DOE Officials Pressured Researchers to Change Report

DOE Officials Pressured Researchers to Change Report

On August 9, 2018, Bloomberg reported that officials at the Department of Energy (DOE) pressured researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to change a report on the 2017/18 bomb cycle.

The NETL report, which was published in March 2018, assesses electric system reliability during extreme weather events. DOE officials sought to use the report to bolster the Trump administration’s claims that retention of coal-fired power plants is vital to maintain reliability. The Director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Fossil Technology, Angelos Kokkinos, identified several points “we need to make” in the report. Among other things, he suggested that the report’s authors emphasize that, during the 2014 polar vortex, over 55% of outages were related to natural gas and only 26% to coal plants. He also encouraged the authors to include information about coal and nuclear plants slated for closure.