Two articles about infrastructure spending caught my eye this morning. Taken together, they help to perfectly illustrate the pitfalls of what America is trying to do with infrastructure development in general and the energy transition specifically. They also illustrate how government subsidies for “green” energy end up creating a self-sustaining money train that only expands over time.
One is a piece in the Houston Chronicle about the insatiable Texas wind industry lobby’s proposal to force the state’s government to subsidize the building of another round of thousands of miles of new transmission lines to carry the power generated by wind farms sited on the distant plains of West Texas to the consumer centers in Houston and the Dallas/Fort Worth region.
The second is a story in the New York Times about the running carnival midway show that is California’s “bullet-train” plan. Both illustrate quite clearly the inevitable massive waste and delays that are about to happen with the trillions in infrastructure and energy transition spending enacted by congress and signed into law by Joe Biden.
First, lets examine the story in the Chronicle, which is nothing but a free advertising piece for the Texas wind industry, written by Chris Tomlinson. To read Tomlinson’s piece, you would think that the wind industry is Snow White while the rest of the stakeholders in the Texas power grid are just a collection of wicked witches. (Some of them surely are, but not all of them.)