Payoffs in plain sight
by digby
And to think people had shit-fits over Bill and Hillary Clinton running an international charity that took money from rich people to save millions of people's lives.
Washington Post:
President Trump set up a clash with an independent agency Monday evening with his call for the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep open an aging coal plant that buys much of its coal from a company chaired by Robert E. Murray, one of the president’s major supporters.
The TVA board will meet Thursday to consider whether to close the 49-year-old plant, which operated only intermittently last year because it was no longer needed to supply uninterrupted power known as baseload. The board also is considering shutting down a 52-year-old coal unit at Bull Run near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
In a tweet Monday night, Trump said: “Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!”
But the TVA is leaning toward the closure of the Paradise and Bull Run plants precisely because they are not viable.
The agency has already said that closing the Paradise coal plant would have no significant effect. The unit “does not provide the level of flexibility needed to balance hourly, daily and seasonal changes in energy consumption,” the agency said in a proposal. “In addition, cycling the unit off and on results in more wear and tear and higher operation and maintenance costs,” it added.
“With less need for base load resources, assets that have relatively high projected future maintenance cost and environmental compliance expenditures, high forced outage rates and poor generation portfolio fit are now the focus of more detailed study for potential retirement,” the agency said on its website. “The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Paradise Fossil Plant (PAF) Unit 3 falls into this category of assets.”
As recently as 2013, Murray Energy was delivering nearly 100,000 tons of coal a month to the Paradise coal plant. But two other coal units, Paradise 1 and 2, on the same site in Muhlenberg County in western Kentucky were replaced with natural gas generation in the spring of 2017. The Paradise Unit 3 employs about 140 people.
Murray, founder of Murray Energy and a leading donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been pressing the president to help prop up coal-fired plants since the beginning of the administration. In Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s first month in office, Murray presented a four-page “action plan” to rescue the coal industry. The plan said that commissioners at three independent regulatory agencies “must be replaced,” Environmental Protection Agency staff slashed, and safety and pollution rules “overturn[ed].”
Murray is also a customer at Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington, according to a list of “VIP Arrivals” distributed to Trump hotel staff on June 20, 2018. This list, which was obtained by The Washington Post, showed Murray and a fellow coal executive, Heath Lovell of Alliance Energy, checking in for one-night stays. Under both of their names, the hotel’s staff wrote “High Rate,” signifying they were especially high-paying.
He has literally paid Trump off, not just with campaign donations the way these people normally do. He has put money into Trump's personal pocket.
Trump's populism sure is great. He's a real friend of the working man.
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