Lobbying facilitates influence by special interest groups on both sides of an issue. So a bad policy implementation from a biased administrator in the executive branch will not be reversed or avoided by "fixing" lobbyists. I don't know that deflecting or trivializing earnest critiques of specific choices and then belatedly attacking "the system" is very productive either.
Good thread, awful topic. I'll be asking about this at my work to see what people think. It will directly impact many I work with but not me.
I agree. I understand why lobbyists get the hate they get, but it's not like bad policy is something lobbyists do to public servants. Especially in this case where the the lobbyists for natural gas and renewables have worked just as hard as the coal lobbyists to try to make sure this didn't happen. This isn't something that happened to Rick Perry; Rick Perry did it.
Can’t wait for Texx to minister coal and spit garbage about how actively punishing solar and wind is a good thing and we are all stupid for thinking this actually isn’t good for our world.
So coal can't compete with other energy. They are going to stop it from failing by paying coal providers to be able to over cheaper prices. but in reality since taxpayers are the one's subsiding coal through a tax, they are basically paying for their own discount ahead of time. Brilliant
Good lord. This is getting beyond ridiculous. Toss billions into a dying industry that pollutes the planet, and end something that was creating jobs, promoting better technology to expand low or non polluting sources of energy and lower their cost, weaning us off oil and gas and coal, which is are finite energy sources, unlike high polluting oil, gas, and coal energy. "Draining the swamp?" Bullshit. The swamp is filling up fast, thanks to trump letting the lobbyists into the hen house, AKA, the White House. Mr. trump didn't reduce lobbying, the liar. He gave them a blank check. It's party time for the lobbying industry.
Eh, I'm fine with that. Of course, I don't have any money in the renewables market (...wait a minute, I own shares in Tesla/SolarCity! D'oh!). The wind and solar credits were helping those technologies to grow faster, but they can actually grow on their own merits anyway. It is already cheaper to put solar on your roof than buy electricity from the utility in several of the high cost states today, and the projections are that it will become true everywhere over the next decade. Meanwhile, though the effect is pretty modest, the subsidies do distort energy markets. If sacrificing the PTC and the ITC is necessary to avoid a double-standard while arguing against coal subsidies, that's a small price to pay. They were going to sunset in a few years anyway. Meanwhile Pruitt just said he'll retract the Clean Power Plan today, saying it overstepped the EPA's legal authority, and open a comment period on what should replace it. That means all the states that were suing over the CPP can stop, and make way for a new host of plaintiffs to sue for retracting it. That won't just be the environmental groups; it'll also be renewables companies, gas generators, gas E&P, maybe nuclear. There were a lot of companies that would have gained under CPP. And meanwhile, there is still a court order finding that the EPA must do something to address the threat of carbon to human health. They can't do nothing.
But Trump is white and racist like my parents! it feels so comfortable like going home for Christmas so I'll ignore this thread and just masturbate to his pictures as usual. Also **** SCIENCE AND EDUCATION those are for sissies.
Lol, Rick Perry issued the NOPR because Trump promised it to Murray Energy and FirstEnergy: https://www.rtoinsider.com/murray-energy-department-of-energy-76903/
3 Takeaways From Unprecedented Texas Coal Plant Closures Energy company Luminant says it’s shutting down three of its coal-fired power plants in Texas by early next year. The sudden closure of so many plants is unprecedented. That's not the only thing unexpected about the closures, though. Wind Beats Coal In Texas Josh Rhodes, a research fellow at UT Austin’s Energy Institute, said canceling out this much coal-generated electricity from the Texas grid this quickly is unusual. “We’ve never seen coal numbers move this fast,” he said. It got him wondering where Texas electricity will come from, and what he found surprised him. “It looks like we may have already crossed the threshold where we have more wind capacity than we do coal capacity,” Rhodes said. If that hasn’t happened yet, he said, the plant closures mean it will definitely happen next year when Texas has the capacity to generate 15 gigawatts of electricity from coal and 24 gigawatts from wind. Depending on the weather, 1 gigawatt can be enough to power anywhere from 200,000 to half a million homes. The switch away from coal may also have a positive impact on carbon emissions. Dan Cohan, a professor of civil engineering at Rice University, said the plants that are closing accounted for 11 percent of CO2 emissions from Texas plants last year. No Coal Plant Is Safe As coal use continues to