Nominee to energy board set for Senate grilling
WASHINGTON — A former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz and chief of staff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is at the center of the debate around President Donald Trump’s efforts to prop up struggling coal and nuclear power plants.
Bernard McNamee, who leads the U.S. Department of Energy’s policy office, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday on his nomination to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
With everyone from oil companies to environmentalists lined up against the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out coal and nuclear plants, Republicans and Democrats alike are expected to question McNamee closely on his involvement in Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s ongoing examination of whether the steady replacement of coal and nuclear power plants with gas plants and wind and solar farms poses a risk of blackouts.
“There will be a lot of ques-
tions at the hearing on Thursday from people wanting to know where McNamee stands,” said John Moore, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In January, FERC unanimously rejected Perry’s proposal to raise wholesale power rates for coal and nuclear plants, following bipartisan criticism such a move amounted to a disregard of the free-market principles the U.S. power grid has long operated on.
Since then the Department of Energy has examined other maneuvers, including the use of federal emergency powers such as those used to impose price controls when blackouts swept California in 2000 after energy traders, led by Houston-based Enron manipulated the market to drive up power prices.
Months after a memo outlining those options leaked to the media, no action has been taken. But Perry remains under pressure from President Donald Trump, who in June ordered the former Texas governor to take “immediate steps” to prevent the closure of any more coal and nuclear plants.
“I don’t think you’ve seen the last of it,” said Dipka Bhambhani, communications director at the U.S. Energy Association, a group of energy-related companies, government agencies and other public and private energy-related organizations..
McNamee’s ties to the Trump administration, along with an appearance at a Senate hearing in July, has raised speculation that if appointed to FERC he could represent a potential “yes” vote in favor of Perry’s plan.
At the July hearing, he defended the administration’s efforts as an attempt to protect coal and nuclear plants against federal policies that aid other forms of generation. Though he didn’t go into specifics, the coal companies have long criticized tax credits and other policies that they say unfairly benefit wind and solar energy, enabling renewable generators to sell electricity below cost.
“The thought is you need to remove those distortions and get some more parity,” McNamee testified.
But whether he was expressing his own beliefs or merely defending Trump remains a question in Washington. During the July hearing, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, ranking member of the Senate Energy Committee, suggested it was the latter.
“I get you’re just the guy here to deliver this, and you basically say [Perry] believes whatever Congress decides will basically rule,” she said.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, McNamee has split his more than a two-decade-long legal career between Austin, Washington and Richmond, Va., serving Republican administrations in between stints in the private sector representing energy companies.
For four months this year, he worked at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin, leading its Center for Tenth Amendment Action and working on the group’s campaigns to promote fossil fuels and reduce the federal government’s role in health care. The Tenth Amendment aimed to protect states’ rights.
TPPF Executive Director Kevin Roberts said McNamee was “extremely judicious” and a “policy wonk” who would likely approach the question on coal and nuclear power as a fact-finding mission. Asked about TPPF’s position on the issue, Roberts said he believed that government regulations in favor of renewable energy necessitated the system to be “rebalanced.”
“It’s reprehensible what the Obama administration did to coal, but I don’t know that’s Bernie’s view,” Roberts said. “However Bernie would vote on that issue would probably represent how most Americans feel.”
McNamee left TPPF in May to rejoin the Department of Energy, where he had worked as a deputy general counsel earlier in the Trump administration. Now, in his bid to replace Trump-appointee Robert Powelson, who left FERC in June to lead the National Association of Water Companies, McNamee is facing a skeptical crowd in the Senate.
Whether Republican or Democrat, Trump’s bid to help the coal sector represents a direct threat to many key U.S. energy industries, from natural gas fields to solar panel installations. At the same time his proposal is testing the independence of FERC itself, which is a bipartisan commission designed to be independent of the White House.
“Everyone I talked with said they respected FERC because it’s been a comparatively neutral voice on energy policy whatever the administration,” Moore, the NRDC attorney, said. “A coal and nuclear bailout would violate that neutrality. You create the grid to meet market needs, not to aid a particular resource.”
The Senate remains firmly in control of Republicans after the midterm elections. Were McNamee to win a confirmation vote, his influence would be limited as a single commissioner..
When FERC rejected Perry’s proposal in January, the vote was 5-0, with Trump’s own Republican appointees voting against him. And pressure on FERC to keep Trump at bay has only intensified over the past 10 months, as natural gas lobbyists step up their campaign and the PJM Interconnect, the nation’s largest grid operator, insists the coal and nuclear plant closures do not represent a threat.
“McNamee’s addition to FERC would be important, but it would just one commissioner among five at this point,” Scott Segal, a Washington energy attorney, said in an email.