Trump's Bizarre Bid To Bailout Coal And Nuclear

[Rhiannon12866]

The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to give a leg up to coal and nuclear, moving to take unprecedented action to intervene in the U.S. electricity markets to essentially bail out failing plants as they face an existential threat from natural gas and renewable energy.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has been trying to come up with a justification to boost coal and nuclear power plants, but several attempts have failed to pass legal muster. In 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed offering a subsidy of sorts to power plants that held a 90-day supply of fuel on site, a definition that only coal and nuclear could meet. FERC rejected that proposal earlier this year.

But Trump isn’t given up yet. Last week, the President basically ordered Sec. Perry to come up with some way to keep unprofitable plants open, a desperate bid that has attracted criticism from many directions.

“Impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities are leading to a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation’s energy mix and impacting the resilience of our power grid,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg on Friday. The President ordered Secretary Perry “to prepare immediate steps to stop the loss of these resources and looks forward to his recommendations.”

The legal logic is based on some federal laws that use national security as justification to keep the aging coal and nuclear plants open. The administration argues that because coal and nuclear can keep fuel on site, and are not dependent on pipelines, they are more secure than other forms of electricity generation.


Much more: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Trumps-Bizarre-Bid-To-Bailout-Coal-And-Nuclear.html

[mr_lebowski]

1. Prematurely shutting down nuclear plants is not necessarily 'smart', IMHO ...

Shutting down Coal-Fired plants, OTOH ... totally different story. Don't even know that the two subjects should be conflated.

Coal-Fired plants have demonstrably caused the premature deaths of millions of people and wildlife, and their effluent will absolutely continue to do so for many decades, even after they're taken offline, due to the effects of purposefully expelling massive amounts of carbon into our atmosphere, changing the whole worlds climate.

OTOH, the harm to people and wildlife caused by nuclear power, despite 50+ years of operating these plants in our country ... remains almost entirely theoretical.

Yes, the waste is an issue, but ultimately is many orders of magnitude less complex to deal with than dumping 100's of 1,000's of tons of carbon directly into the atmosphere yearly as an INHERENT 'business model' like Coal Plants engage in collectively in this country. We just a need a good, safe spot, and a good, safe way to get the nuclear waste there. Not 'simple', but not intractable by any means.

And that is so ... because you don't have to spew out nuclear waste to the air ... in order to create nuclear power.

With fossil-fuel based power plants, they pretty much must expel dangerous pollutants to the environment ... to even work.

That all being said, it's not like I believe for 1 SECOND DumpCo is doing this due to any LOGICAL or humanitarian reasons ... it's almost certainly some kind of reward to wealthy pro-dump campaign donors, and/or simply to piss off Liberals and excite the knuckle-dragging, low-info 'base' of his.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. And guess what, guess who is going to get stuck w/ the bills to pay ...

for these aging plants that aren't shut down? You and I will. That's why if the feds (FERC) fail in their attempts to stop these idiotic attempts to keep these plants open (coal, nuclear) beyond the normal life expectancy, the state public utility commissions in most states will have to rule that costs to maintain these old plants either be included in the rate base or not.

A lot of states won't allow these costs to flow into the rate base, I'm guessing. Very political, and interfering w/ the normal economic cycle (hey, plant is not very effective, so lets close, etc.). Once again, rump is messing w/ normal economic cycle and artificially propping / supporting aging infrastructure. I wonder how many solar panels rump has on his hotels? He fought like mad to keep a solar wind farm offshore his property in Scotland so it wouldn't ruin the view from his property. Hypocrite. A clear example of a conflict of interest.

A lot of plant operators are shutting them down due to new technologies available that render the old plants obsolete, as well as offering rebates on energy efficient appliances and the like, to slow down energy demands (it is cheaper than building a new plant)).

Rump must be getting payments from these guys, it's almost insane to advocate dirty fuels when cleaner ones are available (and is less of a hassle to operate these types of plants, no recapture technologies needed to capture the CO2, etc.). The Koch brothers must be having a fit, they sell a lot of natural gas, which is cleaner than coal.