
Energy Department Proposes Forcing Utilities to Buy Coal Power - vezycash
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21052534/energy-department-proposes-forcing-utilities-to-buy-coal-power/
======
iaw
Just to be clear, at the end of the day it will be rate payers who subsidize
coal power producers if this goes through.

Ignoring any of the environmental problems, I'd rather just be taxed if we're
going to be giving coal workers welfare.

~~~
gigatexal
I’m all for that vs telling companies what to do. Just make the coal worker
after a certain point a protected class and support them while they transition
either into retirement or other careers.

~~~
imglorp
Yup, paying for job retraining benefits everyone more than fossil subsidies OR
welfare.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/05/06/47...](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/05/06/477033781/from-
coal-to-code-a-new-path-for-laid-off-miners-in-kentucky)

~~~
iaw
I think there's a large group of people that don't want to be retrained,
fossil subsidies create a number of problems and screw with electricity market
incentives in a way that could have horrendous repercussions.

Welfare for this class wouldn't help me directly but a subsidy for the
industry would likely hurt us all in a diffuse fashion over the long-term.

------
ghouse
I thought the GOP was in favor of free-market and balanced budget.

In this case, the administration already attempted the free-market approach
(asking FERC to review whether the market rules properly compensated the
unique attributes of coal and nuclear). That failed. So now it's big-
government central-planning.

------
parvenu74
Government forcing private industry to do something for purely political
reasons is always wrong. It doesn’t matter if it’s to protect the coal
industry or “green power” — government involvement is almost always the wrong
thing.

~~~
craftyguy
On one hand there's the "no government involvement. period", but then we end
up with companies clearly taking advantage of citizens and the environment
without any repercussions.

On the other hand, there's the "regulate all the things", which is almost
always abused by those in power to take advantage of citizens and the
environment without any repercussions.

Can we not have a mixture of the two, where there's just enough government
involvement to keep us from destroying ourselves and each other, but not too
much such that we destroy ourselves and each other?

Back on topic: this instance of government involvement is purely political, at
the detriment of the environment and those in it, and should not be legal. I
hope this, if it's implemented, is immediately challenged in court.

~~~
jjoonathan
No, we can't, because "more vs less government" is an almost purely synthetic
wedge issue that is purpose-built to be an ambiguous and adaptable
distraction. If you so much as implicitly acknowledge its legitimacy by using
it to frame your discussion, you have already lost.

~~~
craftyguy
There's very clearly a "more vs less government" stance being taken here. OP
very clearly takes the side of "less government". Other comments on HN,
reddit, on the street are very typically (when on the topic of regulation)
either "regulate everything" or "regulate nothing". If you believe otherwise,
then I would LOVE to know where I can mingle with folks who don't see things
as one extreme vs another, because that's literally all I see here.

------
kevan
It's pretty clear at this point that coal isn't economically viable compared
to natural gas and even some renewable sources, and it won't get any better.
Artificially propping up demand might delay it by 5-10 years. But you can only
fight the inevitable for so long. Then the crash off of coal will be more
severe and harder to manage.

~~~
cletus
You can prop up an industry for longer than you think. Just look at corn.

~~~
XorNot
The thing is humans aren't actually going to stop eating corn - like, our
taste in foodstuffs hasn't shifted that much.

Whereas the trend into the future is to basically drive coal use down to
nothing - it's dirty and harder to deploy then modern alternatives, and even
if you kept the mines open the advent of gas turbines means that coal-seam gas
would be the fossil fuel you'd be targeting.

~~~
vermontdevil
Corn is mostly produced for cow feed and gas. It’ll collapse at some point but
it’ll be a while due to these two industries.

------
ballenf
It's hard to take the purported national security justification seriously
given that it requires actively buying from coal plants instead of just
requiring a minimum # days' worth of backup energy kept on-site.

A regulation more along those lines would, indeed, seem like a smart move (if
it's not already done).

~~~
ghouse
If there were only one power plant responsible for the grid, I'd agree with a
regulation requiring a minimum number of days of fuel on-site.

However, there are many thousands of power plants on each of the three US
grids (Eastern, Western, Texas (ERCOT). And many different points of failure.
[1] How much more should consumers pay for a regulation to keep fuel onsite to
mitigate a risk that has, effectively, never happened? [2]

[1] [http://fortune.com/2018/01/04/bomb-cyclone-grayson-power-
out...](http://fortune.com/2018/01/04/bomb-cyclone-grayson-power-outages/) [2]
[https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2011/02/06/freeze-
knoc...](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2011/02/06/freeze-knocked-out-
coal-plants-and-natural-gas-supplies-leading-to-blackouts)

------
robotkdick
This is just headline grabbing to make the poor people who worked at defunct
coal mines believe Trump has their back when, in fact, the administration
knows nothing will come after the headlines because coal is on its way out due
not to the environment but cost.

