The Obama administration’s climate change rules are threatening the nation’s power grid as it struggles to transition to more natural gas and solar energy to comply, says the nation’s grid reliability watchdog.
The congressionally created North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, on Tuesday announced a number of steps it is taking to guard the grid against possible power outages resulting from states having to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which is the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate change agenda.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the watchdog, had pressed the EPA to address the potential problems its climate rules would pose to the grid. EPA responded by including a reliability safety valve in its final plan to allow plants waivers if shutting them down could cause a power outage.
The Clean Power Plan was finalized in August, triggering the watchdog to step up its efforts to model the effects of the plan on the grid, and advise states on the reliability hurdles they will face in complying with the rules. In addition, the amount of renewable energy coming online in the next year poses its own problems, the watchdog says.
“We’re going to see an acceleration of that resource mix shift,” John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment, told reporters on a call Tuesday. “We are also concerned … will there be enough energy to support that energy reduction” as coal plants “won’t be able to operate at all times” in addition to those that will have to close.
An additional 27 gigawatts of electricity generation is scheduled to be retired by 2025 as the new EPA rules go into effect, Moura said. One gigawatt of electriciy can power approximately 700,000 homes. Moura said the 27 gigawatts slated to retire under the Clean Power Plan is in addition to the 21 gigawatts of coal units retired between 2012-2014 under EPA’s other pollution rules for power plants. In addition, 17 gigawatts were retired among natural gas, nuclear and other power plants.
Even with these latest projections, there remains a “level of uncertainty on how much resources will retire” under the climate rules, he said.
Moura also said constraints will be placed on the many natural gas-fired power plants coming online to fill the space left by coal. Gas is now the largest producer of electricity in the nation. But that offers its own challenges for the grid, Moura says. The “real challenge is to recognize that not all megawatts are created equal,” he said. States and utilities need to recognize that new resources must have the same qualities to provide the right level of voltage control and ramping capacity that the retired plants provided. These qualities are essential to keeping the grid running.
An even bigger challenge comes from the increasing amounts of renewable energy coming onto the grid, which Moura says can cause problems because the system is not designed for them. He also issued formal recommendations for policymakers to deal with these problems.
He said the reliability watchdog is advising that renewables be phased in rather than all at once. New distributed solar resources are “coming in all over the place,” he said, which “changes the dynamics on how the system operates and is controlled.” The group projects 20 additional gigawatts of renewables coming online by 2017, he said.
The watchdog wants “to make sure they come in reliably,” which he says will require new policies to ensure that amount of renewables can function correctly without incident.
The EPA said in response that it “is committed to ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable and reliable sources of energy,” according to spokeswoman Melissa Harrison.
While the Clean Power Plan was being developed, the agency met with NERC, the Energy Department, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, state regulators and “and the industry to hear their suggestions and advice as to how to address reliability,” she said.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation will be creating a new renewable energy task force to examine the reliability concerns raised by more renewable energy, primarily solar. The task force will work in conjunction with a special outreach effort to the states that the watchdog will establish next month to help them understand the reliability risks in developing their plans to comply with the climate rules.
