Brent Bennett, Ph.D., is the policy director for Life:Powered, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America’s energy IQ.
Dr. Bennett has an M.S.E. and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in physics from the University of Tulsa. His graduate research focused on advanced chemistries for utility-scale energy storage systems.
On March 19, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) Chairman Aaron Kinsey issued a statement that the Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF), one of the largest and oldest education endowments in the country with over $53 billion in assets, was moving $8.5 billion from BlackRock to other asset managers. Chairman Kinsey noted in the statement...
On Jan. 26, President Joe Biden took an aggressive step forward in his war on American energy by halting the permitting of new liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals. This action has massive global implications, as TPPF’s Mark Mills laid out when the decision was publicly announced. It also has the added benefit for the president of...
In June 2023, at the start of a summer in which Texas experienced record electricity demand and came to the brink of rolling outages on Sept. 6, I wrote a warning about the upcoming winters, noting that “…the Texas grid is moving toward a situation where the winter period, not the summer period, will see...
A plan to build a multi-billion dollar transmission line from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to Mississippi, dubbed Southern Spirit by its developer Pattern Energy, has made waves on social media this past week after the Dallas Morning News wrote about the project, followed by other Texas media outlets. The project, which has been in the...
The temperatures are dropping in Texas—and so is our ability to rely on wind and solar. A power plant closure in East Texas could make things worse. Fresh off a grid-straining summer, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is preparing for potential energy emergencies this winter with an expensive plan to secure additional power...
The goals of President Joe Biden’s administration are lofty: among them, nationwide vehicle electrification within 20 years. To reach that goal, the administration has recently proposed new fuel economy regulations that will help ensure that 67% of new passenger cars sold are electric vehicles by 2032. The problem is that this green dream is physically impossible to achieve...
On Wednesday night, September 6, 2023, ERCOT had its first emergency energy alert (EEA) since the winter storm in February 2021 and its first summer EEA since August 2019. While the mainstream media continues to misdirect the public toward the preferred talking points of wind and solar lobbyists, examining the real reasons behind why this happened points us...
Along the coast of Rhode Island, a 10-story steel tube is being hauled on the first trip to the construction site. A ship hauls a monopile, weighing more than 700 tons, 15 miles offshore. The massive metal structure is hammered into the seabed with the assistance of a jack plate barge. The ship then returns...
KEY POINTS The summer situation for the Texas grid is actually better than advertised, but winters are becoming a bigger and bigger problem with no clear solution on the horizon. Legislators took some baby steps with HB 1500 to eliminate the last vestiges of state subsidies for unreliable electricity and move toward real market reform....
With Gen Z reportedly being twice as likely to battle depression when compared to Americans over 25, there’s no denying that today’s youth are more mentally ill, or at least more inclined to respond to surveys about it, than the generations that precede them. But what if there was an unrealized factor in these perpetual...
Ryan Reynolds says, “When you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.” But when it comes to Texas and our electric grid, we must have high expectations—our modern lives are completely dependent a reliable supply of electricity to our homes. And the reliability of electricity supply is the fundamental problem facing the ERCOT...
As Texas moves closer to the much-awaited conclusion of another hot summer—thankfully without any electric grid emergencies so far—it’s a good time to break from the conversation on grid reliability and talk about the coming rise in Texans’ electric bills. A common claim is that wind and solar are dampening the impact of rising natural...