For Dan Brouillette, the rejection of an Energy Department plan to subsidize coal and nuclear plants could actually be a good thing.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in January rejected a proposal to give incentives for nuclear and coal plants to handle outages caused by weather and other problems.

Yet Brouillette, who is the deputy for Energy Secretary Rick Perry, said he will “respect” and “honor” FERC’s decision and move forward.

“The bottom line is this: We proposed an idea. We were hopeful that they would just take our idea, but there was never really any serious expectation that they would take it lock, stock, and barrel,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner from his office on Capitol Hill.

“The whole idea of Secretary Perry taking the action that he took was to begin a national conversation on an issue that everyone knows exists, including the FERC. So, we put our idea on the table. That being said, they chose to go a different way, and that’s quite OK,” he said.

“Instead, they are turning to regional grid power operators to gauge how to better improve the resilience of the power systems,” Brouillette said.

Read the full piece HERE.