Energy Secretary Rick Perry told reporters Tuesday that he has not seen a draft copy of the electric grid reliability study that he requested from Department of Energy staff, even though a copy of the draft was leaked to Bloomberg reporters late last week and was widely available by Monday.
At a joint press conference in Washington, D.C. with Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, Perry told the reporters, “I’m like you. I’m breathlessly waiting to get my hands on it.”
The release of the final study, delayed several weeks, was specifically requested to back up Perry’s claims that Environmental Protection Agency regulations, along with renewable power sources like solar and wind, were undermining the U.S. electric grid’s reliability by forcing the premature closure of baseload power sources like coal and nuclear.
The draft DOE study concludes that changes in the nation’s electric system have been driven by lower demand, lower prices, and more flexible and cleaner resources. For instance, a large fraction of the nation’s aging fleet of coal and nuclear plants are simply not economic to operate anymore, the draft report says.
When asked by a reporter whether the DOE plans to consider placing restrictions on the use of natural gas for power generation because of its role in making coal and nuclear plants less economic, Perry responded tersely, “No.” Even though the Trump administration has vowed to do what it can to prop up the coal industry, Perry stated, “I don’t think it’s necessarily the government’s role to pick winners and losers.”
In April, Perry, speaking at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York City, cited national security as a possible reason that the DOE would intervene in states with strong clean energy programs if it concludes the policies are a threat to coal generation and nuclear power.
According to many recent studies, though, high levels of renewables can be reliably integrated into the electric grid and are not the driving force behind the closure of coal and nuclear power plants. For baseload plant retirements, factors like environmental regulations and renewable energy subsidies “played minor roles compared to the long-standing drop in electricity demand relative to previous expectation and years of low electric prices driven by high natural gas availability,” the leaked DOE draft report says.
In his comments at the press conference, Birol highlighted what he believes are potential challenges facing electric grid operators with the increase in renewable energy capacity. “With the growing share of renewables, we must make sure that they are integrated in the grids in the best way so that our grids are secure and economically benign and at the same time reliable,” he said.
.@IEABirol & US Secretary of Energy @SecretaryPerry press conference at Washington's National Press Club to talk #energy markets & security pic.twitter.com/XVi5M0W0s2
— IEA (@IEA) July 18, 2017
Mark Kresowik, deputy director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said the credibility of the leaked draft study is bolstered by the use of data from the DOE’s national laboratories and the “enormous amount of credible data and citations” to other studies that conclude renewables are not undermining the reliability of the grid.
According to the draft report, baseload plant retirements due to age, inefficiency, and inability to compete “began appearing in the early 2000s, well before any significant levels of wind and solar generation in any region of the country.”
“If the final report significantly differs from the conclusions both of the draft report and the overwhelming body of evidence, then it will not have any credibility to anybody who is following the electric sector,” Kresowik told ThinkProgress.
Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer rights group, expressed concern that political appointees at the DOE could revise the conclusions of the study. The Trump administration already has removed mention of climate change from government websites and has deleted a sentence linking climate change to sea level rise in a press release from the Department of the Interior.
“Attempts by the Trump administration to doctor or distort the findings of scientific studies — including this latest report from the Energy Department — to achieve a political outcome must be stopped. We call on Rick Perry to release the unadulterated scientific conclusions of the study,” the group said in a statement released Tuesday.