USA’s subsidy to coal and nuclear power stalled, but still a possibility

TK: The basic idea is that the Department of Energy would like to intervene into the energy markets and basically either order grid operators to buy electricity from struggling coal nuclear plants or they would provide some sort of an incentive to do so. And currently, a lot of those units are retiring because it’s cheaper to get energy from elsewhere. And so, what the DOE is doing here is making a national defense or a national security argument that basically gives wide deference to the administration that would allow them to come in and intervene in those markets and put their thumb on the scale in support of coal and nuclear plants that otherwise might not dispatch. …….

 I think one of the things to keep in mind is that even all of the even before the opposition is stacked against the proposal any sort of legal battles is going to be a very protracted process. …..there’s a lot of kind of a top-down political drive to move this thing forward……..

this is probably going to be a very costly proposal and anything that we’ve seen so far doesn’t really detail who’s going to pay for it or how they’re going to pay for it. ……. someone’s got to pay for it and that’s going to be pretty politically damaging…….http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/coal-and-nuclear-subsidy-still-alive-despite-stall#stream/0