Thread by @electronecon

Hey #EnergyTwitter

I'm proud to present: Used But How Useful. How Electric Utilities Exploit Loopholes, Forcing Customers to Bail Out Uneconomic Coal-Fired Power Plants.

It represents the culmination of years of work on behalf of myself and my co-authors.
Thread alert 🚨 1/?

First off, I have to thank my manager at UCS (Jeff Deyette). I started analyzing the issue of uneconomic coal before I came to UCS and even though analyzing the issue wasn't in my work plan Jeff gave me the agency and autonomy to pursue this work. 2/?

Okay, now onto the juicy bits...
One of the principal shortcomings of past analyses is that they failed to account for what resources would replace coal if it wasn't dispatched. So UCS applied its considerable modeling capacity to analyze the issue.
3/

UCS used PLEXOS (same software MISO uses) to replicate the 2018 MISO system. PLEXOS is able to account for the physical constraints of the transmission system and of individual units so we can figure out how the system would dispatch resources if only operated economically.
4/

The findings are robust and the report details all the nitty-gritty (TL/DR thread next week). But what I think is the most compelling: this analysis clearly shows that many utilities in the midwest are over-reliant on expensive coal plants and that its customers who suffer. 5/

If all utilities in MISO were to dispatch based only on economics (no self-committing), families in those states would have saved $350 million in 2018. Here is a link to the report. Let me know you think. 6/6 ucsusa.org/resources/used…