Nice surprise from the Energy Commission

Trump was named the winner of the “Overall Achievement in Undermining Global Press Freedom” award for going “above and beyond to silence critical voices and weaken democracy.”

The five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is dominated by Trump appointees, unanimously rejected the proposal. Its members were not persuaded by arguments from Energy Secretary Rick Perry that solar, wind and other forms of renewable power were destabilizing the nation’s power grid and needed to be backstopped with more coal and nuclear power at a considerable cost to consumers.

  LA Times

Who on this planet WOULD buy that ridiculous argument? I guess, though, I'm surprised it has to make it past a commission and not just arbitrarily decided by Perry.

[T]he commission reached the same conclusion as many independent energy experts who reviewed the Trump administration proposal, finding no justification for what could amount to multibillion-dollar price supports for the struggling coal and nuclear industries. The commissioners wrote in their decision that the considerable evidence provided by grid operators does “not point to any past or planned generator retirements that may be a threat to grid resilience.”

Only the coal companies cared about keeping coal companies going, and I'm guessing most of them already understood they were on the way out since years ago and have a diversity plan that allows them to move into other energy sources. The only people who are going to be hurting here are people who believed Trump was going to save their coal mining jobs.

The Perry proposal had little support outside the industries that would have benefited from it. Even the American Petroleum Institute, usually a reliable Perry ally, opposed it. The blueprint was met with deep skepticism by independent energy experts, who had warned it would impede economic growth and distort the power market. Environmentalists and green energy advocates fought it bitterly.

[...]

Although Trump had long argued that coal would flourish in the absence of Obama-era climate action and other environmental regulations, the Department of Energy plan was an acknowledgment that propping up the industry would require its own extraordinary government intervention and come at a hefty taxpayer cost.

The lone Democrat Trump appointed to the commission, Richard Glick, characterized the proposal as a “multibillion-dollar bailout targeted at coal and nuclear.”