West Virginia is putting common sense back into energy policy. The Senate Energy Committee just advanced the Reliable and Affordable Electricity Act, prioritizing coal, gas, and nuclear—the sources that keep the lights on. Wind and solar? They’re fine until the wind dies or the sun sets. This bill tells utilities to consider reliability before jacking up rates for unproven, unstable energy experiments. It’s not flashy. It’s not greenwashed. It’s a smart policy rooted in reality.
The Dominion Post quoted AOER’s Vice President of Research Isaac Orr, who testified in committee, “We firmly believe that families and businesses should only pay for what they get.”
The bill is based on Orr’s legislative idea, “Only Pay for What You Get.” The Dominion Post explained Orr’s additional testimony:
There’s a significant difference, he said, between dispatchable power – coal, natural gas, nuclear – that’s available on demand, and intermittent wind and solar that is only available at certain times.
The regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, gives each source a reliability rating: nuclear, 95%; coal, 84%; gas, 62-79%; wind, 35%; solar, 14%.
However, he said, a coal plant’s value will depreciate, and the utility will find more incentive to invest in more profitable intermittent generation.
The bill is designed to lessen that incentive by allowing a utility to profit from only the reliable portion of its assets. The utility could still recover the costs of construction or acquisition of wind and solar, but the profit factor would be limited. The utility would be less inclined to shut down older, dispatchable facilities.
Along with keeping ratepayer costs at affordable and reasonable levels, he said, the bill would enable utilities to reliably meet the increasing grid demands from data centers and manufacturing growth.
This move by the WV Energy Committee ensures humans can flourish by providing affordable energy that powers their homes and improves their quality of life. The rest of the country should follow.