R Street, NRDC respond

Danly’s criticism of subsidies for renewable energy was off base, according to Devin Hartman, director of Energy and Environmental Policy at the R Street Institute, a free market-oriented public policy research group.

“Capacity markets secure sufficient levels of capacity irrespective of subsidy levels, but they cannot procure resources that governments prevent from being built or retained,” he said.

Also, utility integrated resource planning in RTOs can cause reliability problems, according to Hartman.

“The only region to suffer a capacity shortfall has been [the Midcontinent Independent System Operator,] where over 90% of demand is met by cost-of-service utilities,” he said.

It’s a “dangerous myth” that MISO’s capacity framework was the cause of last summer’s capacity shortfall in its region, according to Hartman.

During the hearing, senators and commissioners failed to note that fossil-fueled power plants have performed poorly during grid emergencies, such as in winter storms Elliott and Uri, according to John Moore, director of the Sustainable FERC Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Many committee members and commissioners alike took the hearing as an opportunity to cast blame on the energy transition, cheerlead gas and undermine existing environmental review processes,” he said in an email. “Left out or under-emphasized were the reliability problems we’ve seen with fossil fuels during extreme weather events, the need to expand transmission and ongoing market reforms to manage a shifting resource mix.”