Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Panelists at an American Council on Renewable Energy webinar emphasized politics should be agnostic in managing the electrical grid.
- Neil Chatterjee stressed the need for both fossil fuels and renewable energy to meet future demand.
- Karen Onaran highlighted long-term policy changes are necessary.
SALT LAKE CITY — The American Council on Renewable Energy made clear the United States has to come to grips with demands on the electrical grid when it comes to powering the nation, especially this summer.
At a Thursday webinar, panelists discussed that it will take time to get to a renewable energy future, and in the interim, the politics of keeping the lights on basically has to be agnostic.
"I think on the political left there has to be a recognition that we cannot possibly keep energy affordable and win the AI race and meet this coming surge in demand without fossil fuels, and that we're going to need natural gas in the short term, and that's going to mean more gas plants, more gas turbines, more natural gas pipelines. And there just has to be that recognition," said Neil Chatterjee, former chairman and commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and chief government affairs officer for Palmetto.
He continued further to stress that it does, essentially, take an all-of-the-above approach for meeting energy needs moving forward.
"I think there is going to very quickly be the recognition that we cannot possibly meet this surge in demand while keeping energy affordable and reliable with fossil fuels alone, that we're going to need every available electron, whether it comes from solar or wind or storage or geothermal or hydrogen or nuclear, but we're also going to need megawatts, things like demand response and energy efficiency," he said.
Upsetting the apple cart
"We're going to need to build a lot more transmission lines. So we need to build more transmission to bring clean energy under the grid. We need more natural gas pipelines to get more gas onto the grid. The incoming administration is pursuing policies to preserve existing sources of generation," Chatterjee said.
The problem across the nation is that there are a bunch of moving parts when it comes to energy supply and demand. Multiple utility companies operate in a sphere that best serves their regional demand. Texas stands out as an independent island, and there were consequences.
"How do we add power to the grid? How do we sort through backlogs in the interconnection queue? And you know, I think this is a valuable conversation to have, and I think it will take something like this unprecedented surge in demand, in my view, to kind of upend the politics that have sort of governed energy policy over the past two decades," he said.
Confronting change
Karen Onaran, president and chief executive officer of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, said the fixes will take time, even as the country is facing challenges now.
"A lot of these policy fixes are the long haul, policy fixes that will take time, will take input, and just also take the time to put these policies into play," she said.
But in the meantime, what happens when it gets insufferably hot and everyone is cooling their house at the same time, at a time when there is a growing demand for data centers?
"You know, if everything goes as great, and we all have sunny, 70-degree days all summer, we're golden," she said. "But we know that that's not going to happen, and that doesn't happen in all regions."
