The power sector and government are best at solving industry challenges—including how to ensure a stable, reliable grid—when they work together, a top Department of Energy official told electric cooperative leaders at an NRECA gathering in Arlington, Virginia.
Gene Rodrigues, assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Electricity, spoke Aug. 21 at an inaugural meeting between NRECA’s Strategic Technology & Advisory Council and Member Advisory Groups (MAGs).
The council and MAGs are made up of co-op representatives and have leads within NRECA’s Business & Technology Strategies division. The MAGs focus on areas of innovation, including distributed energy resources, cybersecurity, generation and data analytics. Representatives of the Transmission and Distribution Engineering Council also attended the meeting.
As the power sector rapidly transforms due to emerging technologies and new demand sources, Rodrigues said four principles should anchor what DOE and co-ops do: reliability, resilience, security and affordability.
“The thing that makes NRECA effective … is that we work together around those four things,” he said. “Those principles are what I think are really important.”
But ensuring those attributes is increasingly difficult, according to Rodrigues.
“Reliability and resilience are no longer things that we can forecast accurately,” he said. “And that means we have to get better in this industry about being not just adaptable, but actually being a little more able to … allow judgment to replace a regulator’s economic model for what to do and how to approve it.”
Addressing those challenges also means collaborating across policy divides.
“As we think about all those things that are important to fight against, let’s find a way for this industry to come back to an area of … agreement,” said Rodrigues.
As an example, he pointed to a successful collaboration among DOE, NRECA and other stakeholders to craft final new energy efficiency standards for electric distribution transformers to provide stability to industry after DOE’s problematic initial proposal amid the ongoing supply chain crisis.
“In a perfect world, we would address every issue that way, instead of litigating and regulating, et cetera,” the DOE official said. “We don’t live in a perfect world. So, what we have to do is try to push the balance to as much upfront collaboration around those four principles as we can and just recognize that there are always going to be things that we argue about.”
That cross-sector cooperation will be key as the U.S. prepares for elections in November that could have a big impact on national energy policy.
“There is so much common ground,” Rodrigues concluded.
Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.