Trump Suffers "Major Setback" Before The End Of His First Year In Office -- Bloomberg -- July 6, 2017

From Bloomberg:

A seven-year, $7.5 billion effort to build a first-of-its-kind “clean coal” power plant in Mississippi is officially over.

Mississippi regulators ordered utility owner Southern Co. on Thursday to come up with a deal that’ll have the Kemper plant -- once hailed by the Obama administration as the future of coal -- running as a natural gas-fired generator instead. That ratified Southern’s June 28 proposal to pull the plug on using coal there.

The ruling seals the fate of the Kemper plant, and memorializes the state utility commission’s call last month for the company to give up on “unproven” technologies at the plant. It also assures that customers won’t pay for the failure.

Almost three years after the plant began generating power with gas, Southern has been unable to put crucial coal-gasifiers into service.

The death of Kemper’s “clean coal” component represents a major setback for the very technologies that President Donald Trump has promoted as a way to help save mining jobs. It also marks the end of a high-profile project that was plagued by construction slowdowns, equipment failures and sliding gas prices. Kemper is already years behind schedule and more than $4 billion over budget.

Yup, a major setback for President Donald Trump.

By the way, under which president was this project started? Whatever.

The Kemper story is tracked here.

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And This Is The Problem, Folks --

Getting Caught With A Hand In The Proverbial Cookie Jar

From Joannenova.com:

The BOM got caught this week auto-adjusting cold extremes to be less cold. Lance Pidgeon of the unofficial BOM audit team noticed that the thermometer at Goulburn airport recorded – 10.4°C at 6.17am on Sunday morning, but the official BOM climate records said it was -10.0°C. (What’s the point of that decimal place?) Either way this was a new record for Goulburn in July. (The previous coldest ever July morning was -9.1°C. The oldest day in Goulburn was in August 1994 when it reached -10.9°C).

Apparently this was an automated event where the thermometer recorded something beyond a set limit, and the value put into the official database was the artificial limit. Since colder temperatures have already been recorded in Goulburn, who thought it was a good idea to trim all future minus-ten-point-somethings as if they were automatically “spurious”?

Yesterday, the BOM have acknowledged the error and at first deleted the -10.0 figure, replacing it with a blank space. Then today, after Jennifer Marohasy’s post, they’ve corrected it.