He’s following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader who wanted to shut it down, and also didn’t know what it did? That makes it so much better!
Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.
Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.
Can you explain that parenthetical? I’m at a loss.