This time it was from U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Chairman Joseph Kelliher, who spoke to the National Electricity Delivery Forum yesteday in Washington, DC.
The notion that there are "two separate universes" -- one for energy policymakers and another for environmental policymakers -- may be "a tenable fiction in most areas, but it utterly fails, utterly collapses if you look at climate change,"
The U.S. likely needs "lower demand levels and higher prices for electricity if we are going to meet the climate challenge" than it would need to meet only challenges to supply security, Kelliher said. "I think we should accept that," he added. "That is a reality."
I interpret this clearly as states' utilities need to accept a greater focus on energy efficiency & conservation, and the excuse that dirty old-style coal which is cheap and is therefore acceptable, is no longer a reality nor an acceptable practice for utilities and their state regulators who govern them.
As subtle as this sounds, this is more evidence of the very slow moving establishment in the utility sector, accepting change. Dirty old-style coal is cheap to generate, but what that ~.04-.06/kWh doesn't include, is the cost created to by its high hg, nox, sox and co2 emissions, and its cost to the land we have borrowed from our children and our children's children. With those costs, dirty old-style coal is far more expensive and harmful to society than more expensive alternatives.
Comments like this, reinforce what opponents of dirty coal have been pressing Kaine, our General Assembly, the DEQ and the SCC, to realize. I hope a lawyer with Bracewell & Gulianni and the Southern Law Center, who are trying Dominion on their NOVA powerline and Wise County proposals, attended the National Electric and Delivery Forum yesterday and heard this speech.
Don't give up the fight, and consider this an olive branch to give your more conservative and less green friends and lawmakers, to help them realize what we already know. I hope our next SCC commissioner holds this realization and is no Inhofe.