Those are your electric bills going up in … steam. (You thought I was going to say “smoke,” didn’t you? See, I know things.)

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

No matter how many utility executives say, “We don’t have enough information to decide whether the President Trump nuke bailout is a good idea yet,” the people who know stuff – you know, experts – have weighed in, and the news is not good.

At the same time Exelon’s CEO was telling a crowd at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting that no one had any idea whether Trump’s plan to mandate that grid operators buy electricity from failing nuclear and coal plants was a good one yet, the Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) was saying that the planned federal handouts for nuclear alone could add up to $280 billion to electricity bills by 2030. That’s $17 billion per year in unnecessary money being shelled out by ratepayers like you and me.

It probably doesn’t need to be said, but Exelon owns all or a portion of 16 nuclear plants throughout the United States. So maybe he’s a bit … what’s the word … biased in favor of a Trump nuke bailout.

The NIRS also said in a release that:

Forcing the purchase of overpriced and non-competitive nuclear and coal power also would crowd out renewables, leaving the U.S. farther behind in wind, solar and energy storage technology development and use.

Because if there’s anything the United States needs right now, it’s to fall even further behind in new electricity-generation technology. Gotta keep those coal jobs alive somehow, I guess.

Tim Judson, executive director, Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS), said (emphasis ours):

By pushing for a nationwide bailout for nuclear power and coal, the Trump administration is rushing headlong into an energy buzz saw, and they don’t even seem to know it. Subsidizing the nuclear industry alone is likely to cost American consumers $8 billion to $17 billion per year, and subsidies for coal could cost just as much. Betting on old, increasingly uneconomical nuclear and coal power plants as a national security strategy is like gold-plating a Studebaker and calling it a tank. And it could destroy the booming renewable energy industry, which is already employing more Americans than coal and nuclear combined.

The words for this madness, they fail.

More:

Exelon CEO: ‘We Need Federal Intervention’ on Grid Resilience

Former NRG Energy CEO David Crane

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

NRG Energy shed David Crane in 2015, blaming the company’s financial struggles on the former CEO’s decision to dive head-first into renewable energy and focusing on how consumers wanted to get their electricity instead of focusing on propping up the old centralized utility model.

Turns out, maybe Crane had a point.

Reuters reports the company is now eliminating more than half its power plants to focus more on the retail side of the business. As new CEO Mauricio Gutierrez told the wire service:

NRG started as a generation company that moved into retail and some people still think of NRG in terms of (power plants). But when you think about NRG in the future, I invite you to think about the company in terms of the number of customers we serve.

Stop focusing on polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants. Move to a more consumer-friendly model. Perhaps throw in renewable energy as the catalyst for keeping customers happy and on board with NRG Energy. Hmmm….we feel like we’ve heard that before.

Oh, right. We did. From … David Crane, who could have saved Gutierrez and the rest of the NRG Energy braintrust three years of wheel-spinning had they just allowed him to complete his transformation of the company beyond his 2015 expiration date.

But they didn’t, and now here they are.

Now Gutierrez says the company is finally on the right track, telling shareholders in a letter (again from Reuters):

“When I became CEO, it was clear we were trying to be too many things to too many people,” Gutierrez said in a letter to shareholders on Wednesday. He wants to grow the retail business, especially in the Northeast where NRG still has more generation than it needs to serve customers.

So let us get this straight – you entered in the middle of someone else’s transition from a power-plant purveyor to consumer-focused energy company, decided he was trying to be “too many things to too many people,” and are now … transitioning from a power plant purveyor to … a company that is consumer-focused.

And hilariously, Gutierrez’s interview appeared a mere two hours after NRG Energy just signed a deal to do three big solar farms with food distribution giant Sysco. So there’s that.

Somewhere, David Crane is laughing his face off (and probably crying a little. But mostly laughing.)

More:

NRG Sheds U.S. Power Plants to Focus on Retail Customers

https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Sysco-and-NRG-to-team-up-to-build-solar-gardens-12969596.php