Ranking member Veasey’s opening statement for grid resiliency hearing
“The Department has leaned on its recently released report on the electric grid for its justification. But, the lead author of that report, Alison Silverstein, pushed back against this mischaracterization of her work. According to conversations she had with Committee staff, the bulk of her work remained intact after she handed it to the Department. However, the final report’s specific recommendation supporting coal and nuclear plants due to their resiliency characteristics was NOT justified by any research that she or her colleagues were aware of. In a piece she published in Utility Dive yesterday, Ms. Silverstein took issue with how DOE interpreted her technical work in the staff report.I would like to enter this article in the record.
In it, she states, “The characteristics, metrics, benefits and compensation for essential resilience and reliability services are not yet fully understood.” Specifically, she concludes that at this point we cannot say that coal and nuclear have unique characteristics that provide such significant resiliency benefits that they should receive special treatment in the market. This conclusion is also echoed by a thorough analysis released by the conservative R Street Institute on Sunday, which found that this proposal is “neither technically nor procedurally sound.” R Street summarized it as “an arbitrary backdoor subsidy to coal and nuclear plants that risks undermining electrical competition throughout the United States.”
