The background of the yet-to-be-passed policy dates back to April, when Perry instructed his second-in-command to develop a 60-day review that looks at how regulatory burdens, subsidies, and tax policies “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.” He also wanted to know whether wholesale energy markets adequately compensate actions that, in his view, strengthen grid resilience such as on-site fuel supply usually provided by coal and nuclear plants. The view of Perry and the current DoE is that America’s power grid would become vulnerable if more coal-fired power plants – a form of reliable baseload power – were to close down. It cites the 2014 polar vortex in the Arctic, which sent most of the country into a deep freeze and hiked electricity demand, as an example of a situation that put the power grid in jeopardy. To counteract such a threat, the energy department […]