Enron is synonymous with fake financials and wholesale fraud, but its gaming of the Californian power market set the tone for every crony capitalist wind and solar generator, who’s raped and pillaged, ever since.
The story was laid out in the documentary The Smartest Guys In The Room.
Back then, Enron’s traders would wait for a spike in power demand and then ‘engineered’ either a gas supply interruption or shutdown of a gas-fired power plant, on the premise of “unscheduled maintenance”. Following which they would wait until the grid was on the brink of collapse, and offer to supply the grid at prices a thousand times the prevailing market rate. Good work, if you can get it!?!
Nowadays, there’s no need to ‘engineer’ sudden collapses in output: mother nature does that all by herself; and since we’ve become critically reliant upon wind and solar, well, market rorting is all the easier.
With an increasing role for wholly weather-dependent power sources, the supply of electricity has become more like Roulette.
These days, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, there will be a household or business at the end of the line hoping that its numbers come up. And that it might avoid freezing or boiling in the dark, or having to shut down its business operations, altogether.
At the head of the supply chain, though, there will be a bunch of avaricious young punks hoping to cash in on your desperate need for power.
In the USA, wind and solar operators have rigged the market to such an extent that, if this were a casino in Vegas, they’d be frog marched out the front door.
Mark Mathis explains just why subsidised wind and solar is driving power prices through the roof.
Auctioning Blackouts
Clean Energy Alliance
Mark Mathis
16 February 2021
Blackouts in Texas and other parts of the country in February 2021. Why? It’s happening because of a complex, market distorting (and ridiculous) system of having electricity producers bid to provide you power. The system gives wind and solar companies an unfair advantage, which has led to too much unreliable electricity generation from wind and solar. Blackouts now, and in the future, are a completely avoidable problem that Congress should fix immediately.
Transcript
Did you know a lot of electricity American’s use comes to them through a series of auctions? Weird, right? Well, brace yourself, because it’s about to get a lot weirder. That’s because the auctions are completely rigged in favor of wind and solar. Worse yet, this auction-rigging means most people pay higher electricity bills. And our electric grid is becoming far less reliable. You might think I’m exaggerating, but hear me out.
Do you think it makes sense for wind and solar companies to offer their electricity at one price, but then automatically get paid a higher price… which raises your bill? And wouldn’t you be concerned to know that when we rely too much on unreliable electricity sources…blackouts are much more likely?
All of this started back in 1999 when the federal government allowed utilities to create Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators or RTO and ISOs. These organizations conduct daily auctions to buy electricity. They do it for two-thirds of the US population.
Donn Dears, explains how the system works in “The Looming Energy Crisis.” For starters, not all electricity demand is auctioned off. Some of it is pre-sold in long-term contracts. What remains goes into the auctions for RTOs and ISOs
The first auction is held to see how much utilities will bid to deliver electricity the following day. The bids are for short segments, as little as five minutes. A second day-of auction is held in order to fill in any gaps that remain. I know… this is a ridiculously complicated system, but hang with me.
Here’s where it gets disturbing, expensive, and dangerous. Because wind and solar companies take advantage of tax credits not available to natural gas, coal, and nuclear, they can always offer the lowest bids, typically less than one cent a kilowatt hour. Therefore, wind and solar win any bids for power they can deliver for any given time slots at the first auction.
The next highest bidder, usually a natural gas utility, sets the price that’s accepted as the supply meets demand. But get this… After the natural gas utility wins bids at, say, 3 cents a kilowatt hour, the wind and solar providers also get 3 cents an hour, even though their bids were much lower. Crazy, right?
Coal, nuclear and some natural gas providers that don’t have long term contracts can only be competitive for time slots in either auction for electricity demand that wind and solar can’t supply. But why should you care if some coal, natural gas, or nuclear company is financially stressed? Well, because it’s costing you money.
