Ed. note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Greed Energy Economics:
*** The green industrial revolution is a lie
*** Wind farms were paid not to generate HALF their potential electricity

Wind Energy:
*** Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer
*** America’s Power Grid Is Increasingly Unreliable
The stampede of green lemmings
Wind Energy Developer Compares Opponents To Hitler And The Holocaust
Offshore Wind Power Has a Long Way to Go in America
One Year After Texas Blackouts, ERCOT Expects Massive Increase in Solar and Wind Capacity
Lies My Wind Developer Told Me

Solar Energy:
Large Western NY Solar Project In Planning Stages
China Extracts Yet Another Favor from Biden to Sell Us Solar
Spain’s Solar Energy Crisis: 62,000 People Bankrupt After Investing in Solar Panels
Wind and Solar expansion is a threat to biodiversity — but by how much?…

“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (1979), p. xii.

I have fruitfully engaged in debates regarding energy and climate on social media, some on Facebook and most at LinkedIn. I comment on views I agree with to add insight. But I commonly engage with my intellectual foes, some of whom are quite confident they have the science on their side and share links to prove it.

I learn, while noting the areas of disagreement and why. I remain persuaded that the climate crusade is wasteful and futile–and wealth-is-health entrepreneurship is the way forward, whatever the weather and climate of the future.…

“Rob, you certainly have the right to participate in the discussion but it is clear to me (and others) that you do not understand how the ERCOT market actually functions. Instead you spout off free market economic theories without getting down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems. In the real world the devil is in the details.” (Robert Borlick, below)

“Rob, why are you shilling for the natural gas industry?” (Borlick, below)

Welcome to the political economy of electricity from the expert/planner viewpoint. Electricity is different. Its complexity requires central planning/regulation. The free market does not work. Ergo, free-market theories do not apply.

Bottom line: Experts/planners/regulators/politicians must get “down and dirty into the details of how to apply them to power systems.”

Previous posts (here and here) have chronicled my interaction with electricity planning experts in the wake of the Great Texas Power Blackout of February 2021.…

Make no mistake: The Great Texas Blackout debacle was a failure of government planning, not the free market.

Here are some quotations in the press about a massive coordination failure of nonintegrated entities, one that could have been avoided with ‘natural gas majors’ and ‘electricity majors’ –vertically and horizontally integrated–coordinating in-house.

Some quotations serving as background for this revisionist perspective follow:

“The failure of gas and electric companies to communicate with each other–again–demonstrates how, just as Texas’ power grid is a complex web of producers, transporters, deliverers and regulators, its near-collapse last month, too, was an integrated failure spread throughout the system.”

“At the height of the ‘snowpocalypse,” social media teemed with pictures of the power have and have nots–prompting outrage that vacant downtown office buildings had electricity they didn’t need while average citizens endured teeth-chattering cold or worse.”