One of unpopular President Trump’s glaring incompetencies was his choice to head the Department of Energy, Rick Perry. But upon closer review, Perry is only as incompetent as the rest of his Party’s leadership these days. On the one hand, Perry really does not know what the Department of Energy does. But, in a Republican government, having any workable knowledge of a job is secondary to being a puppet for the bigger fossil fueled interests you represent. Perry’s job is to slow down the march of time and allow the old and increasingly intransigent fossil fuel industry a few more glorious years of polluting the planet and making profits based on tried and true scorched-earth models. To that end, Perry has a study of the United States’ grid in development that is slated to be released any day now. Critics of the plan say that this is clearly an attempt to create a false narrative to allow the Trump administration to push efforts to pull away from our support of renewable energy initiatives. The basic premise of the study is bogus. From Wired:
But much of the controversy surrounding the grid study stems from Perry’s implication that federal policies, including subsidies for renewables, are responsible for edging baseload power plants out of the picture—and that they’re doing so to an extent that they “create acute and chronic problems for maintaining adequate baseload generation and have impacted reliable generators of all types,” as Perry writes.
These suggestions rely on inaccurate assumptions about both the energy market and the grid, said Ryan Fitzpatrick, deputy director of the clean energy program at centrist think tank Third Way.
For one thing, the challenges facing baseload power plants are hardly being driven by federal policies alone. In fact, the greatest single factor in the decline of coal has actually been the rise of cheap natural gas, Victor noted — not renewables. Coal has just been unable to compete.
Perry’s contention is that the power grid is in trouble and he wants to put a lot of the blame on renewables. Bloomberg reported a few days ago on a leaked draft of the study. It turns out, the Trump administration and Perry are going to have to erase some of those findings if they want this study to say the bullshit they want it to say.
"The power system is more reliable today due to better planning, market discipline, and better operating rules and standards," according to a July draft of the study obtained by Bloomberg.
The findings -- which are still under review by the department’s leadership -- contrast with Perry’s arguments that "baseload" sources such as coal and nuclear power that provide constant power are jeopardized by Obama-era incentives for renewable energy, making the grid unreliable.
It would be easy to say that Rick Perry’s ignorance surrounding renewable energy is predominately his years of proximity to oil-rich Texas—but Texas produces a ton of wind energy. Perry may be stupid, but he knows where his bread is buttered, and it’s buttered with oil and carbon emissions that blanket the earth.