons Creek Coal Power Plant
• Built its own natural gas power plant (2018) to provide backup power to its customers and sell the excess into the ERCOT grid.

I have noted many times how the old hometown Houston Chronicle had gone from Left to Hard Left on energy and climate policy in the last decade or more. (Also see here and here.)

I am been a victim, with enough op-ed rejections (as in no response) to discourage me from submission.

But from time to time, I write a letter-to-the-editor on some egregiously biased energy piece. Chris Tomlinson, whose mind is about as closed and pen as vitriolic as they come (bitterness?), gets my goat in particular.

Dry Hole

And so several weeks ago, I sent this letter in, which got no response or publication regarding: “Conservative group takes on climate change” by Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle, July 5, 2021).

The latest Republican interest in climate change activism remains a far cry from 2008 when a televised commercial had Newt Gingrich on a couch with Nancy Pelosi extolling cap-and-trade “to address climate change.”