The Department of Energy (DOE) recently released a report on U.S. grid reliability. This report highlights the threat to the grid from the premature retirement of reliable power generation—primarily coal and natural gas plants—at a time when power demand is rising.
This report fulfills one of the requirements of President Donald Trump’s executive order from April 8th, titled “Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid.” Specifically, the executive order required the Secretary of Energy to “develop a uniform methodology for analyzing current and anticipated reserve margins for all regions of the bulk power system regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and shall utilize this methodology to identify current and anticipated regions with reserve margins below acceptable thresholds as identified by the Secretary of Energy.”
The North American Reliability Corporation(NERC) estimates 104 gigawatts (GW) of announced power retirements by 2030. The DOE report modelled scenarios around the possibilities for these estimated retirements.
The DOE report modeled three potential situations for the power grid in 2030 against the current case: A situation in which all projected plant closures occur, one with no plant closures, and one called “required build”—in which enough new capacity is imagined to meet the projected capacity needed.
Under the report’s most extreme scenario—the plant closures scenario—there is a hundredfold increase in loss of load hours (the number of hours in a year that the power grid is expected to not have enough power to meet demand) by 2030. This scenario would be an increase from 8.1 hours per year in the current case to 817 hours per year in the plant closures model. For the worst weather year assessed, loss of load hours increased from 50 hours in the current case to 1,316 hours in the plant closures by 2030 case.
One of the report’s most notable conclusions is that, even though the 104 GW of power retirements are projected to be replaced by 209 GW of new generation, not enough of the new generation comes from reliable sources. Only 22 GW of the new generation comes from reliable and dispatchable power sources that are available any time they are needed, while the majority comes from intermittent wind and solar. Because of the intermittency of some of the replacement sources, we get an extreme discrepancy between the current expected loss of load hours and the projected future ones.
Even in the situation with no retirements, the report found that because of the intermittency of the new generation, power outages would still be 34 times more likely.
As demand rises, it’s essential that reliable power sources remain online as long as possible, and that the regulatory environment allows for new reliable power to be built with minimal government barriers.