A top Energy Department official said Tuesday the agency plans to fulfill President Trump’s directive to save financially struggling coal and nuclear plants.
Mark Menezes, the Energy Department”s undersecretary of energy, said the department is mulling a requirement that regional grid operators buy power from select coal and nuclear plants, using executive authority under emergency provisions of the Federal Power Act and the Defense Production Act.
“We stand by everything that’s in the paper,” Menezes told reporters on the sidelines of the Energy Information Administration’s annual conference in Washington. “It is one of the options we are considering. This is a process that is bigger than the Department of Energy. We will ultimately take the action.”
Menezes was referring to a leaked Energy Department document that proposes forcing federally overseen grid operators to buy electricity from the coal and nuclear plants for two years, using emergency authority that is normally meant for exceptional crises such as natural disasters, war or a terrorist attack.
Menezes said the Energy Department faces no deadline from Trump to announce a formal proposal to rescue coal and nuclear plants, and is taking time to make sure its plan can withstand the expected legal challenges.
He cited enhanced vulnerability to cyberattacks that could shut down the power grid as justification for keeping online coal and nuclear plants, which operate around the clock and can store fuel on site, making them “baseload” sources.
“The most secure of fuels are retiring at an alarming rate that if unchecked will threaten our ability to recover from attacks and natural disasters,” Menezes said during a speech at the EIA conference. “The president rightly views grid resilience as a national security issue.”
He said the competitive wholesale power markets have unfairly treated coal and nuclear power and don’t recognize their unique attributes.
“I don’t think it was conceived when energy markets were created that the consequence would be retiring our nuclear fleet, our clean coal facilities, due to economic reasons,” Menezes said.
A top official at the nation’s largest regional grid operator said Monday that Trump’s order for the Energy Department to bail out failing coal and nuclear plants “complicates” the functioning of competitive power markets that produce low costs for consumers.
Craig Glazer, vice president of federal government policy of PJM Interconnection, which operates the power grid for 65 million people in 13 states from Illinois to Virginia, said Trump’s call to save coal and nuclear plants worsens the “headache” of recent federal and state efforts to subsidize energy sources.
PJM says its grid is “more reliable than ever” and that any federal intervention “would be damaging to the markets and therefore costly to consumers” by raising electricity prices.
