EFH vs. EPA "Not An Even Trade"

Rating for this letter writer: Just Plain Uninformed
Author:  Will Becker, East Dallas
"Not an even trade"
Re:  "Double jolt: higher bills, less reliability - With use on the rise and fewer generating plants, consumers are primed to pay,"  Thursday news story.


It appears the environmentalists will succeed in shutting down a number of electric power generating plants after the year to clean up our "dirty air."  The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said that, had these plants been taken off-line during this past August, the lights would have gone out.


If next summer is a repeat of this past summer, I'm sure environmentalists will agree that any resulting power outages in 110-degree heat will be a fair trade-off for cleaner air, right?


Well, Mr. Becker let's just examine your statements and see what we can see.


"to clean up our 'dirty air'' - Did you put the words dirty air in quotations because you believe or wish to make us believe our air is as clean as it should be?  For the eight years that the most recent former President Bush was in the White House, local EPA officials were hamstrung in any effort to force the State of Texas to comply with federal regulations that literally clear the air in the majority of the other states in this union.  


What you should really be doing is writing thank you notes to your fellow electric consumers thanking them for subsidizing your electric rates for the past eight years at a minimum by their breathing air less clean than it could and should have been.


If there are power outages next year in the 110-degree heat what this environmentalist will agree is that we are now finally paying the cost for years of allowing TXU (in all its forms and permutations since deregulation of the retail electric market) to flout the law, procrastinate, prevaricate, obfuscate and outright lie about the amount of pollution it took to produce electric using that coal in those plants.  


I worked for TXU and various permutations thereof from 2003 until 2008.  It was no secret to anyone, not even the cleaning staff, that TXU was in a no-win position with the coal produced for and used by these potentially closing electric generation facilities.


Now, Electric Future Holdings has taken the most extreme path available to them in order to gain cover for the fact that they can not competitively provide electric in this market.


Well!!!! I'm aghast.  The truth of the matter is they don't have the money to make them economical because they and their investors made a really, really bad investment and they would like to produce cheap electricity to make a profit by passing the unrealized cost of that electricity to Texas citizens through lower air quality.


EFH bought a pig in a poke and is now upset to find out that they can't make a silk purse out of their sow's ear.


John Wilder and TXU's then financial officers and advisers financially raped what was at least a stable if not particularly well run company.  They kicked the wheels off the trolley, sold the wheels to people who like to make money off reselling wheels, renamed the trolley a sled, put on a cheap new paint job and then sold the sled to the first set of idiots who would buy it for a financial down-hill ride.


Well, I for one do not feel like bailing out EFH and its idiot owners financially by further degrading the air.  Call me an environmental Nazi, but next year when electric rates become high or we have an outage the only thing I will be agreeing to is your right to rev up your own personal coal powered electric generator, let the resulting pollution float down wind to your neighbors, and tell them it's all my fault because I like my clean air and don't feel like letting EFH pick my pocket in order to get it.