Category Archives: Department of Energy

Trump’s Coal Obsession
 To Force Perry, GOP
 To Abandon Free Market

So, it has come to this—Rick Perry, the man who seven years ago couldn’t remember that the Energy Department was one of the government agencies he wanted to eliminate is now essentially going to be entrusted with running the nation’s electricity grid as secretary of the very same department for the next two years.

Or, at least that is the indication from the latest memo (which can be found here) circulating around Washington in the Trump administration’s never-ending effort to rewrite the rules of capitalism, that wonderful free market enterprise the GOP has so often defended in years past. Democrats have frequently been at the receiving end of GOP barbs about the free market, with Republicans warning anyone listening that they were the only thing standing between the country and, that’s right, socialism. See Secretary Perry’s particularly relevant quote below about President Obama from 2012. Oh my, how things have changed.

I think Barack Obama is a socialist. I think he cares for his country – don’t get me wrong about that – but I think he truly misunderstands what this country was based upon, the values that America was based upon, which was free enterprise and having the ability to risk your capital and having a chance to have a return on your investment.

–Rick Perry

Anyway, the general GOP defense of the free market used to run something like this: When cheaper, better products come along, incumbent industries get hurt, some survive and evolve while others go out of business. It’s messy, but that’s what makes America great.

Well, that exact messy transition is under way now in the electric power industry, and not even a two-year grid nationalization, for that in effect is what is being considered, is going to stop it.

Renewable energy is getting cheaper almost by the day and, coupled with storage, offers the much ballyhooed “baseload” power that seems to appeal to Trump and his tag-alongs. At the same time, the administration’s own energy dominance agenda ensures that natural gas will be in plentiful supply and remain low in cost for all the existing and planned new natural gas-fired generating facilities across the country. Those facts can’t be wished away by half truths about resilience and reliability.

Continue reading Trump’s Coal Obsession
 To Force Perry, GOP
 To Abandon Free Market

AEP Looks Forward, Beyond Coal, Trump Team Still Stuck In The Past

The rear guard defending the coal industry in the White House and across the mall at the Department of Energy need to put their reading glasses on and spend some quality time with a couple of just-released documents that put to rest any dreams of recovery.

The first, from American Electric Power, is a corporate document filled with congratulatory platitudes and the obligatory cautions about going too far, too fast. But, and this is the key, it acknowledges reality, and lays out a plan for addressing that reality instead of pining for the past. The report, Strategic Vision for a Clean Energy Future 2018 (which is available here), should be required reading for the Trump White House and the administration’s energy-related political appointees.

The forward-looking tone is evident from the outset, with Nicholas Akins, chairman, president and CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based AEP, writing: “We have diversified our generating portfolio to provide our customers with the clean energy solutions they are asking us for.” [Emphasis added] You could easily read right over this, but it’s worth digging into the details a bit.

Continue reading AEP Looks Forward, Beyond Coal, Trump Team Still Stuck In The Past

Corporate Green Goals
 Playing A Key Role
 In Pushing Utilities
 Toward Renewables

The Trump administration’s budget proposal for the coming year threatens to do exactly what the president promised as a candidate: eviscerate federal funding for climate change programs. The Energy Department’s highly successful renewable energy office would be particularly hard hit, with the administration’s proposal calling for a roughly 70 percent cut in funding—from just over $2 billion currently to $639 million next year. While wrong-headed, the proposals won’t slow the nation’s renewable transition, which is now being powered, to a large extent, by the corporate sector.

This change, which I discussed here, was highlighted in an interview last month by Chris Beam, the new president of American Electric Power’s Appalachian Power subsidiary, which currently gets 60 percent of its electricity from not-so-clean coal. Speaking to editors and reporters at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Beam said: “At the end of the day, West Virginia may not require us to be clean, but our customers are.”

And that is exactly what is happening across the country, corporate customers are forcing utilities to expand their renewable energy offerings, whether that is to keep existing customers or to attract new companies into their service territories. As Beam added, according to the Gazette-Mail’s Ken Ward Jr.: “So if we want to bring in those jobs, and those are good jobs,…they [corporate customers] have requirements now, and we have to be mindful of what our customers want.”

Continue reading Corporate Green Goals
 Playing A Key Role
 In Pushing Utilities
 Toward Renewables

Energy Secretary Perry
 Badly Misses Mark
 In Grid Study Memo

Energy Secretary Rick Perry clearly has bought into the fact-challenged approach to governing perfected by President Trump and now practiced almost daily by White House spokesman Sean Spicer: In a speech last week to the National Coal Council, Perry told the group that one of key problems from the Obama administration’s energy policies is “that we’re seeing this decreased diversity in our nation’s electric generation mix.”

Unfortunately for Perry, the fact is that the nation’s electric generation mix actually is much more diverse today than it was eight years ago. According to data from EIA, the independent statistics arm of his new agency (the same one, of course, that he forgot he wanted to eliminate back in the 2012 presidential campaign), the U.S. grid is demonstrably, provably and irrefutably more diverse now, as the chart below demonstrates.

Coal’s share of the market, as everyone knows, has fallen, dropping from roughly 50 percent of the total in 2008 to just under a third today. In its place, the amount of gas generation has shot up, and now accounts for about a third of the nation’s generation total as well. The rest of coal’s lost market share has been gobbled up by the wind and solar industries, with nuclear largely unchanged. Objectively, a system where two sources account for roughly 33 percent of the total, a third 20 percent and a fourth 15 percent is significantly more diverse than one with a single resource accounting for almost 50 percent of the total, and the next two at roughly 20 percent each.

Secretary Perry may not like the changes, but to say that something is not what it is, indeed, to say that it is the opposite of what it is, borders on the irresponsible. Worse, the secretary is using this and a number of other questionable assumptions as the basis for a department study looking into issues surrounding the “long-term reliability of the electric grid.”

Continue reading Energy Secretary Perry
 Badly Misses Mark
 In Grid Study Memo

‘Just The Tip
 Of The Iceberg’–
 DOE LED Update

The LED revolution is in full swing: DOE’s latest market data show that the number of installed light emitting diodes almost doubled in just a year, climbing from 215 million at the end of 2014 to 424 million by the end of 2015, while cutting energy consumption by 280 trillion British thermal units (compared to 143 trillion Btu a year ago). This is still a relatively small amount—overall the U.S. consumed 97.8 quadrillion Btus in 2015, of which about 5.8 quads were for lighting—but DOE says it “is just the tip of the iceberg.”

That has got to strike terror in the hearts of electric utility executives everywhere. Already starved for growth—overall retail sales of electricity in the U.S. in 2015 totaled just over 3.7 trillion kilowatt-hours (kwh), essentially unchanged from 2007—utilities are now seeing real erosion in lighting-related demand, erosion that could turn into a landslide in the next 5-10 years and beyond.

Continue reading ‘Just The Tip
 Of The Iceberg’–
 DOE LED Update