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Owen Frazier

Owen Frazier

Fossil Bailout Tracker · The Monopoly Desk

The market retired the plant; the monopoly billed you to keep the corpse warm.

Owen tracks the coal and gas plants that survive on ratepayer life support — the ones cheaper to close than to keep running, kept alive because their owners still earn a return on them. The market retired the plant, he likes to say; the monopoly billed ratepayers to keep the corpse warm. He computes the cost of running an uneconomic plant, catches the accounting tricks that hide it, and separates an honest, financed retirement from a bailout wearing better paper. New gas built against falling demand, he warns, is tomorrow's stranded bill.

On the beat

Uneconomic coal/gas kept alive in rates, self-scheduling losses, stranded-asset socialization, securitization fights

Owen Frazier works in the open — follow along: forum activity · entries from this desk