The following is the official written testimony submitted to the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for a hearing to examine the reliability, resiliency, and affordability of electric service in the United States amid the changing energy mix and extreme weather events by Environmental Progress Founder and President, Michael D. Shellenberger. Click here to download a PDF of the full testimony.
Good morning Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso, and members of the Committee. I am grateful to the Committee for inviting my testimony, and for your willingness to hear from someone who is neither a grid operator nor an electric industry participant, but someone whose perspective has been shaped by two decades of research, writing, and action motivated by a concern for necessary improvements in the reliability, affordability and environmental sustainability of electric service.
Congress took questions relating to the security of America’s electricity supply seriously before more than a dozen states experienced energy shortages last month, but those events make this hearing all the more urgent. In 2012, 2017, and 2021 the National Academies of Science and Engineering published three separate reports on threats to the grid, resilience, and the future of electricity. [See: 1] In its 2017 report, the Academies warned that U.S. electrical grids were increasingly “complex and vulnerable.”[See: 2]
Over the last 25 years, increasingly decentralized electricity generation in restructured electricity markets, along with growth in the number of regulatory institutions, has resulted in “divergent interests of federal, state, regional and local authorities,” wrote the Academies in the 2021 report. Electricity experts are not able to clearly answer the question, “who is in charge of planning, developing and ensuring the integrity of the future power system?”[see 3] The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and-the North American Electric Reliability Corporation are tasked to ensure electrical grid reliability and resilience. However, the Academies noted, “they too face short-term pressures and fiscal constraints.”[see 4]
Meanwhile, many experts see in recent trends an inevitable transition away from coal and nuclear power plants, designed to function as baseload capacity, toward variable renewable energy sources with just-in-time natural gas back-up. The price of solar panels and wind turbines has declined 75 percent and 25 percent, respectively, since 2011.[See 5 ] The U.S. Energy Information Administration ("EIA") estimates renewables will be a larger source of electricity than natural gas in the United States by 2050. In that same time, EIA projects renewable electricity will rise from 28 percent to 50 percent of global generation.[See 6]
But events in mid-February throughout the center of the country, including Texas, and last summer in California, suggest that attempting to replace nuclear plants with variable renewable energy sources could make electricity grids less resilient. While energy sources across all categories failed in mid-February, they didn’t all fail equally. The capacity factors for nuclear, natural gas, coal, and wind in Texas during the four days of load shedding during the cold snap were 79 percent, 55 percent, 58 percent, and 14 percent, respectively.[See 7]
Nuclear plants are among the most reliable components of America’s power grids. Nuclear plants operate as a national fleet at 94 percent annual capacity factor, thanks to tightly choreographed refueling operations that barely interrupt eighteen-month continuous uptime at most facilities.[See 8] The hardening required of nuclear plants first in response to 9/11 and then in response to the loss of Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 has further ensured their contribution to reliability, resiliency, and affordability.[See 9]
Although Texas lost one of four of its nuclear reactors after cold water affected a sensor, automatically shutting down the reactor, it returned to service within 64 hours, and thus in time to help end the power cuts. Meanwhile, nuclear reactors in other cold snap states, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan, operated normally.[See 10]
Even if all Texas wind turbines had been winterized, it is unlikely that they would have contributed significantly to electricity supply because wind speeds in cold snaps are so low. It is for that reason that grid operators do not rely on wind turbines to provide more than trace amounts of power during those periods. And, indeed, while wind turbines north of Texas functioned more or less as intended, during the cold snap, they produced very little power for their grids.[See 11]
Part of the reason for inadequate in-state electricity supply in California last August was that state regulators had closed in-state baseload power plants. "People wonder how we made it through the heat wave of 2006,” said the CEO of California’s grid operator, CAISO, at the time. “The answer is that there was a lot more generating capacity in 2006 than in 2020.... We had San Onofre [nuclear plant] of 2,200 megawatts, and a number of other plants, totaling thousands of megawatts not there today."[See 12]
Electricity lost from the closure of California’s San Onofre nuclear plant undermined electricity affordability as well as reliability. It was mostly replaced by electricity from natural gas, which raised the costs of generating electricity by $350 million.[See 13].
[Read on ... outstanding testimony]
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