The clean energy industry is repositioning itself to survive the Trump era: Carbon cutting is out, power reliability is in.
On Tuesday, renewable energy advocates called on red-state utility regulators and the country’s reliability watchdog to press the case that America’s power grid needs more wind, solar and batteries.
In a pair of panels on grid reliability, industry advocates argued clean energy projects can be built faster than natural gas and nuclear projects, helping to satisfy rapidly growing energy demand from data centers and artificial intelligence and fortifying the country’s collection of regional electric grids from increasingly severe weather.
“I’ve made no secret of the fact that I want to see the cleanest possible grid that we can have and as fast as we can get there,” Andrew French, chair of the Kansas Corporation Commission, said at the event hosted by the American Clean Power Association. But he stressed that cleaner power systems must be affordable and reliable because otherwise “consumers will reject that, and we have the risk of being set back even further.”
