So this happened yesterday while Rump was distracting everyone with his tweets.
In a brazen move, Energy Secretary Rick Perry has ignored the findings of his own grid study and proposed a new federal rule that would effectively force Americans to buy dirtier, more expensive power.
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Friday morning that Perry has “formally proposed that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) take swift action to address threats to U.S. electrical grid resiliency.” FERC oversees the U.S. grid and regulates interstate electricity transmission.
To make his case, Perry has fabricated an economic threat to U.S. grid reliability from cheap renewables and then proposed a rule to account for the imaginary reliability benefit of other electricity sources — all the while ignoring the actual health and environmental costs of carbon pollution from burning coal that aren’t priced in to the market yet.
Perry is trying “to essentially end competition in U.S. power markets in order to force customers to pay billions of dollars for uneconomic coal and nuclear plants they don’t want or need,” Mark Kresowick, an expert on FERC rules, told ThinkProgress. Kersowick called the move “unprecedented.”
In the continuing saga that is the Rump administration’s denial of reality itself this is an effort in ignorance that only Rick Perry could propose with a straight face.