Regulators should reject Perry’s plan for coal in America

WINTER is coming to America. That simple statement of fact ought not to send shivers down policymakers’ spines. But Rick Perry, the energy secretary, sees it as a call to arms. To defend Americans from blizzards, polar vortices and other treacherous weather which, he says, threatens the country’s electricity grid, he proposes throwing a multi-billion-dollar lifeline to struggling coal-fired and nuclear plants if they can keep emergency fuel on standby for 90 days.On December 8th the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) was given a 30-day grace period to decide whether to support Mr Perry’s plan. It should refuse to do so, or substantially amend it. His scheme is a confection of bad policy, faulty economics and thinly disguised patronage. But it also raises a genuinely difficult question: how to keep grids working smoothly in an era of cheap natural gas, which is hard for baseload power plants to compete with, and renewable energy, which is dependent on the vagaries of the wind and sun?