The House passed a bill Tuesday that would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to require retiring power plants to remain open if their closure could pose reliability concerns.
Under the bill, known as the Power Plant Reliability Act, FERC would determine whether a plant scheduled to retire should remain open if a complaint has been filed by a potentially affected state commission. If FERC finds a power plant closure could contribute to reliability issues within five years of the complaint, the commission could require the plant to stay open for up to five years. Facilities trying to comply with such an order would be exempt from related environmental regulations.
“When a state seeks to close a power plant without identifying sufficient replacement, there is little recourse for affected households in neighboring states that need the power,” Bob Latta, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, said on the House floor. “The Power Plant Reliability Act solves this by providing a bridge solution to maintain generating resources until sufficient capacity can come online to fill the gap.”
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., passed by a vote of 222-202.
Latta and several Republicans argued on the floor that the previous administration’s policies prioritizing renewable energy over less environmentally friendly forms of generation, such as coal, have strained power reliability.
“We are in the midst of a reliability and affordability crisis because of the Biden-Harris administration and blue states who took a hatchet to our baseload capacity resources while making it impossible to build the necessary energy infrastructure to replace it,” Latta said, emphasizing the need for neighboring states to be taken into consideration when plants are retired from the grid.
Latta and Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., who also sits on the Energy Subcommittee, noted recent testimony from a representative of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. who they say called the current state of grid reliability a “five-alarm fire.”
But Democrats said a more limited version of the proposed authority already exists.
“The Department of Energy already has the authority under the Federal Power Act to prevent power plants from retiring if doing so would cause reliability problems, but Republicans want to go further,” Energy Subcommittee ranking member Kathy Castor, D-Fla., said. “This bill requires states to file reliability complaints five years before a generator retires.”
Castor said it was “nearly impossible” to predict the impact of a planned retirement five years in advance and that the bill would “raise energy prices for American families by forcing them to pay for outdated polluting plants that are poisoning their air and water.”
The Trump administration already has used some emergency powers to keep plants scheduled for retirement online this year. The J.H. Campbell coal plant in western Michigan is under its third emergency order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright this year to remain open beyond its originally scheduled retirement in May. In those orders, Wright cited grid reliability concerns to justify keeping the plant open.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., who represents western Michigan, said the decision to keep that plant open has driven up costs.
“The president may call the affordability crisis a hoax, but I invite him to come to west Michigan and talk to people who are paying more every single month in their utility bills because of this plan,” Scholten said. “HR 3632 would make this outcome more common.”
She said decisions about local plants should be made by people in the area with expertise, not those in Washington, calling it a “top-down order that raises costs and ignores systems that already work to keep power reliable and affordable.”
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