Largest US Grid Operator; "No Issues" With Reliability, Puts The Lie To Shitstain Forced Coal Plan
The largest regional electric grid operator in the nation sees “no imminent threat” to the reliability of its system, despite the closure of several coal and nuclear plants in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions.
PJM Interconnection LLC released a fuel security study Thursday that said there are “no issues” with powering the grid network, even as it loses more than 15,000 megawatts of generating capacity through mostly coal and nuclear plant retirements.
The study was prepared in response to a grid resilience proceeding launched by federal regulators in January. It throws cold water on the Trump administration’s efforts to justify a nationwide coal and nuclear plant bailout due to an impending threat. Fuel supply could become an issue in the PJM territory during extreme circumstances in the future — such as a prolonged cold spell combined with a loss of natural gas supplies — but the issue could be resolved without government interference, the grid operator concluded.
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In the stress test on its grid, PJM found that even accounting for all the announced retirements of coal-fired and nuclear plants over the next five years, the system would remain reliable even if the region was hit with extreme winter weather combined with disruptions of natural gas pipeline supply. “PJM’s stress test study is further evidence that the Trump administration’s efforts to force taxpayers and electricity customers to pay tens of billions of dollars to bail out old, uneconomic coal plants are nothing more than political graft for billionaire coal plant executives who helped elect him,” Mary Anne Hitt, senior director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said Thursday in a statement.
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https://thinkprogress.org/grid-operators-in-depth-study-shows-trumps-bailout-of-coal-and-nuclear-plants-not-needed-67ad96ff7be2/
