HERSHEY, Pa. — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is “not in the business of putting our thumb on the scale” for one source of power over another, one of its commissioners said Friday as he responded to questions about how the independent agency will handle a directive from the Trump Administration to come up with a rule to value the fuel-security features of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
Commissioner Robert Powelson — one of three sitting members of the commission and one of two appointed by President Donald Trump — said the agency, instead, is likely to consider the unique attributes of the nation’s different regional power grids and what kind of insurance they need to withstand disruptions to their fuel sources from disasters or attacks.
“FERC is trying to stay out of the fuel wars,” he said, “and that’s what’s going on right now: coal against gas, nuclear trying to stay above the fray. It has become, unnecessarily, all about ‘my fuel is more resilient than your fuel.’ We should stay away from that conversation.”
The U.S. Department of Energy proposed an expedited rule to the commission last month that would benefit large nuclear and coal plants in Pennsylvania and other states by allowing them to recover their costs if they have a 90-day fuel supply on site.
Many operators of those plants welcomed the proposal as a way to save them from crippling competition from low-priced natural gas-fired power plants. The Pennsylvania House and Senate both passed resolutions this week to encourage FERC to follow through on the proposal.
But regional electric grid operators, environmental groups, energy-hungry manufacturers, and the natural gas and renewable energy industries oppose the proposal, saying it would disrupt markets and unnecessarily increase costs for consumers.
Mr. Powelson spoke at an energy conference called “Decade of Disruption” that was organized by former Pennsylvania utility regulator and environment secretary John Hanger.
After his public remarks, Mr. Powelson reiterated that “FERC throwing added revenues at a particular generation resource” is “not what we do.”
Earlier in the day, officials from northeastern regional grid operators and power companies tended to agree that the Department of Energy’s specific proposal for addressing power grid resiliency is unlikely to become a final rule.
But leaders of the mid-Atlantic and New England regional transmission grids identified unique resiliency issues specific to their footprints that should be studied and addressed outside of a uniform federal rule.
In the near term, for example, PJM Interconnection President Andy Ott said his regional grid is trying to better understand and prepare for the hypothetical risk of a pipeline supplying several major gas-fired power plants going offline — a pressing vulnerability in a region that has seen a surge of new natural gas-fired capacity added since 2007.
Valley Forge-based PJM coordinates the flow of electricity to 13 states including Pennsylvania.
“Resilience, at least in PJM, should not be a discussion to overbuild the system,” Mr. Ott said. “What it should be is a way to responsibly account for the reality that we face.”
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: October 27, 2017, 9:27 p.m.
