Enron 2.0?

Jennifer Granholm, who served as former President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, has been tapped to the board of Edison International, one of the US’s largest electric utility holding companies. 

Edison announced the move on Thursday, and also said Granholm would be joining the board of it’s subsidiary Southern California Edison, which delivers electricity to 15 million people in the state.

As energy secretary, Granholm oversaw billions of spending on a host of renewable energy projects and electric transmission line improvements, among other clean energy installations funded through Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. That included a $600 million grant to a California consortium that included Southern California Edison and other entities for power line upgrades. 

As it turns out, Bloomberg also reports that Edison is presently investigating whether its equipment could have sparked one of the massive wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles region in January.

During Granholm’s tenure, the DOE allocated tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to support green energy initiatives and associated infrastructure. Notably, the DOE’s Loan Programs Office hastened to distribute billions in loans during the lame duck period, despite objections from Congressional Republicans and the agency’s internal oversight body, which warned that taxpayer funds might face heightened risks.

Jennifer Granholm’s being hired for these leadership positions have echoes of Kenneth Lay, who was a bureaucrat during the Carter administration hired on to Enron’s board of directors. Not to say that it is a self fulfilling prophecy that a company hiring a government bureaucrat can have bad outcomes, but Granholm isn’t just corrupt, she’s incompetent too.

PHOTO CREDIT: Edison Building, Los Angeles – By Downtowngal – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22718988