The Trump Energy Resilience Plan which Could have Saved Texas
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 20, 2021
Has Trump derangement syndrome cost Texan lives? Back in 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal onsite, for disaster resilience.
At the time the resilience proposal was widely criticised as being a thinly disguised Trump scheme to pump government money into the coal and nuclear industries. But in hindsight, a bit more resilience might have saved Texas from days of painful electricity blackouts.
From 2017;
Rick Perry: DOE’s Coal, Nuclear Proposal Is ‘Rebalancing the Market’
Perry doubles down on arguments that the NOPR will protect Americans.
LACEY JOHNSON NOVEMBER 02, 2017
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said a proposed rule to subsidize coal and nuclear plants is “rebalancing the market” to correct for the Obama administration’s support of renewable energy.
They “clearly had their thumb on the scale toward the renewable side,” said Perry, who spoke about his energy policy priorities with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and Axios CEO Jim VandeHei at an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The DOE’s request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would upend decades of energy market policy by guaranteeing cost recovery for power plants with 90 days of fuel supply on-site — something that only nuclear power, a few hydropower sites, and some larger coal power plants can provide.
“If you can guarantee me that the wind is going to blow tomorrow, if you can guarantee me that the sun’s going to get to the solar panels…then I’ll buy into that. But you can’t,” said Perry.
The notice of public rulemaking, or NOPR, implies that there is a looming threat to grid reliability due to coal and nuclear power plant retirements. Its conclusions are largely based on an incomplete analysis of the 2014 polar vortex, which could have led to blackouts had several coal-fired plants now slated for closure not been available to serve the load.
The move has been widely criticized by clean energy advocates as politically motivated and factually unproven, and has drawn a backlash from major sectors of the energy industry.
…
Federal regulators rejected the plan, on the grounds that Rick Perry failed to provide enough evidence that retiring coal and nuclear plants was undermining grid stability. The plan was eventually dropped, after vigorous lobbying from gas and renewable energy groups.
Now that the scenario Rick Perry predicted has actually happened in Texas, it seems pretty obvious the Rick Perry was right about the risks. Nuclear power plants and fossil fuel plants which had access to adequate fuel supplies mostly stayed fully operational.
Why is government intervention required to ensure grid resilience?
Keeping several months worth of fuel onsite is a cost which does not contribute to company profits. The cost of all that reserve fuel represents money which could instead have been used to pay down capital debts, or pay out dividends to shareholders. Power companies which choose to wear this kind of expense are at a competitive disadvantage compared to power companies which run leaner operations, by running their reserves down to the bare minimum. The expense of keeping fuel in reserve impacts market share and company growth; consumers frequently flock to the lowest price energy service, without considering the long term consequences.
Rick Perry’s plan would have eliminated the financial penalty for keeping a fuel reserve onsite, by compensating power companies for the cost of maintaining substantial fuel reserves.
Given resilience payments seem to be a workable solution, will President Biden or Texas Governor Greg Abbott implement the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan, to ensure nothing like the Texas power outage disaster ever happens again?
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Whatever happened to “Keeping Americans Safe”…or was that just an election slogan?
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Dunno (who knows whom/what to believe any more?): I’m a helluva lot more “grabbed” by the superlative Investigative-Journalism icon Greg Palast here: https://www.gregpalast.com/texas-gets-layd-how-the-bush-family-turned-off-the-lights/ .
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Robert, I’ll use your words to describe Palast: “goddammed Zionist, meddling, manipulating, lying, diverting,” and simply note that the two states with the most intermittent power generation, California and Texas, are also the two states where we have intermittent power delivery.
Use your common sense and, please, ignore Palast.
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Can’t do that. I have too much respect for Palast, John Pilger, Wayne Madsen and those few who try to ferret out filth and keep the sane public on track. Remember Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson?
Found this blurb randomly at a site listing (not the actual site) while idly searching: “Greg Palast is investigative journalism at its best. No one has exposed more truth about the Bush Cartel & lived to tell the story.”
But who knows?–maybe Palast merely has a personal axe to grind against the Bushes? — as I wrote above “Who knows whom/what to believe any more?”
Are you identifying Palast as a “goddammed Zionist…”? In truth, I do find other “blurbs” that cause shivers of concern in that direction…. Who knows…?
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Yes, Bush bashing got him a lot of cred. But that’s a snap. And then what?
Maybe you should select a piece for an archival post:
Greg Palast: Ties to the Mossad, Rockefeller ”Liberal CIA …
Search domain isgp-studies.com/bio-of-greg-palast https://isgp-studies.com/bio-of-greg-palast
Greg Palast biography: born in 1952. Jewish family and apparently a nephew of notorious Mossad chief David Kimche. Sister Geri Palast today is a major Israel activist who works together with AIPAC. Greg and his sister had a poor background, but apparently were great students.
Greg Palast is Related to Mossad … – Christopher Bollyn
Search domain http://www.bollyn.com/greg-palast-is-related-to-mossad-chief-david-kimche/ https://www.bollyn.com/greg-palast-is-related-to-mossad-chief-david-kimche/
Greg Palast is an American journalist who rudely accused Professor Steven E. Jones, the scientist who discovered nano-thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center of being “a complete fruitcake, and a complete, utter fraud” on INN with Lenny Charles in 2007.
Greg Palast’s Attack on 9-11 Truth – Christopher Bollyn
Search domain http://www.bollyn.com/greg-palasts-attack-on-9-11-truth-2/ https://www.bollyn.com/greg-palasts-attack-on-9-11-truth-2/
PALAST’S ZIONIST ROOTS Greg Palast is the product of a Chicago-based Russian Yiddish immigrant family which married into an immigrant Hungarian Jewish family. Gregory is the 55-year-old son of Gilbert (Gil) L. Palast and Gladys E. (nee Kaufman) Palast from Chicago. He is married to Linda Levy and has two children.
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Thanks; duly appreciated.
Is nothing — integrity, principle, objectivity… — sacrosanct anymore?
As for Trump, I’ll admit to possible terminal naïveté and/or prudishness, but my single takeaway from him as a primetime bas*ard lies not in any good he might incidentally have done politically or nationalistically for the U.S. but in his crass/crude “Women? Just grab ’em by the pussy and they’ll do anything you want.” That was quite enough for me…have too much respect for my mother and all women to abide by such astonishing male arrogance…a male arrogance that was on full display, all the time, by The Bully Trump. As a major element of that bullying instinct and persona, T’s focus was turned to trying (w/a little gleeful help from his Zionist friends, who know a thing or two about bullying) to replace one “deep state” with another…and — grudging nod to fellow billionaire Sheldon Adelson — he made some headway the momentum of which has not stopped. That’s not what I want for America…never have been fond of “entangling alliances.”
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That’s narrow.
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Double ditto.
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