Last month, America’s Power’s President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth joined reporter Robert Bryce as a guest on his Power Hungry podcast. The episode focused on the many challenges facing our electric grid and the importance of coal as a solution to maintaining reliable and affordable electricity.
Bryce and Bloodworth agree that coal has a critical role to play in our nation’s energy mix and that EPA regulations and Biden administration policies that undermine this role endanger our electric grid. On this point, Bloodworth said that the “Clean Power Plan 2.0 would really put the entire coal fleet at risk by 2030”, stressing the discrepancy between what experts are saying and what policymakers are doing. “Grid operators and [the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)] are saying, three-quarters of the country is at elevated or high risk of blackouts, which is unheard of, for a country who certainly can be energy independent.”
She further stressed that the EPA’s goal of switching to renewables is practically impossible, citing the “million megawatts of wind, solar and battery storage” that still needs to be constructed and the trillion-dollar price tag associated with it. Still, Bloodworth struck an optimistic tone, underlining how the conversation around retirements has evolved in the past few years toward greater recognition of these underlying challenges. Now, in her words, “electricity experts, whether that’s FERC, whether that’s Jim Robb [at NERC] all cite reliability concerns,” and “utility commissioners…have really expressed their concern and the need to ensure that we maintain these dispatchable resources.”
This was exemplified at a recent Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, where all four FERC commissioners agreed that coal would remain important for the foreseeable future. Their conclusion was echoed by Bryce at the end of the podcast: “We should keep all of our coal plants open.”
For additional information regarding the nation’s coal fleet, grid reliability, and related topics, please visit www.AmericasPower.org.