Since February, with only two sitting members, the five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been without a quorum. That has meant it can’t do its job, which is to approve and regulate interstate oil and natural gas pipelines, the transmission and wholesale sales of electricity, approve liquefied natural gas storage facilities and license non-federal hydro-electric plants. That paralysis suits anti-fossil-fuel activists just fine. They’d like FERC to remain hamstrung.
That’s because these climate hawks seek to keep most coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground as a means of reducing the impact of global warming. They have long viewed the 40-year-old commission as a rubber-stamp for pipelines and other projects that have benefited the nation’s boom in oil and natural gas production. That boom has grown rapidly in the past decade by means of hydraulic fracturing of underground shale formations. As long as there is no FERC quorum, it’s a “net positive for the climate,” according to the Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuel research and advocacy group.
Five protesters therefore were on hand Thursday at a confirmation hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for two new FERC commissioners, Robert Powelson and Neil Chatterjee. After chanting slogans such as “FERC is killing Pennsylvanians” and “Shut FERC down,” four of the five were arrested by Capitol police and charged with obstruction. One paid a fine and three were detained overnight for arraignment Friday. It was not the first such protest, but usually protesters are hustled out on the room and let go instead being arrested.
Mark Hand at ThinkProgress reports:
Without an expanded pipeline network, companies would likely be forced to leave natural gas in the ground, according to the activists. Natural gas is mostly methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
“Their rubber-stamping of fracked gas permits disregards the harms such projects inflict on communities, towns, and the climate,” Lee Stewart, an organizer with Beyond Extreme Energy and one of the four arrested in the hearing room, said in a statement. “Until FERC is replaced with an agency dedicated to a just transition off fossil fuels and to an exploitation-free energy system based on localized, renewable energy, business as usual is unacceptable.” [...]
During the hearing, Powelson, a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, and Chatterjee, a senior energy policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), pointed to the continued use of coal, natural gas, and nuclear as good options for meeting the nation’s need for baseload power generation.
The two nominees noted in their testimony that renewable sources need to be included as elements of the nation’s energy sources. But the general tone of their views—and that of most of the 12 Republican members of the 23-member Senate committee—see solar and wind as mere add-ons, forever just a tiny fraction of U.S. electricity sources.
Renewables advocates, on the other hand, want these sources to quickly replace coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power. They see as obsolete the idea promoted by the two nominees (and many of the Republican members of the Senate committee) that such sources are incapable of providing reliable baseload power. However, many scientists and engineers say that, in conjunction with energy storage via batteries, molten salts, and pumped-hydro, solar, wind, biomass, and other renewables can, in fact, provide baseload power. They concede that this will require upgrading the nation’s transmission grids and making other changes. But that’s hardly a bad thing.
Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, said at the hearing that he hopes utility companies won’t be encouraged by future FERC decisions to discriminate against renewables storage and distributed energy like rooftop solar in favor of fossil-fuel projects. “Storage and wind is part of the baseload we’re talking about,” Franken said.
Hand has previously reported on Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s stance in an April memo calling for a review of whether energy subsidies are undermining the reliability of the electricity grid—often called grid resilience—by spurring the “premature” closing of coal-fueled power plants that currently provide much of the nation’s baseload power.
That memo elicited sharp criticism from prominent Democrats who labeled the memo “a thinly disguised attempt to promote less economic electric generation technologies, such as coal and nuclear, at the expense of cost-competitive wind and solar power.” Four renewables trade groups also challenged Perry’s views. The American Council on Renewable Energy also took issue with Perry’s memo, pointing out that several studies on grid resilience, including a December 2016 analysis by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, have concluded that renewables are not contributing to unreliability of the grid.
The grid resilience argument is just the latest of the old guard’s attack on renewables. Back when FERC was established early in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, key arguments included claims that solar cells could never be made cheap enough and wind turbines could never be made big enough to provide more than a tiny smidgen of the nation’s electricity. That argument can still be heard, of course, but it’s on shaky ground when most of the nation’s new electricity each year now comes from wind, solar, biomass, hydro, and waste heat, 61 percent of it in 2016, for instance.
But lots of new electricity generation is coming from natural gas. While burning it contributes about half as much greenhouse gas emissions as burning coal, leaks of unburned methane from extracting and transporting natural gas reduces the benefits from a lowered carbon footprint due to the closing of coal-fired power plants.
The day before the Senate confirmation hearing, Oil Change International noted on its website:
As our “Bridge Too Far” report shows, building major new gas pipelines increases access to gas that, if we’re going to avoid runaway climate change, we cannot afford to burn.
But, in its legally required environmental reviews, FERC routinely fails to add up the full lifecycle greenhouse gas pollution of proposed gas pipelines, including fracking, piping, processing, and burning the gas. Even in rare cases where FERC has attempted a cursory, limited analysis of lifecycle climate pollution, the agency has used sweeping, outdated assumptions to dismiss the impact as insignificant. FERC ignores science and economics by assuming gas is always cleaner than coal, that gas will get to market with or without pipelines, and that gas will always replace coal.
Collecting enough Senate Democrats to vote against these two nominees would be a tough goal. Keeping FERC without a quorum indefinitely seems like its own bridge too far, the longest of longshots. But that doesn’t make the protesters’ efforts worthless. Spotlighting the problems with FERC’s decision-making and with the fossilized philosophy that drives these two nominees and the commission itself are valuable objectives.