Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior, detailed why dependable coal energy is a national security issue during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Burgum’s comments on Thursday came in response to Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV), who emphasized his concerns about the potential for an electricity crisis, especially as “permitting has gotten totally outrageous.”
“We are in an energy crisis in our country, and the first place is actually related to electricity,” Burgum said. “Electricity is at the brink; our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable. We could be just months away from having skyrocketing prices for Americans.”
Burgum then noted the need for electricity in the artificial intelligence “arms race,” underscoring that wind and solar alone cannot propel the U.S. to victory.
“And, of course, as we talked about in the AI arms race, we need electricity for manufacturing,” Bugum said. “And AI is manufacturing intelligence. And if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company, in every industry.”
“You understand this,” he told Justice. “And we’ve got to get to work. The permitting right now in some of the queues in FERC [the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee] for electricity, it’s seven years or longer, and… that queue in FERC is 95 percent intermittent sources and only five percent base load.”
Burgum emphasized the need for a balance between base load energy and renewables.
“We’ve got to have the balance between those two, or the grid, which is like a giant machine, just doesn’t work, and so we’ve got to get to work in permitting reform and speeding permitting,” Burgum detailed, criticizing tax incentives that currently exist for renewables and barriers in place for base load energy.
“Right now, we’ve stacked the deck… where we are creating roadblocks for people that want to do base load, and we’ve got massive tax incentives for people that want to do intermittent, unreliable, and the balance is out of whack, and we’ve got to bring it back in line,” he added.
Burgum said that America can achieve a healthier balance between renewable and base-load energies while also achieving “objectives that we want to have about… having a cleaner environment.”
