Worrying Senate testimony on the state of U.S. power grid
In February, Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey touted his support for green energy funding throughout his state, announcing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act that would help to “build a clean energy economy” by bankrolling projects in “communities with closed coal mines or retired coal-fired power plants.”
Today, experts warn the Senate that the rapid shift to green energy is putting the country’s energy grid at risk of failure, with the possibility of rolling blackouts and widespread deaths looming.
A June 1 hearing at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was called to “examine the reliability and resiliency of electric service in the United States in light of recent reliability assessments and alerts.” Expert witnesses at the event testified that the grid could become critically unreliable in just a few short years.
James Robb, the president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., told senators the electric power system “is absolutely at an inflection point right now.”
“The electric transmission grid is highly reliable and resilient,” he said. “Yet the risk profile to customers is steadily increasing.”
Robb warned that “more frequent, more serious disruptions are increasingly likely” and that the “pace of grid transformation” to green energy must be “recalibrated with the reliability needs of the system.”
The concern is real. Blackouts and brownouts are happening more often across the United States. According to the Department of Energy, the typical American suffered just over eight hours of power outages in 2020. And the overall duration of power interruptions has more than doubled since 2015. In December 2022, the venerable Tennessee Valley Authority was forced to implement rolling blackouts for the first time in its 90-year history.
“Grid transformation” has been occurring throughout the United States for years, as increasing numbers of reliable coal-fired power plants are retired and renewable energy methods replace those plants. Activists claim the rapid shift from carbon-based fuels to green energy is necessary to prevent the effects of climate change.
David Tudor, the CEO of the midwestern Associated Electric Cooperative, predicted that the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels could bring about high-level deaths in the United States.
“My concern is, you’ve got a gap period here that we have this push for new renewables and this push to shut down plants that work, and there’s nothing there in the middle to save us,” he said.
“I fear we are going to have blackouts, and I’m afraid we’re going to see a significant number of lives lost.”
After the Senate hearing, Rich Nolan, the president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said it was “impossible to listen to the testimony this morning, including from the nation’s top reliability regulator and from the CEO of our largest grid operator, and not conclude that we’re pushing aside existing, dispatchable generation — namely the nation’s coal capacity — far too quickly.”
“We are already in a grid reliability crisis and the EPA’S regulatory onslaught is making an extraordinarily challenging situation all but unmanageable.”
The Energy Information Administration says that most electrical generation in the United States comes from coal, natural gas, nuclear energy and petroleum. Just one-fifth comes from renewables.
Robb testified that traditional, non-renewable forms of energy production remain the critical backbone of the U.S. energy grid, best prepared to handle large shifts in energy usage during weather events and emergencies. He argued that novel new forms of energy
“can’t do that nearly as well as large, spinning mass generation.”
“And that’s why the loss of coal plants and natural gas plants and nuclear plants is so concerning from a grid reliability perspective,” he said.
Daniel Payne is news editor of Insidesources.com.