Debate over prioritizing "dispatchable" resources surfaces as committee weighs reliability bills
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Summary
Lawmakers and witnesses clashed over draft bills that would prioritize dispatchable, always‑available generation and give regulators tools to prevent premature retirements. Supporters said the measures are insurance against outages; opponents warned they could raise costs and distort markets.
The House Energy Subcommittee spent substantial time on proposals that would give regulators new tools to protect grid reliability by prioritizing dispatchable generation or compelling particular resources to operate.
The draft Reliable Power Act and a related Grid Power Act would give regulators expanded authority to identify resources considered critical for system reliability and — under some proposals — to require compensation or temporary operation of otherwise uneconomic units. Supporters, including representatives of competitive power suppliers, argued those measures are a necessary "insurance policy" to prevent near‑term shortfalls as demand rises rapidly.
"Dispatchable resources are particularly important," Todd Schnitzler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, told the committee. Schnitzler supported a narrowly tailored mechanism to allow operators to move needed capacity forward in exceptional cases while requiring safeguards and transparency.
Opponents cautioned against broad, permanent mandates. Kim Smasniak said changing queue priority or compelling long multi‑year reliability contracts could be costly and counterproductive if the prioritized resources are not commercially buildable before a reliability gap must be closed. She told the panel the market and existing FERC authorities — including regional reliability must‑run (RMR) contracts and the Department of Energy’s section 202(c) emergency authority — already provide layered tools to respond to genuine emergencies.
Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, urged Congress to focus on keeping existing plants online while accelerating new capacity: "We shouldn't dig ourselves in a deeper hole by shutting down already existing plants when they're still economically viable and we don't have reliable replacement," he said.
Members repeatedly cited assessments from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) about scheduled retirements: the committee memo quoted NERC findings that roughly 115 gigawatts of dispatchable generation are scheduled to retire over the next decade while demand could grow by up to 151 gigawatts in the same period. Witnesses disagreed on remedies but largely converged on two points: avoid rushed, technology‑specific statutory preferences, and act quickly to preserve needed flexible capacity while bringing new resources and transmission online.