Trump’s coal preservation move portrayed as energy safety net

President Donald Trump’s move to keep coal and nuclear power plants on line was portrayed at a June 7 congressional hearing as a prudent move to keep the lights on in the event of a crippling natural disaster or successful cyberattack.

Bruce J. Walker, assistant secretary of the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability at the U.S. Department of Energy, said having a large pile of coal on site might be a prudent investment at times when renewable generation or a key natural gas pipeline was knocked off line by Mother Nature or a malevolent hacker.

“We are developing operational strategies to better ensure that when we have one of those widespread events, whether it be cyber in nature or a hurricane, that we have the capability to restore the system,” Walker told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “That’s one of the focuses of having a fuel-secure generation source. We don’t have to rely on the supply chain and the risks that are realized when you have something like a hurricane or a cyberattack and you have destruction from the port to a (power) facility.”

Walker’s position received tepid backing from some members of the committee, and fellow panelist Robert Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, LLC, noted that coal and nuclear plants were themselves vulnerable to cyber intrusions, fuel-supply interruptions, and breakdowns of aging equipment. “Subsidizing such resources will ultimately harm rather than help consumers,” he said.

Walker, who said the DOE looked at the grid in terms of national security rather than on a market basis, cautioned that the threat of cyberattacks on gas pipelines that are feeding more and more power plants should not be discounted because hackers were growing more active and more sophisticated, and the odds of a successful attack were increasing.

“We have now reached a point that is different than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. “If I lose the wrong gas pipeline, I can lose tens of thousands of megawatts of generation simultaneously. The simultaneous loss of all those generators will have deleterious effects through cascading frequency loss, and there are real risks as a result.”

There was, however, near unanimous agreement among the witnesses and the committee members that proposed cuts to the Office of Electricity’s FY 2019 budget were coming at exactly the wrong time. The proposed overall 27 percent hit to the budget includes major reductions in research into electricity storage and development of the smart grid, which would help accommodate the increasing flow of renewable electricity onto the network.

However, the panelists warned that funding cuts would impact many other programs, including work on sophisticated grid modeling currently taking place at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and ongoing efforts at Texas Tech University to understand the physics and fluid dynamics of wind farms.

“The security issue is a constantly changing landscape,” said Joseph A. Heppert, Vice President for Research at Texas Tech. “Sustained federal funding is critically important for us to take advantage of and leverage some of the modeling systems we have developed.”