Competing interests in dealing with Perry's power reliability plan

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix:
In his 20 years of promoting renewable energy in Washington, Gregory Wetstone has made common cause with a range of special interest groups:- environmentalists, power utilities, even a handful of natural gas producers. But President Donald Trump's efforts to bail out the coal industry led Wetstone, the head of the American Council on Renewable Energy, to find a surprising new partner: Big Oil.

Within hours of Energy Secretary Rick Perry releasing a proposal to overhaul the country's power markets to advantage unprofitable coal and nuke plants, Wetstone was busy pulling together a team of unlikely allies, including solar installers, oil refineries and natural gas drillers, all of whom were worried that the plan would raise electricity costs and undercut their fuel source in the power markets.

With uncharacteristic speed for a collection this broad, Wetstone's renewable energy council joined the American Petroleum Institute and 19 other groups to submit comments that noted their unlikely alliance, slyly noting the proposal's "power to unite." They dubbed the plan ill defined, unwarranted and unreasonable.

"It's not often that our interests align, but I think everyone recognizes the importance of standing up together," he said in an interview. "It's a reflection of how disruptive the policy put forward would be.

The lobbying is aimed at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's electricity markets and is set to decide by Dec. 11 whether or how to act on the Energy Department's proposal. If approved, it could help achieve Trump's goal of putting some U.S. coal miners back to work by giving unprofitable coal power plants an edge against more economical ones that run off cheap wind, solar and natural gas.

When he proposed his grid overhaul, Perry relied on an obscure statute to argue that regulators should reward coal and nuclear plants because of their ability to keep enough fuel on hand to operate in case of emergency. Perry has asked FERC to allow power plants with 90 days of fuel on site to charge customers more money. Coal and nuclear plants store their fuel at the plant; natural gas and renewables typically don't.

No one is really sure how much that would raise Americans' power bills. Estimates range from a few hundred million dollars to more than $200 billion.
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The issue is how does the US make sure that the grid can operate in an emergency situation.  The power produced by wind and solar is too intermittent to be depended upon for round the clock production.  And despite selling themselves as cheap, they are not.  They need huge subsidies to be competitive with other energy sources. 

Nuclear, which would benefit from the plan has been regulated to the point that it is barely viable as a competitive source.  Coal has been made expensive by Obama and the anti-energy left which has also tried to regulate it out of existence.  Natural gas is probably the cheapest and most reliable of the sources.  As long as there is no pipeline disruption its energy supply is not that vulnerable to energy disruptions, although terrorists could it make difficult to keep it flowing.

What I don't hear being discussed is keeping the grid operations after an EMP attack.  That seems like the biggest danger to reliability.  The US has adversaries and enemies who could and would launch such an attack and it is hard to see how any of these energy sources can address that problem on a grid-wide basis. Those living off the grid who can afford the inefficiencies of solar might have an advantage assuming their operation was not run by computers that also get fried in an attack.

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