Senate committee presses Energy Secretary on budget effects for grid reliability, national labs and DOE loan projects

A senator on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee pressed the U.S. Secretary of Energy on whether the president’s proposed budget and recent DOE procedural changes would harm grid reliability, reduce national-lab capacity and slow projects in the Department of Energy’s loan pipeline.

The exchange centered on DOE modeling of supply and cost, a proposed $2,750,000,000 reduction the senator said was in the president’s budget for national laboratories, delays in loan-program projects in New Mexico and the role of political appointees on DOE review boards.

The senator asked whether DOE had done modeling to “determine the specific impacts of this proposed budget on both supply, energy supply, and cost.” The secretary replied that DOE “has a team, in fact, that develops a model of the grid that looks at the grid by regions,” and cited a recent DOE order to keep a coal plant in southwestern Michigan open because of small reserve margins on the MISO grid.

On laboratory funding, the senator said engineers at Sandia National Laboratories had told him the cut would “significantly affect…