Wind and solar aren’t just more expensive, they are unreliable. There must always be a natural gas power plant ready to provide electricity during peak demand. That demand comes late in the day when solar is producing only limited power and wind sometimes produces nothing. Having natural gas as a necessary back up adds additional costs.
Secondly, as more wind and solar is added to the electric grid, older coal, natural gas, and nuclear power sources that keep the grid stable are forced into early retirement. That’s where the blackouts come in. And, no, we can’t use batteries that store electricity when the sun and wind are producing excess power and then use that juice during the peak. There are a number of people selling that idea. But we debunk it as magical thinking in our video, Battery Fantasy.
The upshot of all of this is that the rigged RTO/ISO auctions are costing you money while setting us up for blackouts across many regions of the country. It’s time for Congress to step in and stop this failed experiment…while we can still keep the lights on.
For the Clear Energy Alliance, I’m Mark Mathis. Power On.
Clear Energy Alliance
His number didn’t come up…
About stopthesethings
STOP THESE THINGS 
America’s Light Usage Reveals Insanity of Relying on Weather-Dependent Wind & Solar. Renewables have underperformed in temperate climate California, resulting in the states’ need to import electricity from the adjoining Northwest and Southwest states.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/03/08/americas-light-usage-reveals-insanity-of-relying-on-weather-dependent-wind-solar/
Summary: The bulk of America’s population are in areas of the country that incur the most erratic weather patterns that have proven to be disruptive to the already intermittent electricity potential from renewables.
Nothing new there. Anybody who has done any research at all into electricity pricing knows how the system is rigged.
The problem is that the general public have NO idea how this pricing structure works, or how it inflates their electricity costs.
The uninformed are also the problem, not just the providers.
Blame for this can be put on their ignorance, unwilling to do any research and politicians and the MSM for their love affair with FREE electricity.
Nothing will change until the population start hurting with cost increases (already happening) and blackouts.
I say the sooner that happens, the better.
Another fun fact, check the pension plans, see where they get their $ energy, it might just be through these wasteful wind/solar schemes. Navajo County in Arizona agendas for FEB/JAN 2021 show plan for MET towers to test wind speeds and temperatures for more wind projects that would cover another 64 square miles to add to the 49 square miles at Chevelon Butte at Chevelon Canyon. This would affect Chevelon Retreat, Chevelon Acres, Chevelon Canyon Ranch, Zeniff, Winslow, Holbrook, Heber, drives on Route 99 and Route 377, and Apache Sitgreaves Forest. They put these meterological towers in first. Digging a bit we find Aztec Cattle Company is the land owner that will profit from the leases big time and one of the companies listed is Pattern Energy. Pattern Energy was acquired by Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. Notice the pattern yet? So basically the dots are now showing these systems are collecting your $ energy through taxes that hand money in subsidies, collecting your $ energy from added ‘clean energy’ fees on your bill, collecting your $ energy by these pricing schemes (that cause your bills to rise and not get trapped by imaginary carbon blankets in the stratosphere) to to feed pension plans for Canadians. How many other pension plans are being supported by these schemes? It’s not a good feeling to know as an Arizonan that the money leaves the state rather than being reinvested locally especially when there are so many areas where these will be built that people have no connection to the grid, relying only on back yard solar or small wind turbines of their own and generators struggling to make it work. They will be looking at wind turbines and flashing red lights for miles in 3 directions, west, east, south in an area that currently is free from such blight. Grid connection should be provided to those areas as an offset to the scheme but that would cut too much into their profits. Land owners there might embrace grid connections as an offset to the utter destruction and massive industrialization of pristine viewscapes. There should be a fund established for generous grid connection offsets using the massive wealth created by these schemes. Pattern Energy is worldwide. How many pensions are being propped up by each one of these propeller machines spinning in the sky? One might look deep into this aspect of how ‘green’ energy is transferring our dollars to pension plans and inform the pubic.
https://patternenergy.com/learn/portfolio
https://chevelonbuttewind.horsepower.net