Thread by @energybants

Let's have this a little louder: Natural gas generation speculators are outright saying they ONLY INVESTED IN NATURAL GAS because they were SURE that nuclear plants would die.

Let's be even more explicit: the investment in natural gas was to *ENSURE* nuclear would die. (thread)

https://twitter.com/AriPeskoe/status/1316464846305660930

Nuclear plants need long stable investment horizons, to secure staffing and long-lead-time upgrade parts and services.

Natural gas speculators aggressively enter capacity auctions knowing their investments don't make sense unless they can ensure that local nuclear is killed.

This is happening over and over around the country. In fact, this is the real reason that "deregulated" markets were set up a few decades ago: to shift rents to new natural gas, wind, and solar entrants, away from existing power plants like our nuclear fleet.

#energytwitter sits around saying "renewables and nuclear should work together" while the hard fact on the ground is that natural gas and renewables work ISOs in tandem to destroy nuclear.

Unsurprisingly, costs for consumers don't drop after the loss of the "expensive" nuclear!

Nat. gas, W+S both benefit from the same structures and laws, put into place to facilitate them, exploiting the difference between marginal costs for a single merchant facility vs the average cost of service by the utility formerly entirely responsible for keeping the lights on.

The game plan is that once the nuclear plants are killed and system costs soar, consumers will be told that yes solar and wind are cheap so it's their own moral failing making their electricity bills expensive, by not stopping their electricity usage when nature fails to provide.

In dire cases like California, we're seeing a grid death-spiral, as richer consumers and wealthy businesses start buying batteries & diesel generators as the rest are left at the mercy of a flailing system, loss of energy-intensive jobs, and rising residential electricity rates.

And woe be upon the people if natural gas gets expensive again and/or someone actually passes a carbon tax and their state's nuclear has already been killed by speculators.

Our nuclear plants can live forever. These "deregulated" markets are what need to be destroyed.