Gary Sandquist’s Oct. 22 commentary on the state of the nation’s electric grid got one thing right. The reliability and resilience of our electricity system are critical to our country’s economic prosperity and growth. But he misses the punchline by suggesting that a healthy electricity grid requires American consumers to bail out outdated, uneconomic power plants.
As a member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on grid resilience, I spent a lot of time considering how to avoid the power outages we saw (and are still seeing) from recent hurricanes in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The Trump administration’s proposed “resiliency” rule, which would massively subsidize out-of-the-money coal and nuclear plants in the eastern United States, is not the answer. Conservative estimates put the proposal’s cost to customers at several billion dollars per year, and affected grid operators in the East think the proposal may actually worsen electricity reliability or resilience.
The rule would not apply in Utah or the West. But, it reminds us that Utah can avoid costly support for policies that don’t improve grid reliability. Our state can instead embrace cost-competitive clean energy technology to power our future and add thousands of new economy energy jobs.
Allison Clements, Salt Lake City