At a congressional hearing on regional grid stability, representatives from seven regional grid operators warned a House of Representatives energy subcommittee about unprecedented load growth — and sparred with lawmakers specifically about the Inflation Reduction Act’s impact on looming capacity shortfalls.
Republican lawmakers criticized Biden-era clean energy and climate initiatives, including the IRA and emissions targets. For instance, Brett Guthrie, a Kentucky Republican and chair of the Energy and Commerce committee, characterized those policies as making it “more difficult for operators to keep the lights on.”
“Momentum behind this so-called [energy] transition continues just as a generational increase in power demand is emerging,” Guthrie said. “Consider how new demand growth is clashing with residual Biden-Harris policies today.”
Democrats on the committee pushed back, with ranking member Frank Pallone (N.J.) accusing Republicans of “purposely ignoring the fact that they’re attempting to repeal the single biggest incentive to build electricity capacity in this country.” That of course, Pallone said, is the IRA. “Repealing billions of dollars in technology neutral funding for all types of new energy is not the way you address the increasing need for energy.”
The IRA as well as the bipartisan law known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act have allocated significant funding in recent years for grid stability and development. For example, the IRA has provided nearly $3 billion through the Grid Deployment Office for projects including transmission siting. And the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program provides more than $10 billion for projects that enhance grid flexibility and improve resilience against extreme weather events.
Caught in the political crossfire, grid operators acknowledged that repealing IRA funding would impact grid stability. As PJM’s president and CEO Manu Asthana put it, “in the near term, the interconnection queue is full of a lot of renewable projects, many of whom are, I’m sure, counting on the IRA. And so I’m sure it would make those less likely to come, and we do need them.”
CAISO President and CEO Elliot Mainzer echoed Asthana’s concern. “Anything that’s going to impact the supply of commercially viable projects to meet the rapidly growing demand…is going to be problematic and could potentially compromise reliability and affordability,” Mainzer said.
Meanwhile, Republicans were equally concerned with highlighting critiques of Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, a set of EPA regulations that aimed to drastically reduce carbon emissions from power plants, requiring all existing coal-fired facilities and new natural gas plants to eliminate nearly all emissions by 2032.
Rep. Gary Palmer of Alabama pressed the grid operators on whether the EPA under Biden had adequately considered grid stability when finalizing its power plant rules. The response was a nearly unanimous critique of the agency’s approach.
PJM’s Asthana said the rule “definitely raised reliability concerns for us.” The updated Clean Power Plan could have significant impacts on dispatchable generation, he continued, and “has the potential to shut down nearly 14,000 megawatts of coal plants in our region which would affect reliability and cost.”
