Thread by @AriPeskoe

We’ve all had some fun with this latest “campaign promise,” but how does it intersect with Project 2025’s agenda about power markets and electric utilities?

A quick look at what Project 2025 says about interstate wholesale electric power markets…

https://twitter.com/AriPeskoe/status/1817340591740490026

Buried within a chapter about the Dept of Energy, Project 2025 dedicates 7 pgs to FERC, with 2 about natural gas pipelines and LNG facilities.

So I’m focusing on 5 pages here written by former FERC Comm’r McNamee. I'll take what I can get!

Project 2025’s main goal is to raise market prices received by coal, gas, and nuclear and/or raise market costs paid by wind and solar. Project 2025 calls this “reliability pricing” but it has only half-baked ideas (at best!) for how to implement it.

It asserts that “there is a growing problem with the electric grid’s reliability because of the increasing growth of subsidized intermittent renewable generation (like wind and solar)…” and

“Subsidized renewable resources are undermining electric reliability in RTOs.”

What’s the proof? In a footnote, it says that devastation from Winter Storm Uri in 2021 was due to subsidized renewables and “a lack of dispatchable generation.”
There was in fact plenty of dispatchable capacity in TX in 2021. It just didn’t work.

It also cites to a few NERC documents that don’t support the proposition about subsidized wind and solar and notes outages in California in 2020 and 2022.

Of course, it ignores all problems experienced by coal and gas generators. Anyway…

Project 2025 targets RTOs that run power markets. It says RTOs “no longer seem to work for the benefit of the American people.” The “increase in subsidized, intermittent resources is undermining the ability of RTOs’ pricing models to support reliable dispatchable generation.”

The solution: “FERC should direct RTOs to establish reliability pricing for eligible dispatchable generation resources or require intermittent resources to procure backup power for times when they are not available to operate.”

But how would RTOs implement that “reliability pricing”? Well, the prior administration proposed a version of this, and it was panned by every power market participant (except FirstEnergy and PSE&G) and ultimately unanimously rejected by FERC on a bipartisan basis. Also...

Author McNamee's major contribution to FERC was spearheading a version of the third item -- eliminating renewables from capacity markets -- but it was quickly rescinded in 2021.

In targeting RTOs, Project 2025 also props up monopolist, for-profit utilities: “Unlike vertically integrated utilities that are accountable to state elected officials and state public utility commissions, RTOs and their participants are accountable only to FERC.”

Project 2025 wants to reverse FERC’s recent long-term transmission planning rule bc it “socializes costs for customers who do not benefit from the projects.”

Thus far, only Southeastern utilities are advocating for total repeal of FERC's transmission planning rule.

As I’ve noted, this is an anti-innovation agenda:

https://x.com/AriPeskoe/status/1688575295820091392

By the way, lest you think it’s pro-nuclear, an earlier section in this chapter says that the Department of Energy/Congress should stop funding the civilian nuclear credit program enacted in the 2021 infrastructure bill.