Steven Winberg, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for fossil energy, touted early data Friday showing coal and nuclear generated a higher percentage of power during the cold surge than usual. Temperatures were expected to return to normal this weekend.
"People will pore over the data, and one thing you will see is coal will have stepped up its capacity factors, and nuclear will have stepped up its capacity factors," Winberg told the Washington Examiner in an interview. "Those are power sources that have fuel on the ground, and that's absolutely important. If we didn't have that, it would have been a much worse situation."
The Trump administration has repeatedly cited the stress of extreme cold weather events as a possible reason to subsidize coal and nuclear plants, which can store fuel on-site. Natural gas, normally the cheapest and most-used fuel for electricity, depends on pipeline flows that can be interrupted during extreme weather, while wind and solar power, whose prices have dramatically fallen, fluctuate depending on when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
President Trump has repeatedly pressed for action to save coal and nuclear plants, even after an independent panel of federal energy regulators rejected a Energy Department plan to provide them special payments because of a lack of evidence showing the grid is at risk.
The White House has stalled over an effort to use emergency executive authority to help coal and nuclear plants.