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I want to invite you to a fireside chat and join the Ghost of FDR as I explain in the simplest terms why the electric bill is so costly to wage workers. You know the two big companies' names right off I am sure you will recognize them! American Electric Power and FirstEnergy which operate here in Baby Dog's West Virginia had merchant coal plants. Speaking in just folks' terms these are plants that sell power into the wholesale markets. The risks of profit or loss are borne by the shareholders, not by the ratepayer's simple-term customers. The big corporations realized, at the onset of the shale gas revolution as it was happening and wholesale prices declined so rapidly, that these three coal-fired power plants were losing money, so their strategy was to put them in the regulated rate base in the Mountain State.
You have these three coal plants that were moved from merchant operations where they were losing money, and those losses were being borne by the shareholder's small-term owners into the regulated rate base in West Virginia. The Public Service Commission approved each of those three deals.
That was a big factor in the large rate increases that those who get bills in the mail suffered from 2010 until 2020. When we are taking those plants that are losing money for the players, the outcome is not going to be any better open-hearted people. It is going to be better for the shareholders. Oh yes -- if you get rid of those plants and put them on the ratepayers. Now the ratepayers are bearing those losses.
Let me place another log on the fire as I continue ...
The thing is that these plants' CEOs have stated publicly that they have had trouble getting coal.
What do you say? The mines that have been working have been shipping the coal to more profitable markets overseas, leaving the coal-fired power plants wanting with an uncertain supply chain to make coal more expensive is passed on to you, the consumer.
Fingers have been pointed at Washington, D.C. "Democrats." Local Dems have been convicted in the court of public opinion by guilt by association. Behind the grate is a party that understands that Democracy is equal to groceries plus liberty.
"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. … The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jan. 20, 1937.
That is a crutch -- that the deregulation of the railroads made eastern coal more expensive. Environmental regulations -- that if they were rolled back, coal would boom again. That is simply not the case because coal's No. 1 competitor is natural gas.
What is wrong with coal? Progress! Coal has fallen just this quarter to less than 20% of the power grid U.S. energy supply, and will by the time of the 2024 general election be between 10% and 13%. In just a few years 35% of the U.S. energy supply will come from solar; by 2050, that number will rise to 45%. Rare earth minerals found in coal ash will power the second half of the 21st Century.
Some see a way forward for coal in carbon capture. Others point to coal as part of the key for National Power Grid Security, yet the U.S. military is leading the way with the application of solar making the case that local control of the supply of power provides great national security.
The chimney blaze is nearly out now as 2024 brings the 90th anniversary of many of The New Deal Programs.
Michael Traubert is a resident of Wellsburg.