No Free Lunch and No Free Markets

"There is not a single free and rational market for energy anywhere on earth. Never has been, likely never will be. We decide what fuels are readily available, abundant, useful and desirable, and we build the market to suit the exigencies of those fuels. (To cite just one case in point, the vast majority of North American power bills are calculated using a blended pricing process where a kilowatt-hour bought at peak demand on a hot day and generated by a dirty, inefficient, soon-to-be-shuttered coal plant costs as much as one bought in the middle of the night from a wind turbine or hydro dam or nuclear plant. We do this to make sure those old coal plants can pay themselves off over their full life and so forth. In short, we rig the market to support the status quo.)"

-Chris Turner (writing on MNN)

Robin W. passed along a link to Chris Turner's full piece and I thought it was a great follow-up to the last Green Collar blog about the Maryland SREC legislation. Talk about building the market......