www.AlaskaMiners.org 31 tricity these plants can provide. The potential loss of this capacity would have been catastrophic for the nation’s power supply. Mark Christie, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman, recently said we must “stop the premature retirement of dispatchable generation” to address projected power shortfalls. Manu Asthana, the president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest electricity market, told Congress, “We will need to slow down the retirement or restriction of existing generation until replacement capacity is deployed. … Frankly, we see this as the single largest risk in the energy transition.” Lanny Nickell, the president and CEO of the Southwest Power Pool that operates a grid stretching from New Mexico to North Dakota, told Congress the “growing imbalance between rising demand and a less dispatchable, more intermittent resource mix … is our generational challenge.” The challenge is immediate. It takes 18 months to build and connect a data center with the power needs of a small city, but it can take a decade or more to build the power plant and infrastructure needed to serve it. A recent forecast sees electricity demand rising 128 gigawatts over the next five years — equivalent to adding 80 million homes to our already overstretched and under-supplied grid. Failure to meet that demand could mean two things: acute grid crises with rolling blackouts for millions or demand destruction, where surging power prices from constrained supply not only wallops consumers but stops the addition of proposed industrial projects in their tracks, leaving untold investment, tax revenue and jobs sitting on the table. The Industrial Energy Consumers of America — representing manufacturers with 12,000 facilities and more than 1.9 million employees — has warned that “the manufacturing sector’s economic growth has never before faced such a growing crisis” due to constrained energy supply. They have asked for one critical, difference-making action: to not prematurely shut down coal-fired electric generating units.” The administration has risen to the moment and is determined to make electricity not a crippling constraint on our economy but a distinct advantage. Its recognition of the value of the coal fleet provides a critical tool to manage demand reliably and affordably. This is the abundance agenda in practice, and the coal industry is ready to underpin it. — Rich Nolan, President and CEO of the National Mining Association
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