You and I are in complete agreement that subsidies and tax breaks should not artificially favor one generation technology over another in a market. If we're going to leave it to markets to select the winners and losers, each contestant has to stand on its own two feet. Perhaps a subsidy is merited to maintain a more reliable, but less cost-effective, source of energy, but it means consumers pay an inflated price every day in exchange for that reliability for a few days in a decade.
If last week doesn't teach that reliability is critical then nothing will ever teach it. I don't know what that means for specific generation technologies; I would like to see a more clear analysis of the freeze-driven failures of each technology last week in per cent terms, and a better presentation of how the various technologies are included "in the mix" as the seasons change during the year. I've seen arguments here that wind was a very small part of the mix going in to last weekend so the absolute magnitude of its failure was immaterial; I've also seen that wind had been a much larger part of the mix just one week earlier.
I think the Achilles heel of "renewables" is not weather resistance so much as their intermittent nature, requiring redundant capacity and as-yet-uninvented energy storage capabilities. I suppose that's just a fancy way of saying they are inherently unreliable and thus require huge additional capital investment to compensate.
I understand what you are conveying and we seem to be mostly in agreement.
I will point out a couple of things:
One, wind power has preferences over other power generation, so the week before it was robust because of this and weather did not impact it. It is why natural gas and coal were both reduced. Both coal and gas had to step in to replace the loss of wind power when the weather affected it. You seem to suggest that during the freeze that wind was such a small part of the problem that it was not a primary issue for the lack of power to the grid, oddly because it was already out of the mix. Don't you find that odd? It is supposed to generate power and when it does not, it is not its fault? The overall fact is that wind cannot step in when needed, so why is it there in the first place if one needs reliability as well as power generation? It fails on one side of the coin. Wind and solar to me are considered novelties, and should never be relied upon without substantial backup with other, more reliable systems.
Second, you also suggest a subsidy for ensuring more reliability may be needed. Simply taking an unreliable power generation scheme out of the mix will provide that reliability as more strength toward installing and operating other reliable systems will exist. Also, the most reliable power generation by far is coal and nuclear, and both are faced with increasingly onerous regulations that threaten their survival.
Texas requires political leadership that stands up to the imposition of these regulations and asserts its sovereign rights to decide what is best for its citizens rather than to permit dictates from unaccountable DC bureaucrats to decide. If Texans suffer or die from bad decisions, we want state accountability we can change out. We do not need just politicians who receive accolades from the wind energy like Abbott.
