Lawmakers push to save nuclear
Group outlines strategy for subsidies and credits
If Pennsylvania was willing to give Royal Dutch Shell $1.6 billion in incentives to build an ethane cracker in Beaver County, and offer $4.6 billion for Amazon for the privilege to host HQ2, it should be willing to open its pocketbook to save the 16,000 nuclear power jobs already in Pennsylvania.
The economic argument — buttressed by concerns about carbon emissions and grid resiliency — was the basis of a report released by the Pennsylvania Nuclear Caucus on Thursday. The bipartisan group of state legislators made several proposals for keeping nuclear in the mix and said it would begin agitating other lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf to put them into action within the next few months.
“The time for action is now,” said Sen. Ryan Aument, a Lancaster County Republican and one of the caucus leaders. “We have a very narrow window in early 2019.”
The caucus’s report outlines four options but essentially settles on a strategy of enacting state subsidies for nuclear in the short term with the potential to transition to a carbon market in the future.
Subsidies could mean giving nuclear energy the same treatment as solar and wind in Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio standards, which currently require utilities in the state to get a certain chunk of their energy from renewable sources.
It could also mean creating a zero emission credit specifically for nuclear, following in the footsteps of Illinois and New Jersey.
The impetus for the Pennsylvania effort, and the urgency behind it, is that nuclear is losing market share to cheap natural gas. Pennsylvania’s five nuclear power plants supplied 34 percent of electricity produced in the state in August — the latest month with data
available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Two are slated for early retirement.
The Beaver Valley nuclear power station and Three Mile Island in Dauphin County are scheduled to shut down in 2021 and 2019, decades ahead of their license expirations.
“We make long-term energy policy decisions based only on what is cheap today,” the report laments. “This short-sighted approach incentivizes states to ignore the very real implications of what is happening over the long-term, and for nuclear assets, those choices are irreversible.”
About 800 workers are employed at Beaver Valley.
“If they choose not to act, there will be thousands of families across the Commonwealth asking why they decided to let these good jobs go,” said Joe Gusler, president of Central Pa. Building & Construction Trades Council, who spoke at a fire hall in Middletown on Thursday, flanked by a row of power plant workers.
“Once those jobs are gone, they’re gone forever,” he said.
The Nuclear Caucus held five hearings within the past year, soliciting input from unions, utilities and environmental advocates.
In its report, lawmakers warned that Pennsylvania cannot surrender the fate of its nuclear plants to the machinations of federal regulators or regional grid operators, like PJM Interconnection LLC, the Valley Forge-based operation that coordinates the flow of electricity between 13 states including Pennsylvania. The report painted PJM — which has rebuffed federal efforts to subsidize nuclear and coal plants as market intrusions — as borderline obstructionist.
Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts, a Pennsylvania coalition that includes the natural gas industry, major manufacturers and the AARP, quickly released a short rebuttal of the nuclear report, noting that PJM said that there are no immediate risks to the grid from the loss of previously announced nuclear retirements and warning that a bailout would “benefit shareholders, not PA ratepayers.”
The New York-based Environmental Defense Fund, meanwhile, said the report underscores the rising awareness in Pennsylvania that the state needs to set a cap on carbon and taper it over time.
“Such a policy would drive cost-effective investment in zero-emission resources, and ensure that the Commonwealth is achieving necessary pollution reductions at the lowest cost,” the fund said, without naming nuclear in its statement.
In fact, during testimony to the nuclear caucus in June, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Rama Zakaria cautioned against blindly assuming that nuclear would be the answer to carbon emissions. Instead, he recommended the state set a carbon reduction goal first and then calculate what carbon price would make that goal achievable.
Earlier this week, a group of environmental advocates petitioned the state legislature to establish a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, a move that would help the state’s struggling nuclear plants, they said.