Lawmakers are questioning the motives behind the Department of Energy’s decision to study whether government support for renewable energy resources are threatening the reliability of the nation’s power grid and contributing to the closure of coal-fired and nuclear power plants.
In a letter sent to Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Monday, several Democratic senators called the request for the grid reliability study “a thinly disguised attempt to promote less economic electric generation technologies, such as coal and nuclear, at the expense of cost-competitive wind and solar power.”
The study appears intended to blame wind and solar power for the financial difficulties facing coal and nuclear generators and suggest that renewable energy resources threaten the reliability of the grid, the senators said.
In a memo to his chief of staff last month, Perry requested DOE investigate how federal subsidies boost one form of energy at the expense of baseload generation. The memo specifically directed the agency to look at the extent to which “continued regulatory burdens, as well as mandates and tax and subsidy policies, are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”
Yeah, the wind and the sun are the wild cards. Uh huh.
Trump has filled every cabinet post with a “stupid” lunatic.
When compared with them our idiot president looks almost sane.
Yes the sun and especially the wind are wild cards. You can’t predict the energy from wind from one minute to the next. Until that energy can be stored to smooth out the peaks and valleys, it doesn’t do a lot of good. You can’t switch a power station on and off as needed like that, the excess just goes to waste.