decline, analysts expect the older, dirtier and less efficient plants to shut down first. But one of the plants in this recent rash of closings doesn’t fit that mold. Sandow 5 has the capacity to generate about 600 megawatts of electricity and was built only in 2009, Rhodes said, “so that’s kind of the outlier in this group.” He said it’s not exactly clear why this unit in Milam County will be closed — it’s not even 10 years old. But there’s a lot of speculation. Sandow 5 "is part of a bigger complex. It may not make sense just to keep one part of it open," Rhodes said, "it may make sense just to close the whole site down." One thing the closure does show is that no coal plant is immune from market trends against coal – specifically, the competitiveness of renewables and natural gas as a power source. “Yeah, they would have started building that when it they thought natural gas was going to be way more expensive than it is,” Cohan said. Regulatory Rollbacks Aren't Saving Coal When EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the repeal of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan last week he said “the war on coal is over.” Then the plant closures were announced, sending a clear message that policy alone is not responsible for plant closures. “Trump and Pruitt haven’t found a way to repeal the rules of economics, so market forces keep pushing these … coal plants off the grid,” Cohan said. That’s precisely why Rick Perry, head of the Department of Energy, recently proposed subsidizing coal and nuclear power plants in an effort to prop them up. Perry has long been an ally of the coal industry. When he was governor of Texas he worked to fast-track permitting for coal plants. One of them? Sandow 5. http://kut.org/post/3-takeaways-unprecedented-texas-coal-plant-closures
That's a little misleading. The coal plants are actually running something like 90% of the time, so most of their capacity is used. Wind turbines are probably generating at less than half their capacity. So, we've had a day where 45% of ERCOT's demand was produced from wind, but you can't do that every day. Still, it's a neat symbolic threshold to cross as we shed coal from the stack. I don't really feel bad at all. Luminant was a big bet on coal. It was a huge leveraged buyout after deregulation by some Goldman Sachs geniuses who saw the forecasted gap growing between coal and gas prices. They thought they'd make billions. That was mid-2000s, then we had the shale fracking revolution in 2008, gas prices dropped like a rock and Luminant lost the bet. They took all of EFH down with them (including Oncor and TXU). They bet big and they lost big. Too bad so sad. That's capitalism for you. We will probably hear later about how our reserve margins are shaved by this and we risk blackouts. The truth is ERCOT has been declining in reserve margin for quite some time. Other markets have a capacity market where they pay power plants for existing, and then they get paid again for generating. ERCOT is an energy-only market where you only get paid if you generate. We will have a hard time keeping excess generation (the reserve margin) around as long as we don't have a capacity market. I think the model is sustainable, but if we do have blackouts, it's not because of these coal plants, it's because of the incentives in place (or not in place) to build new.
FERC says nope to NOPR! Probably no one else is interested, but I figured I should provide the conclusion to my thread. The commission, like most of the industry, thought this was a bad idea but they seemed to feel a lot of pressure to do something for Perry to satisfy Trump. Of the 5 commissioners, 4 of them just got appointed by Trump and 3 of those are Republicans. Chatterjee in particular was trying to do some limited version of Perry's plan. But, the commission seems to have found a way to say no gracefully. They closed the docket Perry ordered opened, and opened a new docket on the same subject but without the solution predetermined. Now, they can find whatever solution for resilience is sensible, if any is needed. Though the geography of interest here -- mid-Atlantic and Northeast states -- just had this bomb cyclone followed by a polar vortex and the grid held up fine. The industry already fixed a lot of the trouble we had in the winter of 2014. Of course what this means is no handouts for Murray Energy and FirstEnergy from the feds. I'm sure Murray has already called Trump to voice his displeasure. Bankruptcy is not far off for them, I don't think. FirstEnergy is in trouble too, but they have some flexibility because of their regulated utilities. They can spin off their generation fleet into a separate company that can declare bankruptcy, and the utility holdco would emerge with a much safer regulated return.
energy is an area where market forces are completely distorted by government intervention, a regulatory morass of taxes/subsidies, creating all sorts of perverse incentives to misallocate resources
So we should all still only have American car manufacturers in the world right? Guess how Japanese and Korean car makers got started?