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Dependable Power First Kentucky

In early 2020, while serving in my role as Senior Energy Advisor in the Trump Administration, I attended a meeting with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where a debate was taking place. The debate was over what the official federal definition of the word “resilience,” should be. 

I continue to find it baffling that this was even a debatable topic. Allow me to provide my own definition, the same definition I proposed in that meeting:

Resilience – the capability of our nation’s electrical grid to instantly respond to upset conditions.

Simple, right? To elaborate, we can define upset conditions as weather related (a heat wave or polar vortex, the second of which caused the devastating Texas blackout of 2021 and the freezing death of over two hundred people), a major loss of power generation (which was the first domino to fall during the historic northeastern blackout of 2003), or damage to a part of the grid (as happened in 2022 when someone fired a rifle at a substation in North Carolina leaving 36,000 customers without power).

When events like these occur, it is essential, literally a matter of life and death, that the grid be able to respond with power delivery from an alternate source or alternate direction, which direction maintains the critical balance of electricity flow through the grid. In other words, the grid must not only be reliable, it must also be resilient.

For most of the history of electric power in the United States, we had the luxury of taking resilience for granted. Blackouts in the United States were relatively rare. Most of us have been able to have absolute confidence, most every day of the year, that when we reach to flip on a light switch, the lights will come on. Now, thanks to a combination of the age of our coal power fleet and a premature and mostly unnecessary push toward “green” energy, our grid reliability is in greater danger than at any time in forty years.

My use of and exposure to the word, resilience began in the early 2,000s when I was authoring energy policy white papers to inform political leaders. As the renewable energy market was beginning to receive massive government subsidies, fossil energy producers began to rightly use the word resilience to describe why base-load fossil fuel plants (primarily coal plants) were essential to ensure that resilience.

We need look no further than the 2021 Texas blackout for an example what happens when that coal plant resilience is not in place. First, we must define intermittency as the inconsistent delivery of electricity to the grid due to factors like low wind speed (which directly impacts windmill productivity) or prolonged cloudy or snowy conditions (which directly impact solar energy generation). The Texas episode was a direct result of an overreliance on intermittent renewable energy sources combined with an overreliance on natural gas fueled energy production facilities.

“Wait,” you ask. “Isn’t natural gas a fossil fuel?” Yes, it is. But it is also a fuel that cannot be stored on site at the plant facility. It is a fuel that relies on real-time delivery via miles and miles of natural gas pipelines. In the Texas event, valves controlling this gas flow froze shut, cutting off fuel to the plants in an instant and causing the end of their power production during a time that there was a critical need for it. There were other mitigating factors such as an ill-timed maintenance outage at one gas power plant, but the concept of fuel delivery limitation was an equally important variable.

Coal fueled power plants have a 45-90-day fuel supply sitting right there at the facility in the form of a coal pile. Coal fueled plants also have a multi-decade track record for robust design and reliable operation in the lowest of winter temperatures or the hottest of summer heat waves. In other words, coal plants, perhaps more than any other energy source, provide resiliency. That resiliency comes in the form of fuel security, robust design, and a consistent supply of bulk energy onto the grid that can be directed by grid operators to the areas of greatest need as conditions change.

With this more in-depth understanding of the true meaning of resilience, it is interesting to note the green energy lobby’s co-opting of that term. Green energy advocates are nothing if not politically savvy. I first heard this term misused by none other than Hillary Clinton in a speech she delivered during her presidential campaign. She stated that we needed to spend trillions on green energy because those resources would provide resiliency. This is incorrect. Intermittent green energy can indeed provide bulk energy, but only when given geographic footprint orders of magnitude larger than any known coal plant (hundreds of acres as opposed to less than one hundred acres for a coal plant). And green energy does not provide that energy consistently, or in all weather conditions. In fact, green energy intermittency is the opposite of resilience.

In order for American homeowners and businesses to continue to reap the economic and human health benefits of a reliable, resilient grid, the solution is simple. We need coal plants to remain viable well into the future, and on a parallel path with investment in nuclear plants and new, safer, reactor technologies, we need to invest in new versions of the already tried and true, bulletproof reliability, of coal fueled power generation to support an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

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Chris Skates is an author, a 30-year energy industry veteran, a former energy policy advisor, and former Senior Energy Advisor in the Trump Administration. He is a member of the Dependable Power First Kentucky coalition — a statewide group of businesses and local leaders working to promote a reliable, resilient, and affordable electricity supply for all Kentuckians.