January 19, 2021 - America's Power (formerly known as ACCCE) is the only national trade association solely focused on coal electricity whose mission is to advocate on behalf of coal-fueled electricity and the coal fleet.

“We are trying to educate moderate Democrats on what it means for President Bidon’s goal of implementing zero carbon for the power sector by 2035,” said Michelle Bloodworth, President and CEO, America’s Power. “This would mean adding 47,000 megawatts per year of renewables, battery storage, and nuclear plants. We don’t think that’s realistic. The total electric generating capacity of West Virginia is only 15,000 megawatts, but if we are going to get rid of all fossil fuels, who is going to pay for all that and are we really going to be able to get that done by 2035 and still keep the lights on?”

Michelle Bloodworth

 

The past few years have been very challenging and we are all going to have to work together to develop a more persuasive voice especially for policymakers and newly elected officials to understand that the 500 electric generating units that still remain, are going to be even more important as this transition takes place. There's certainly a role for wind and solar but we all know that coal is more reliant. That means that the grid has to provide affordable electricity when the sun’s not shining and the wind's not blowing.

Unfortunately, roughly half of the coal fleet has retired or announced plans to retire but right now the coal fleet still has 500 electric generating units totaling about 219,000 megawatts. We have to constantly remind policymakers that the coal fleet was responsible when extreme weather hits this country like the Polar Vortex. It was the coal fleet that bailed out the electricity grid and ensured that we still had electricity 24/7. No doubt the elections are going to have a greater challenge on the coal fleet across the board.

Coal-fired electricity will be needed for the foreseeable future and the grid transition needs to be gradual. Rolling blackouts and emergency conservation measures - basically telling people when and how to use electricity is a concern. In California last year, it really showed what can happen if renewables are not backed up by dispatchable, flexible electricity sources. Since 2010, more than half of the coal fleet has retired or announced plans to retire.

Our job is to slow down these retirements, again because as this transition takes place, coal is going to still play a critical role. What did happen in California definitely shows what can happen when you go too far too fast. The electricity grid is in transition, but we don’t need to compromise or risk the reliability of the grid. In 2018, California passed a very aggressive clean energy goal. They increased their renewable portfolio standard to 60% by 2030, and to 100% zero carbon resources by 2045. Currently, 30% of California's electric generating capacity is solar and wind, but it's projected to be 40% by 2030. They also get a quarter of their electricity from 10 bordering states. All those bordering states have very ambitious renewable portfolio clean energy goals and they are also retiring a significant amount of coal. During the two days, August 14 and 15, sure enough, California was forced to impose rolling blackouts and begged customers to adopt emergency conservation measures. Had they not invoked those emergency procedures, the grid would have collapsed and triggered even more blackouts across a lot wider area.

So, what really happened in California? California is heavily relying on renewables, but they lack adequate backup of balancing resources when the sun goes down in the late afternoon and when the wind is not blowing because of congestion in transmission, and not enough transmission. A lot of these coal plants are being retired. Renewable resources are being built in different locations, so there wasn't enough transmission for them to try to get in some of these balancing resources. At 12:30 pm, there is typically about 10,000 megawatts of solar in California. By 6:30 pm, that number went to zero. However, based on California's reserve margin, the amount of capacity they have in that state, on paper it would look like they would be perfectly fine, but they weren't. So, what this is causing them to do is to rethink their entire market construct. That is not an easy task. It's very complex and it's going to take a long time. They also relied on their last operating nuclear plant. It played a key role during this period. That nuclear plant is also scheduled to retire in 2025. That means they're going to be solely dependent on natural gas to provide balancing resources and even the CEO of the largest gas generator in California has said that that market is not providing the revenue to even keep the plants that they have from retiring. So, they've threatened to also retire some plants.

The questions are: How much is it going to cost to make changes? Are some states transitioning too quickly? How do states ensure that achieving clean energy goals will not cause problems? When will batteries be able to provide the backup for the large amount of renewables that are the goals? Is the time frame consistent with clean energy targets? And are we going to see more of high-impact low-frequency events? NERC's long-term reliability assessment, released in December, cautioned that we could see blackouts in the Northwest. New England can't get any pipelines built. Transitioning to a low-carbon power sector is not a matter of simply replacing all these fossil fuels with renewables. There's a massive amount of infrastructure and technology along with rethinking how a reliable grid is operated, how it is maintained, and how is it going to be paid for.

These are just some of the areas that are going to have to be overcome in order for this transition to be met. In the United States today, there are only 1,000 megawatts of battery storage on the grid. A recent study has estimated that we are going to need about 450,000 megawatts of battery storage that would be needed to support the grid if it was 100% renewables. It's estimated that it might cost $2.7 trillion.

Carbon pricing is a huge debate and is certainly going to affect West Virginia and the PJM footprint of about a handful of states, four or five, trying to encouraging PJM to set a price on carbon in the PJM market, which would basically result in the retirement of pretty much every coal plant. Certainly, there's going be a lot of pressure at FERC to incentivize grid operators to put a price on carbon.

“Advanced technologies were touched on by Sen. Manchin (D-WV). We need to continue to educate policymakers on the need for investment incentives on research and development and on advanced technologies,” said Bloodworth. “But that's going to take sustained investment and take time. We've got to ensure that we keep the coal supply chain healthy for all those 500 coal units that are still ensuring that 24/7 we keep our lights on.”