If the latest regulations jeopardizing the reliability of the nation’s power grid are enacted, the outcome could be quite dark — literally.
If the latest regulations jeopardizing the reliability of the nation’s power grid are enacted, the outcome could be quite dark — literally.
N ew regulations from the Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency would be “catastrophic” for the power grid, according to a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
The Biden-Harris plan is about as technically illiterate as suggesting that electricity comes from the light switch, according to FERC commissioner Mark Christie. Christie is one of the five FERC commissioners and has been regulating electricity markets for decades.
If enacted, the Biden-Harris EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 regulations would require existing power plants to capture 90 percent of their emissions by 2032, a basically impossible standard. Effectively, the Biden-Harris administration is proposing a de facto ban of the majority of America’s electric power; blackouts would surely follow.
“The overwhelming weight of the expert evidence indicates that a 90% carbon capture standard applied to generation units fueled by gas or coal is neither technically nor commercially feasible,” Christie wrote in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I am not aware of any generating units that are commercially successful in energy or capacity markets today that have met such an unrealistic standard.”
The letter goes on to state that the EPA “apparently dismissed any serious concerns it heard from FERC staff,” despite the fact that the environmental agency would be effectively banning all gas- and coal-power plants in the United States. In 2023, gas- and coal-power plants provided over 59 percent of all electricity generated in America, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas and coal keep the majority of America’s lights on.
This is especially foolish as other Biden-Harris policies, such as electric-vehicle mandates and support for artificial intelligence, will already increase power demands.
These EPA regulations have been challenged in court by both Republican state attorneys general and a massive utilities trade group. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the EPA lacked the authority to issue the original Clean Power Plan, so the legal challenges certainly have precedent. This means that the Biden-Harris proposal is more likely an attempt to scare utilities out of investing in conventional energy using the threat of theoretical regulatory hurdles.
“If the EPA’s new power plant rule survives court challenge, it will force the retirements of nearly all remaining coal generation plants and will prevent the construction of vitally needed new combined-cycle baseload gas generation,” Christie wrote. “This loss of vitally needed dispatchable generation resources will be catastrophic.”
Dispatchable power is electricity that can be turned on or off to match fluctuations in electricity demand. It is the key to ensuring that the lights come on when a switch is flipped. Electrical sources such as wind and solar power are referred to as non-dispatchable, as their output depends on natural conditions such as wind speed or cloud cover, which can’t be controlled by power-grid operators.
Losing vital gas and coal capacity would result in “a serious shortfall in power generation resources” according to Christie. He wrote that FERC can do “very little” to “reverse the effects of the EPA’s power plant regulation,” adding that the agency, as well as state regulators, “will have to attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of the rule on reliability and consumer costs.” But such mitigation couldn’t save the plants themselves. “I emphasize, however, that once critically needed power plants retire, they are gone,” Christie said.
FERC is concerned that adding the overwhelming amounts of wind and solar power to the grid that the Biden-Harris plan demands would make it effectively impossible to maintain reliable power.
It also concluded that the EPA’s proposed solutions of grid-management systems, energy-storage solutions, and more demand-response capabilities are likely not feasible and would further undermine grid stability. Green sources, especially solar, do not provide “inertia” to a power grid to stabilize frequencies and voltages, which can trigger blackouts.
Blackouts already cost the U.S. economy a minimum of $150 billion annually, according to the Department of Energy. The actual value is almost certainly more, as this estimate didn’t factor in the human toll of power outages.
In addition, the unreliable nature of green energy requires utilities to immensely overbuild capacity to meet peak demand. This means that since a utility knows only a fraction of solar or wind power will be available when needed, it must construct vast amounts of additional capacity to have enough to meet peak demand. However, that creates an additional problem of what to do with all that excess power, as it cannot be effectively stored.
To function, power grids require demand to exactly match supply, which is a huge problem for green energy. Power demand is relatively predictable across various times of day and year.
Conventional power plants, such as nuclear, coal, and natural-gas facilities, can adjust output accordingly, as they put out a steady and predictable supply of electricity while potential downtimes for maintenance can easily be scheduled months in advance. Solar and wind energy, however, are inherently unpredictable, as it’s impossible to forecast how cloudy or windy conditions will be more than a few hours in advance.
America’s old power grid is not set up to handle these issues. And replacing it would cost roughly $5 trillion, almost 400 times more than the comparatively paltry $13 billion the Biden-Harris Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated to grid modernization.
Many observers have long predicted that overreliance on undependable solar and wind energy would result in disaster. “If you continue going down this route, you’re going to have significant challenges in managing disturbances,” John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., told EnergyWire in February 2016.
Moura was commenting on an FERC investigation, which found that there is a “significant risk” that wind and solar simply power would render North American electricity unreliable because “wind and solar don’t offer the services the shuttered coal plants provided.”
So-called green energy has triggered numerous blackouts when placed under even fairly modest stresses, such as a summer heat wave in California or a winter cold snap in New England. Such events were unbelievably predictable. It isn’t new that California gets hot in the summer or that New England gets cold in the winter, but the inherent inflexibility of these regions’ green-power grids ensured blackouts.
If these latest regulations jeopardizing the reliability of the nation’s power grid are enacted, the outcome could be quite dark — literally.