The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission moved Thursday to dismiss a three-year-old proceeding to determine how to ensure the power grid remains resilient as it transitions away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy.
Chairman Richard Glick, a Democrat recently promoted by President Biden, quickly acted to terminate the issue at his first meeting leading the commission.
Neil Chatterjee, in a critical dissent, said he regrets the issue became politicized because of its origins in the Trump administration, which critics said sought to exploit the concept of resilience as part of its pro-fossil fuel agenda.
But Chatterjee said dismissing the proceeding now is “ill-advised” as a power outage crisis caused by extreme cold weather is gripping Texas and other grids in the Midwest and Southeast.
“I am concerned extreme weather events will continue to increase in frequency and severity and present serious risks to the resilience of the bulk power system,” said Chatterjee, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, acknowledging the risk that climate change could make cold snaps and extreme heat events more frequent.
Glick countered that his move to dismiss the issue has “nothing to do” with the grid crisis in Texas and said the “politically charged” effort initiated by Republicans was the wrong way to address resilience.
The issue of resilience, the ability of the U.S. power system to bounce back from a major disruption, became a hot button political issue in the Trump administration.
Trump’s former Energy Secretary Rick Perry issued a proposal to FERC in 2017 encouraging the commission to subsidize economically struggling coal and nuclear plants in the name of resilience, claiming these plants deserve higher payments for their ability to store fuel-on site as backup in the event of a disaster. Wind and solar, by contrast, are unable to provide power when the wind is still and the sun is not shining, unless backed up by batteries or other forms of storage technologies.
Critics said the Perry proposal would have upended competitive power markets overseen by FERC by propping up failing plants and increasing prices for consumers. The Republican-led FERC, an independent agency, unanimously rejected the Perry proposal. But FERC then opened a separate docket to investigate what it means to have a resilient grid and what steps the commission could take to foster it.
“I continue to oppose a coal bailout in any way, shape, or form. This is not what this was about,” Chatterjee said Thursday.
FERC’s Republicans, however, chose not to act on the docket as the commission struggled to form a consensus position.
Glick, the Democrat who took the reins of FERC last month, sought quickly to move on from the issue, saying Thursday that resilience is a matter best addressed at the regional level since extreme weather events generally don’t hit different areas the same. California, for example, suffered rolling blackouts last year during extreme heat and has resorted to planned outages to protect against worsening wildfires. Texas, meanwhile, was hit by extreme cold.
Glick earlier this week did announce FERC and North American Electric Reliability Corporation would conduct a joint investigation into the failures of the nation’s bulk power system’s handling of the recent extreme winter weather.
Chatterjee, however, argued the broader issue of resilience still deserves consideration at a national level. He said the stress on the grid will only get worse as Democrats seek to electrify more aspects of the economy, such as transportation, which is currently primarily powered by gasoline.
“The majority ignores the fact these events do not respect regional boundaries,” Chatterjee said. “I emphatically support accelerating our nation’s transition to a cleaner, more flexible grid. That is why I am not satisfied with a piecemeal, passive approach to ensuring its resilience.”
