Highlights from our interview with Robert Bryce, author, journalist, film producer, and public speaker that focuses on energy issues.
Lone Star Standard: Will you explain your work as it relates to electricity and economic growth?
Bryce: A friend of mine named Todd Moss, who does a lot of work in the energy field running a group called Energy For Growth Hub said there’s no such thing as a low energy, high income country. You can’t be rich and not use energy. Energy and wealth go hand-in-hand. More particularly, electricity use and prosperity go hand-in-hand. Economic growth drives electricity use and electricity use drives economic growth. And that’s been the focus of a lot of my work. In fact, both of the documentaries that I’ve worked on, co-produced with my colleague Tyson Culver. Our first documentary was called Juice, How Electricity Explains the World, which came out four years ago, and our new docuseries, a five part series, came out in January. We’ve had 3 million views on YouTube. We focus on the importance of electricity and the electric grid because electric grids reflect the societies they power. And that’s even true in Texas, right? We had this idea that we’re going to let the free market work and this is going to be the solution to the future of electricity. What we found out during Winter Storm Uri was that, in fact, that wasn’t the case, just trusting the market was probably the wrong direction.
Lone Star Standard: Who was responsible for the failures during Winter Storm Uri?
Bryce: You know this is partly the legacy of Enron. And my first book, called Pipe Dreams, was on Enron. It was published 22 years ago. And Enron and Ken Lay were great promoters of this idea of restructuring. That was the word that they used instead of deregulation. We’ll just let the market decide how the electricity system works. Well, what happened after Winter Storm Uri? Everyone said, well the market fell and who’s responsible. In fact, no one is responsible. And that was the problem that we’re seeing after Winter Story Uri, that the buck didn’t stop anywhere. Now, am I in favor of monopoly utilities? Well, maybe we could have had the same kind of failures if we’d had monopoly utilities in Texas. Maybe not? We can’t test that. But what we know is that there is no accountability in a system like what we created where the market’s not going to work. And, if the market fails and we don’t have enough power, people die. That’s a bad outcome. So, I think we have to be very clear about how we make our electric sector more reliable and more accountable. And that’s a bigger and bigger issue now as we see more and more blackouts occurring across the country, prices going up, and a lot of bad incentives for more weather dependent generation, forms like wind and solar.
Lone Star Standard: Can you address the claim that renewable energy is cheaper than dispatchable energy?
Bryce: I wrote a piece on my substack, Robert Bryce.Substack.com, about this very issue and using data from the federal government, in fact, from the Energy Information Administration . Solar, last year or maybe it was 2022, when you measure it on a per unit of energy basis, solar energy got 302 times the federal subsidies, more tax credit than what was given to nuclear energy. It got 136 times more than oil and gas on a per unit of energy basis. The late Charlie Munger said, ‘show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.’ Well, you get what you incentivize. So these tax credits at the federal level for wind and solar are, frankly, totally outrageous. We’re told over and over again on repeat by the climate activists and others that wind and solar are cheaper. Well, if they’re cheaper, they shouldn’t get any subsidies because they are cheaper. But instead, solar is 300 times more, in terms of subsidies, than nuclear, and wind is getting 136 times more than oil and gas. Something is wrong here. And what this is, unfortunately, a simple symptom of this climatism and renewable energy fetishism that has overtaken and overwhelmed environmentalism in America. I wrote this piece just a few weeks ago, Environmentalism in America is dead and it’s been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. And those are the things that are now undermining the integrity, resilience, and reliability of our energy and power networks.
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and public speaker. His latest docuseries, "Juice: Power Politics and the Grid", is available for free on YouTube and on juicetheseries.com.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-25-robert-bryce.
