Old Coal-Fired Power Plant Found the Key to Solving America’s Biggest Clean Energy Challenge

Researchers at the Berkeley National Labs have determined that oil, coal, and gas power plants still have a major role to play in America’s energy economy—as electrical sockets.

There are years of red tape needed for renewable energy projects to connect fully with the grid, but because coal and gas plants already negotiated that process long ago, one of their best uses for Americans in the future will be to act like a home electrical socket that the renewables could “plug” into.

In a feature piece on CNN, “experts” say that there are more clean energy projects waiting to be connected to the grid than there is power—from all sources—circulating in the grid right now; a startling statement considering the billions in borrowed money being spent to transition the US electrical grid to renewable sources.

Described by CNN as “seven years of bureaucracy and red tape,” attaching new solar and wind farms to the grid is so much more difficult than connecting them to a thermal power plant and piggybacking on that existing infrastructure.

“This should be one of the main strategies that we adopt going forward, because we already have so many existing assets, so much grid infrastructure and we don’t want to just throw them away,” said Umed Paliwal, a senior scientist at UC Berkeley and a lead author of a new study on the topic.

The study found that there are enough suitable lands around thermal power plants that are currently decommissioned or that run only as backup power sources to build 1,000 gigawatts of renewable capacity that could all use the grid connections at the thermal plant to deliver clean energy years ahead of a normal schedule if they weren’t built next one.

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In the piece at CNN, Sherco’s aging power plant in Minnesota is currently awaiting decommissioning, but its power grid infrastructure is being used by an enormous solar farm from Xcel Energy—one of the largest in the country.

“Any fossil fuel power plant does not operate every single hour of the day,” Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of clean energy think tank Energy Innovation told CNN. “[T]hat big plug, this really valuable resource that everyone is waiting years to get access to—that’s just sitting there, not being used.

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Like an aging sports star who’s not quite ready to call it quits, the energy sources that powered America’s past may yet have a game or two left in the tank to help the team, so to speak, move ahead to a brighter future.

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