He’s following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader who wanted to shut it down, and also didn’t know what it did? That makes it so much better!
Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and are trying to determine possible market solutions.
Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.
Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.
Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.
Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.