More foes line up against Perry power proposal

The nation’s factories and industrial plants are joining the fight against Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s plan to save the coal and nuclear power industries, joining environmentalists, natural gas producers and renewable energy companies.

The trade group Industrial Energy Consumers of America wrote to members of Congress last week, urging them to tell Perry to withdraw his proposal requesting power market regulations be adjusted to raise prices for coal and nuclear power. Industrial companies rank among the biggest users of electricity.

“Though we remain supportive of both coal and nuclear, we are opposed to providing subsidies that would damage competitive markets,” the Industrial Energy Consumers of America said. “The proposal is anti-competitive and if implemented, it would distort, if not destroy, competitive wholesale electricity markets, increase the price of electricity to all consumers, and directly negatively impact the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing.”

Perry announced his proposal last month as a means to protect the stability of the U.S. power grid, which he said was under threat as coal and nuclear plants close in the face of competition from plants fueled with cheap natural gas as well as wind and solar energy, where costs are falling quickly.

So far, he’s managed to draw opposition from groups as wide-ranging as the Sierra Club and the American Petroleum Institute.

The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, which claims to represent companies consuming 26 percent of the nation’s power supply, is a particularly important voice for the Trump administration, which has made expanding domestic manufacturing a priority in his first term.