GRID RELIABILITY

GRID RELIABILITY

Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 30 (Thursday, February 13, 2025) [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 30 (Thursday, February 13, 2025)] [House] [Pages H700-H703] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] GRID RELIABILITY The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, the gentlewoman from North Dakota (Mrs. Fedorchak) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. General Leave Mrs. FEDORCHAK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentlewoman from North Dakota? There was no objection. Mrs. FEDORCHAK. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to start this speech with a real-time exercise. I wanted to suddenly have all the lights go out in here. Imagine what would happen if we did that. It would be pitch black in this room. Everything would come to a halt. The microphones would stop. We wouldn't be able to see each other. People watching online would certainly be confused. We would all wonder what was going on. {time} 1215 Would we be able to see to walk around, to get out? Would anyone panic? Then, let's imagine if the outage wasn't just in this room or this building, but all across Washington, D.C. At first, there would be silence, but it wouldn't take long before confusion and, perhaps, chaos ensued. Now, let's imagine this happening in my State of North Dakota where just this week, temperatures dropped to minus 22 degrees for many days in a row. In fact, this morning was the first day it rose above zero. What would that mean to lose power when it is 22 below? People's livelihoods be at risk. Children couldn't go to school. Hospitals would be unable to care for people. Businesses would come to a standstill. Energy production would halt. Livestock would be threatened. Homes and properties would freeze up. It wouldn't take very long in that kind of weather for the economy of North Dakota to grind to a halt and for people to die if we had no power. This isn't some farfetched scenario. This is a real threat in America today. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warns that two- thirds of the United States is at an elevated risk of blackouts, of not having enough reliable power to meet demand when we need it the most. This map clearly illustrates the problem. Every area of America in red and yellow on this map has an elevated risk of not having enough power to meet demand; not tomorrow, not in 5 years or 10 years, today. This is the scenario today in America. That is why I am on the House floor today to sound the alarm about our grid reliability crisis and to highlight five practical solutions to keep the lights on. First, let's talk about why this happening. What is driving this problem? It really comes down to one thing: We are retiring power plants faster than we are replacing them. Seriously, it is that simple. In States throughout our Nation, power providers are shutting down massive amounts of traditional power generation from power plants that can be turned on, up or down, as needed to follow demand. They are retiring these generators faster than they are able to bring on new generators that can provide the same kind of always-available power. Grid operators measure this availability in terms of capacity, and there are two kinds. First, there is installed capacity. That is the maximum amount of power a generator can churn out in the best conditions. For example, most wind farms in North Dakota have a nameplate capacity of 300 megawatts. Our largest coal fire facility is 1,100 megawatts. Over on this chart, the blue line on top represents nameplate capacity. The second capacity term, is called accredited capacity. That is the amount of power that can be counted on, regardless of conditions. Grid operators determine the value of accredited capacity. They look at performance of a generator over time, how it works in different conditions, and they determine how much of that power they can rely on when they need it the most in any weather condition. That same wind farm would likely have an accredited capacity that is 30 percent of its nameplate capacity or in a 300-megawatt wind farm, a fraction of that would be accredited capacity. The coal facility probably comes in at about 80 to 90 percent of nameplate capacity, so about 950 megawatts of accredited capacity. In the MISO market, this region here in red, that serves 15 States. Roughly, 42 million Americans get their power in the MISO region. The operators in that region warn that the accredited capacity, the line on the bottom here, the red, is shrinking dramatically even though we are spending a lot of money installing more and more generation on a nameplate capacity. You can see this clearly in these two lines. The top line, the blue, is nameplate capacity. Americans are paying for that to be installed. The red line below is accredited capacity. Americans are already paying for that, too. The red line is what you can count on when times are tough, when it is 22 below. The blue line is questionable. That is dependent on the weather. If you ever wonder why your utility prices are rising, but you face more risk for blackouts or brownouts, this gap is why. That is why NERC keeps warning us with reports, forecasts, and maps like this. MISO is in the red zone on this map. All the yellow zones also have elevated risk. In a nation as blessed with natural resources and brilliant people like the United States, there is no reason to ever run short of power. Our whole country should be blue. We should never run short of power ever. We will have storms that knock the power off for a time, but to not have enough power to meet demand, that is just bad planning and terrible leadership. That is the bad news today. The good news is this: We can fix this. We have the resources. We have the technology, and now we just need to act. Here are the five key steps--the five solutions to this problem. First, we need regulatory relief. Right now, Federal regulations are strangling our energy producers, making it nearly impossible for them to meet our power demand. We must repeal the EPA's greenhouse gas rule. We must eliminate the methane fee rule and roll back the BLM resource management plan for North Dakota and other States. We must reform the new source performance standards that prevent power providers from making efficiency improvements to their existing fleets, the ones that are already connected to the grid, to improve them, to help them produce more power in a cleaner and more efficient way. That new source performance standard is just bad policy. It makes no sense at all. These are just a few examples of Biden administration policies that have imposed crushing costs and regulatory burdens on the power sector. They are jeopardizing the stability of our grid and the livelihoods of hardworking Americans. Second, we must reevaluate Federal incentives for energy production. Our government has distorted the energy market with subsidies that favor certain resources while neglecting others. This has resulted in a grid that is too dependent on the weather. Think back to the map from NERC, two-thirds of the country at an elevated risk of not having enough power to meet demand. It is time to realign these incentives. Today, our grid operators are calling for more dispatchable generation, more capacity. They want to fill that gap in those two lines that I showed earlier. Think of the MISO zone in red on my first map. MISO is desperate for more power resources that can be turned on when needed, but here is the stack of resources that are in line to connect with the MISO grid. You see this over time, it goes back to the year 2000, and shows back then there was a decent amount of gas--the blue lines are gas, and then you start seeing wind coming online. [[Page H701]] If you go all the way over to the far side of this map, you see this stack of resources currently in line in MISO, 171 gigawatts of resources, actually more resources than the entire nameplate or the entire peak demand in MISO is currently in line. Today, in that column, you see it is almost filled with solar and wind resources. Fortunately, some battery too, but those are not the dispatchable resources MISO is calling for and clamoring for. Only a sliver of gas on the bottom is in line to connect to MISO, even though they are desperate for more gas to help make it a more stable grid. We must ensure that our Federal policy doesn't exacerbate this problem and current vulnerabilities that have been created by a flood of wind and solar, which are weather-dependent generation. Instead, we must support fair markets that better encourage the investments needed to meet growing demand and long-term grid reliability and stability. Third, we need to speed up the permitting process. Right now, it can take years, sometimes decades, to get approval for new energy projects. This is unacceptable, especially when we have transformative technologies ready to go, like small modular reactors. These advanced nuclear systems are safe, reliable, clean, and capable of powering entire communities. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the House and leaders, like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and accelerate deployment of these new technologies. Fourth, we must implement rules that protect grid reliability. As I mentioned earlier, it was well below freezing throughout North Dakota this week. My State and region weathered those temperatures largely because of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. This chart here is straight from MISO data. It illustrates the energy that was used this week in the MISO region to meet demand. As you can see, fully 80 percent of those resources were coal