The story came out Monday on Vermont Public Radio:
The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant is not needed for the stability of the New England electric grid, according to grid operator ISO New England.
Just last year, ISO had said Vermont Yankee was needed to ensure the stability of the region’s power grid.
Now ISO says transmission upgrades and new generation means that Yankee is no longer needed to maintain grid reliability.
Which, as the Conservation Law Foundation’s Sandra Levine noted, undercuts the main argument for continued VY operation.
“The lights will stay on, the electricity will keep flowing, and we will continue to have more than adequate power supply without Vermont Yankee,” she said.
Since Monday, the story has kind of slowly piddled out in the Vermont news media.
This would seem like a fairly dramatic development in the Yankee saga. But aside from the VPR report, it’s gotten short shrift in the state’s media. The Associated Press issued a very brief article, obviously cribbed from the VPR account. The Burlington Free Press’ only coverage, as far as I can tell, is that very brief AP account.
The Brattleboro Reformer buried the ISO pronouncement in an article about last night’s public meeting with representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
(The Reformer says that ISO made the announcement on Wednesday. Which is curious, since VPR reported it two days earlier
This might be a media conspiracy to downplay the story, but I don’t think so. As a veteran of the biz, I suspect that the real reason is simple competitiveness. News sources hate to follow up on stories broken elsewhere. They have to credit the original source, and they have to spend time and effort basically catching up with someone else. The result — worthwhile stories getting underplayed — is a disservice to us all, but it’s just the way self-interested organizations and human beings tend to work.
probably accounts for the underplay. But it is a very significant confirmation of something that many people have been maintaining since quite a while.
And it comes at a time when Vermont’s challenge to the NRC’s primacy, already tarnished by intrigue and conflicts of interest, seems to be gaining more and more validity.
Vermont Yankee has megawatts to sell and other utilities are always looking to buy and resell it to consumers. That’s what keeps Vermont Yankee humming, not reliability concerns.
A movement that asks neighboring states and their utilities to stop buying Vermont Yankee power would put real pressure to close the plant.
Actually, this is pretty old news, which has been fairly consistently distorted in the telling.
In 2009, VY applied to ISO-New England asking to be removed from its annual auction of capacity. ISO-NE refused, saying that removing VY COULD jeopardize grid security. This year, when VY again made its request, ISO-NE granted it. That’s the core story.
Back in 2009, ISO released press releases and testified to the Vermont legislature saying that they were certain that if VY were shut down by the Senate’s vote during the next session, steps could be taken to insure that reliability was maintained. VELCO said exactly the same thing. Both noted that there were short term measures which were already in progress and that further measures would be taken to completely eliminate the problem by 2020. In other words, despite the refusal to allow VY to delist, ISO was saying that, if push came to shove, they did NOT foresee any real problem.
It should be noted that ISO uses tests based on EXTREMELY conservative assumptions, which is fitting given that no one wants a blackout. First, they assume that the 2 most important generators (or transmission lines) are already down. Then, they project what would happen if, in this instance, VY were ALSO to go off line. They do this test assuming that load demand is at the highest level possible. It should be obvious that the concatenation of all of these events is not very likely.
So, what ISO said in 2009 is that the test showed there COULD (NOT would) be a problem; in 2012, it shows that the potential problem has been eliminated (as forecast by ISO and VELCO).
VY and its supporters blew the 2009 statements entirely out of proportion, attempting to make them sound as though ISO was suggesting that shutting the plant down WOULD shut the grid down. That’s not the case and never was. It may not be up to the standards of a “pants on fire” lie, but it was certainly never a correct representation of the truth.
Now, in any case, it’s clear that even under the most conservative scenarios, there’s no need for VY to maintain system reliability.