This article seems disconnected with what we currently know, to the point of being completely delusional. It seems the professor is so focused on price signals

This article seems disconnected with what we currently know, to the point of being completely delusional. It seems the professor is so focused on price signals that they’ve begun to mistake them for reality. The core premise seems to be “we need all this excess capacity, who is going to pay to have all of this production that will sit idle?” The problem is that it’s not clear that we need more capacity. At the minimum we need to winterize our current capacity as is, so that it doesn’t fail when the weather gets cold. That’ll cost some money, of course, but it’ll cost a hell of a lot less than creating brand new extra power plants that’ll sit idle. It’s also not clear why extra capacity would help. If the grid has a bunch of new power plants sitting idle, why should we believe that they too won’t fail when cold weather is shutting down other power plants? Wouldn’t they be even more likely to fail than the plants that are already on and running? I guess we could winterize them, by why not just winterize the main grid so it doesn’t die when you need it most? It honestly seems like they started with their argument and began to work backwards towards to find some evidence to match, because they’ve totally ignored the simplest solution that already worked in places like El Paso: winterize your damn power plants.