Everyone who cares about independent analysis in government should read this. I left a position overseeing analysis at @eeregov in April 2019. Things like this were a big reason why I left. A thread! (1/n) https://twitter.com/pfairley/status/1296486345041379329

Full disclosure: I wasn't involved in the Seams study, but I know a lot of the lab staff mentioned in the story, and was at DOE when the Seams study blew up, and was aware of many of the staff-level DOE and lab discussions. (2/n)

Stifling this type of research is obviously short-sighted - in this case, it's reducing the urgency to figure out how to make infrastructure investments that can't be built overnight... (3/n)

...but that would help accelerate the transition to the clean grid we know we need to address climate change, reduce air pollution and its negative health effects (asthma, etc.), & increase the benefit of electrifying other parts of the economy through EVs, heat pumps, etc. (4/n)

These investments would create jobs, and, as the study shows, more than pay for itself. To be clear, we aren't even talking about whether the government should try to make these investments happen, this study was just modeling the impacts of better connected electric grids. (5/n)

- which were huge! Up to 35 megatons of CO2 and $3.6 billion per year. But there were problems: 1) the study was showing these investments would not only reduce emissions and save $$, it would accelerate coal retirements. (6/n)

And 2) it was already getting positive publicity from @drvox and others.

It's important to underline - the studies' authors did not violate DOE protocol at the time. Leadership of EERE & the Office of Electricity (whose Dep Asst Sec raised the alarm) had been briefed. (7/n)

And the stated objection - that the study was advocating for a carbon price - was patently false. (As an aside, in my experience, @NREL is if anything too conservative about exploring policy scenarios precisely b/c they are committed to being analysts, not advocates.) (8/n)

But think how crazy it is to shut down any studies that explore scenarios you don't like. Regardless of whether you support a carbon price, for instance, it shouldn't be controversial to say the US might have one some day. So it's also worth exploring its implications. (9/n)

Failing to do so leaves policymakers flying blind. It's like shutting down pandemic research just because you hope we'll never have to deal with one. Wait... (10/n)

As Sue Tierney makes clear in the article, this is not an isolated incident. The final report in the Electrification Futures Study ( https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/electrification-futures.html) series is similarly languishing, awaiting "DOE review" that everyone knows is not forthcoming. (11/n)

The 12th report in @BerkeleyLab's Future Electric Utility Regulation Series on - surprise, surprise - renewable energy options for large utility customers has been "under review" since June 2019. (12/n)

Since the FY18 (!) appropriations bill, Congress has been directing DOE to submit a report on the impacts of Zero Emissions Energy Credits. This is at least as much about nukes as renewables, but same story. The House E&W approps report for FY21 is getting desperate (p.99) (13/n)

And those are just some publicly known reports. There are many, many more examples we don't hear about. Most insidiously, DOE and lab analysis staff can never be sure which studies are going to cause problems, in part b/c DOE politicals won't put guidelines in writing. (14/n)

*Obviously* studies focused on climate change or retiring coal are a no go, but seemingly innocuous topics like the role of energy efficiency as a grid resource have also been shut down. It's genuinely hard to predict what will fly. (15/n)

Unsurprisingly, this leads to self-censorship. It's a waste of talent and federal funding and time, to say nothing of the lost knowledge these reports would have generated. And it leads to demoralized staff who sooner or later give up and leave, as the article shows. (16/n)

Look, in some ways, this is the exact wrong time for this discussion. Nothing's going to change over the next two and a half months, and if Trump wins reelection, this is probably a lost cause, and we have bigger problems anyway. (17/n)

But add this to the list of things a Biden Administration has to fix - rebuilding and recommitting to the analytical capability of DOE and the national labs, and putting in durable practices and protocols to ensure scientific and intellectual independence at the labs. (18/18)