“Government shouldn’t pick winners and losers,” we’ve heard, over and over. But the Department of Energy's long-anticipated grid study, released Wednesday evening, makes us think that isn’t the priority it used to be.
The study, commissioned in order to support Perry’s baseless belief that renewables threaten grid security, ultimately found that cheap natural gas and energy efficiency measures are simply outcompeting coal and nuclear. Regulations and renewables play only a marginal role in coal’s decline, the report states clearly. Oh, and renewables are bringing down prices and keeping the grid flexible and reliable.
To no one’s surprise, the report mostly ignored the benefits of renewables and renamed them “Variable Renewable Energy” in a transparent attempt to frame them as unreliable. Fortunately, it didn’t quite go as far as some had feared in attacking clean energy to prop up dirty, though it does make some recommendations to that effect. But no matter how hard Perry wanted the report to justify killing renewables to save the grid, the facts just don’t support it.
This is a surprise to no one who’s been paying attention. Earlier this week, Joe Romm at Think Progress compiled a bunch of examples of how, as one Houston Chronicle columnist put it, “environmentalists didn’t kill the nuclear power industry, economics did.” Cheap renewables mean mining and exploiting radioactive materials isn’t as appealing as it was once promised to be.
And earlier in the year, a report from the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy quantified what, exactly, is killing coal. Natural gas was responsible for 49% of the decline, lower demand for energy 26%, renewables 18%, and regulations 3-5%. Why the DoE report didn’t refer to Columbia's numbers would be a mystery, if anyone thought that the omission wasn’t intentional to appease Perry and Trump. If you’d like to tell the administration about the study, or maybe about this new study showing how 139 countries can run entirely on renewables, here’s the public comment page.
But never one to let the truth stand in the way of politics, Perry’s cover letter to the new DOE study makes a claim directly contradicted in the report itself: that “certain regulations and subsidies are having a large impact on the functioning of markets.”
This deceptive description, which dances around the truth, makes it obvious that this report was never anything more than an excuse to justify the Trump administration strangling renewables with one hand while giving handouts to coal and nuclear with the other. Lo and behold, yesterday DoE announced $50 million in grants for “transformational coal technologies that improve coal-powered systems’ performance, efficiency, emission reduction, and cost of electricity.” This, despite the poor performance and potential corruption of existing clean coal efforts.
Meanwhile, the invisible hand keeps lifting up renewables and natural gas. So despite the constant opposition of supposedly “free market” deferential, anti-renewables voices, it turns out that in terms of clean energy winning on the economics, the free market deserves a hand.
And Perry? Just a finger.
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