From Power Mag:

In a blog post for non-profit public policy research organization R Street, Electricity Policy Manager Devin Hartman lambasted the effort as “nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political optics.” A key point Hartman stressed is that the draft memo admits the grid is reliable, but that reliability in the “conventional sense is not sufficient” as the grid must be resilient and secure. “Grid resilience has certainly become the topic du jour, and a flood of work on the topic has surfaced in the past year. But the administration’s rationale directly contradicts this body of evidence and its intervention has made economists’ fears come true,” he wrote.

Hartman argued—citing a May 2018 paper released by Rob Gramlich, Michael Goggin and Alison Silverstein (who was the technical lead of the DOE’s 2017 controversial study on grid reliability)—that the recent surge of distributed generation, especially behind the meter, has been pivotal for resiliency. The paper highlighted that more than 90% of service outages occur from distribution-level problems. “The study also examined the relative values of measures to improve grid resilience, finding that coal and nuclear subsidies have very low value, while over two dozen measures have far higher value. Read another way, if grid resilience is actually a matter of national security, the Trump administration is asleep at the wheel.”

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