NE Renewables Complain to FERC About Grid Auctions Favoring NatGas
The left always fights dirty. One of their favorite tactics is to demand a change in the rules of the game when they are losing. Free enterprise, allowing the best companies and best solutions to win based on economics, doesn’t work in the world of leftwing radicals. They seek to skew things–change the rules–tie a 50-pound weight on the back of the runner next to them in order to give themselves an advantage in a race. Which is exactly what’s happening in New England, where UNRELIABLE renewables (solar and wind) are complaining to FERC and FERC’s Chairman, Richard “Dick” Glick, a former wind lobbyist, that electricity auctions are awarded to natgas-fired power plants instead of so-called renewables because natgas is 100% reliable and renewables are not. Time to change the rules.
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For over a year the oil and gas industry has been swept up in net-zero carbon emissions mania. We can provide countless examples of M-U drillers and pipeline companies jumping on the net-zero carbon bandwagon (
A Forbes article caught our eye and we had to do a double-take. Two liberals from the Left Coast, professors at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote an honest and transparent article about how the crisis in Ukraine is making their fellow liberals take an honest, probing look at the policies they advocate for. Renewables, which the two profs support, are not enough to power the world today. Not in the real world of 2022 with Vlad Putin threatening to overrun half of Europe.
In December 2020, Dan Rice IV, former CEO of Rice Energy and a member of the EQT board of directors, launched a “blank check” acquisition firm, called Rice Acquisition Corp., to invest in various energy ventures. Dan found that something-to-invest-in just a few months later in the form of acquiring and merging together Archaea Energy and Aria Energy into a single company focused on providing renewable natural gas (RNG) and “green” hydrogen (see 
One of our favorite Forbes website contributors, David Blackmon, has penned another fabulous column. This one looks at the chatter and debate surrounding “the energy transition”–as if it’s a foregone conclusion that we must dump the use of all fossil fuels within the next few years and transition to so-called renewables, or the planet is toast. Blackmon tackles one aspect of this debate that is seldom discussed: the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels to 100% renewables. The cost is so big, it’s incomprehensible.
Brian Anderson is director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and now the head of the Biden administration’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, an effort to kill the use of fossil fuels (see 
As we told you in April, President Biden launched a new program to be funded with $109.5 million aimed at figuring out how to convince fossil fuel workers to be happy taking a huge pay cut and installing solar panels and windmills instead of making far more money in a far more meaningful job working in fossil fuels (see 
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Gordon Tomb, a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation (Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank) has some strong words for those want to put all of PA’s energy eggs into the so-called renewables basket: “‘Green’ energy proposals are no economic therapeutic for Pennsylvania. They’re snake oil miracle cures that ignore the realities of physics–and people’s needs.” So begins a column by Tomb. It’s a verbal slap across the face to get the attention of people who either won’t, or can’t, think for themselves about the glaring failures of a policy to convert to all-renewable energy, and what a total conversion would mean for the state (a complete disaster).
We’re kind of speechless and dumbfounded–but perhaps we shouldn’t be. Last week President Biden announced a new program to be funded with $109.5 million aimed at figuring out how to convince fossil fuel workers to be happy taking a huge pay cut and installing solar panels and windmills instead of making far more money in a far more meaningful job working in fossil fuels. Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), headquartered in Pittsburgh, will lead the effort. How enormously sad that Anderson, someone we greatly admire, is out in front selling Biden’s bill of goods–the end of fossil energy.
For years Vermont has made millions of dollars selling Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to other states–a scam that allows pretentious environmentalists to claim they’re helping out the environment when in fact they still burn the same fossil fuels and biomass (i.e. woodburning) as they always did by paying a fee, a REC, and absolving themselves of feeling bad about it. Think of modern-day RECs like the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the Middle Ages to absolve you of your sins, or at least lessen the punishment for your sins. RECs are the new indulgences of the post-everything era we live in now. Selling REC indulgences is about to go away for Vermonters, and it may lead to widespread blackouts.
If you live in Pennsylvania, actually in just about any state, you couldn’t miss the big splash made yesterday when PA’s worst governor in the past 50 years, Tom Wolf, announced a massive taxpayer-funded initiative to build seven new solar energy facilities in six PA counties that will strip away some 2,000 acres of valuable PA farmland to produce enough electricity to power just half of PA’s state government. (Perhaps we can call it the half-baked solar project?) Leftists in mainstream media are falling over themselves to praise Wolf. We (as usual) have a different take.