The McDonnell Group

ATLANTA GA – February 23, 2009 - The issue of a national renewable portfolio standard will pose the first major challenge to goodwill between states and the new administration around energy policy.  At the Energy Delivery Forum in DC last week, the conventional political wisdom seemed to be that putting a national RPS in place is a logical precursor to carbon legislation deemed too disruptive and potentially costly to implement in 2009 under current economic conditions.

One way to improve both the likelihood of widespread industry support for a national RPS and to actually have it effect meaningful and statistically significant long term reduction of carbon out of the electric power sector would be to expand any RPS standard to something akin to a National Carbon Reduction Portfolio Standard (NCRPS) and include in its definition an increased amount of funding and focus on nuclear power.

Legislation that provides clear and resonant signals to utilities, capital markets and state regulators that removes some of the current uncertainty around nuclear waste storage, reprocessing, cost recovery and federal support for investment would pave the way for an accelerated nuclear renaissance alongside the distributed and renewable resources that the smart grid will enable in the future.

While recent legislation has helped advance nuclear project applications in places like Texas and Florida, increased Federal funding, loan guarantees, tax benefits and -- more importantly -- resolution to the longstanding issues around waste reprocessing and storage would help accelerate this process. If the real goal of a national RPS is to pave the way for carbon reduction legislation to follow and to begin to tackle the issue of how to accelerate the decarbonization of the power sector, why not do this right and add nuclear to expanded goals for 2009 for a national portfolio standard? Include clean coal too, but the sequestration technology would need to become proven and cost effective to qualify for treatment under any future standard.

I don’t know if this idea would be “politically correct” or even politically feasible but it sure would be smart and in our national energy interests. America needs power to grow our economy and the cleanest, most proven form of baseload power that provides a perfect complement to smart grid enabled distributed renewables is nuclear.