July 6, 2023 |
Photo – Senator John Barrasso – Bigfoot99 file photo
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso warned in a letter on Wednesday, to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that Biden Administration is moving too quickly to phase out traditional power sources used in the American electric grid for unproven alternatives.
In a letter to the Federal Energy Commission, Senator Barrasso, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, joined West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore Capito, ranking member of the Environments and Public Works Committee, urging the commission to hold a series of conferences to analyze the negative impact of the Proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 on the nation’s electric reliability.
In their letter, the senators quote testimony that FERC Chairman Willie L. Phillips and Commissioners James Danley and Mark Christie gave to the senate energy committee this summer.
Commissioner Danly warned of “an impending, but avoidable, reliability crisis” caused by “public policies that are otherwise designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar assets or to drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”
Commissioner Christie explicitly warned about a “looming reliability crisis” if “the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas” continues unabated.
The result, Senators Barrasso and Capito state in their letter, is an increasing “reliability crisis” in the nation’s energy supply—a conclusion that the members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed to in testimony on separate occasion in recent months.
In their letter, the senators urged the Energy Regulatory Commission to hold a series of technical conferences to analyze the impact of the Proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 on electric reliability. Senators Barrasso and Capito also asked that any analysis or documents that federal nuclear agencies provided to the EPA on the impact of phasing out traditional energy sources on electric reliability be shared with the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
The senators note that the “EPA clearly lacks the expertise to project accurately the impact of its rulemaking on electric reliability.”
