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.
Buried in an economic impact analysis for a rule released earlier this week, the EPA made an important decision that will reverberate throughout many of the major rules regarding the six criteria pollutants, especially ozone and particulate matter, that the EPA regulates. Among the many ways that the current EPA is trying to inject rationality...
Now that Congress and President Turmp have ended subsidies and regulatory favors that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars per EV, the U.S. auto market is pivoting back to physical and economic realities. The latest sign in the return to sanity is a rapid shift in emphasis from electric vehicles to hybrids. As reported...
Ford Motor Co. is considering scrapping the electric version of the Ford F-150, the Wall Street Journal reports. “In October, the first month since the end of the federal EV tax credit, Ford’s overall EV sales in the U.S. fell 24% from a year earlier,” the WSJ explained. “Ford dealers sold 66,000 gas-powered F-Series pickups, up...
On Wednesday, ExxonMobil, the largest energy company in the U.S., will face yet another challenge to its leadership. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest state public pension fund in the U.S., is leading a group of pension funds to vote against all of Exxon’s directors. Glass Lewis, one of the largest proxy advisory firms...
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region will likely see real-time market prices approach the regulatory cap of $5,000/MWh on Wednesday, not long after price spikes on April 28 and April 16. The fact that the market is showing signs of scarcity in the spring, long before the heat of this summer or the...
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...