Feds order Washington power plant to keep burning coal

30 pointsposted 2 months ago
by geox
(washingtonstatestandard.com)

13 Comments

jmclnx

2 months ago

Simple solution, add a large state tax on coal fired plants and prevent the tax from being paid by residential consumers.

The Supreme Court ruled the federal gov. cannot override states taxes, so adding the very large tax will force the owners to do something.

jasinjames

2 months ago

Unfortunately the gov cannot decide who ultimately pays for the tax, just who ends up needing to put it on their balance sheet. If residential consumers demand is inelastic, relative to the commercial customers, then they will pay the tax. I have zero insight into whether domestic or commercial customers have higher demand elasticity, but it's worth being aware of this general principle [0].

[0]https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/...

toomuchtodo

2 months ago

The rules don’t matter at this point in the governance cycle, attempts to be clever will be ignored by the federal government. Start tearing up the rails used for delivery of coal to these plants, and it solves the problem of illegal DOE must run orders for coal generators that have reached retirement and have received grid operator approval to shutdown. No coal supply, no way to satisfy an illegal order.

Be prepared to switch gears and approach an adversary at their level. Legality when the law matters, direct action when the law doesn’t matter.

brianwawok

2 months ago

So go all Richard Daley with a bulldozer? As far as I can tell he never had any consequences.

toomuchtodo

2 months ago

Indeed. Compare the constituency who benefited from Meigs Field (a well to do minority) vs Northerly Island (Chicago’s general public). If you have public support, laws become lesser concerns. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law" cuts both ways.

These generators are not needed as described by their owners and the grid operators of the grids they operate on, and are costing rate payers hundreds of millions of dollars to keep running collectively. Who is the victim by forcing them offline?

vincekerrazzi

2 months ago

This feels like a great idea on the surface, but will likely be overcome by a federal government no longer playing by the rules, requires swift and decisive action on the state government’s side that has not been consistent across the US, even when there’s an obvious issue and solution.

netsharc

2 months ago

Is this the act of the federal government acting like a 5-year old petulant child, who does the thing that its been told to stop to do because it's something bad? Or is some friend of Trump getting paid to sell coal to them?

johng

2 months ago

From the article, this is the only reason I can see for the order to keep it going...

Quote: "That analysis, commissioned by Puget Sound Energy, Tacoma Power, Avista, Seattle City Light, and others, argues that Washington could get hit with an electricity crisis."

The above is if they have an extended downtime. So, the only argument can be that as the power companies shut down, it might create an emergency in Washington, or a crisis if power is needed and it's not there.

Edit, added: It seems the above power companies are in Washington and concluded themselves that it might be dangerous and create an energy crisis?

OutOfHere

2 months ago

Trump's coal friends funded him into power, so now he is funding them.

I don't know when we will realize that big money and an imposing federal government both are evil. Money and power should ideally be distributed, not vastly concentrated. The Gini index and similar indexes come to mind. The purpose of a federal government should be to grant rights, not restrictions.

tanaros

2 months ago

> The purpose of a federal government should be to grant rights, not restrictions.

If the federal government is about granting rights, does that imply the default state is “no rights”? That seems objectively worse.

OutOfHere

2 months ago

Individual states tend to take away rights. In the aforesaid approach, it's the job of the federal government to ensure they can't or don't.

readthenotes1

2 months ago

"The purpose of a federal government should be to grant rights, not restrictions."

In the US, at least, that's exactly backwards.

The purpose of the Constitution was to specifically limit the rights the people gave to it's government and those who govern.

The 9th and 10th amendments were added to make that abundantly clear.

Unfortunately, the articles gave plenty of ambiguity to exploit.