Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Tuesday that he hasn’t seen an electric grid study that he ordered, even though drafts of the report have been leaked and reported on since Friday.
“There are a lot of folks throwing Jell-O at the wall, folks that say they may have some information that’s in the report,” Perry said at the National Press Club in Washington. But the bottom line is: “I haven’t seen it yet.”
Perry was at the press club to introduce the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol.
“There are lots of people breathlessly waiting to read that,” Perry continued. He had told a congressional committee last month that the study would be released in the first week of July. A draft was leaked to Bloomberg on Friday that concluded that renewables were not a threat to grid reliability, but the agency said those findings were from an early draft and could change.
Perry directed the agency’s electricity office to examine the market and regulatory threats to baseload coal and nuclear power plants, which provide electricity around the clock. The Trump administration has made restoring the coal industry a core part of its agenda.
Meanwhile, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will be releasing a separate grid report Thursday as directed by Congress in a 2015 spending bill, called “Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation’s Electricity System.”
The report will look at the “resilience and reliability of the nation’s electric power transmission and distribution system,” a press release said Monday. “A new Academies report resulting from this study addresses technical, policy, and institutional factors that might affect how modern technology can be implemented to improve the resiliency of the electric system, recommends strategies and priorities for how this might be achieved, and identifies barriers to implementation.”
