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Sanders walking into 'buzzsaw' with plan to boost US clean energy output

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants federally owned power marketing administrations to help the U.S. transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2030, in part by building massive amounts of new wind and solar capacity.

But policymakers have tried and failed in the past to expand the adminstrations', or PMAs', role to boost renewable generation, with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Congress reluctant to back such top-down approaches to regional power planning.

"I doubt Bernie's team has any idea the kind of buzzsaw they will be walking into if they try this," said Travis Kavulla, director of the R Street Institute's energy policy team and a former president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "It would literally be easier to make the private utility sector a willing pawn of the administration than it would be to bring the PMAs into a transformational role like the one Bernie has in mind."

Sanders' climate plan released Aug. 22 calls for the U.S. to power 100% of the electricity and transportation sectors with renewable resources by 2030. A key piece of the plan involves the PMAs, federal utilities that are largely responsible for marketing and transmitting power from federally owned hydroelectric plants across 34 states.

Sanders wants the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority and the four existing PMAs — the Bonneville Power Administration, Western Area Power Administration, Southeastern Power Administration and Southwestern Power Administration — to build and own massive amounts of new wind, solar and geothermal power along with energy storage resources. In addition, he advocated for the creation of a fifth PMA that would cover parts of the country not currently served by the existing PMAs and would also be charged with building new renewable capacity.

The output from the new plants would be sold to distribution utilities "with a preference for public power districts, municipally- and cooperatively-owned utilities with democratic, public ownership, and other existing utilities that demonstrate a commitment to the public interest," the framework said.

But the PMAs already mostly serve local electric cooperatives and public power utilities, which are "fiercely protective of the PMAs" and "hate nothing more than when politicians try to use national policy to influence what the PMAs do," Kavulla said.

That thorniness has extended to lawmakers in Congress who have fought prior efforts to expand the PMAs' role to achieve federal energy policy goals. In 2012, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced plans to direct the four PMAs to grow and upgrade their transmission assets and incorporate more renewable energy and energy efficiency into their systems. In response to the proposal, a large bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress urged Chu to back off, calling the changes a "fundamental shift away from regional planning, and the understanding of local needs and impacts which comes with it, towards a Washington, D.C.-based, top-down approach."

The resistance from lawmakers and Chu's decision to step down as head of the U.S. Department of Energy in April 2013 effectively stalled the initiative.

Opposition from public power entities and legislators to a top-down PMA management approach is not the only thing standing in the way of Bernie's plan. PMAs have historically focused more on marketing and delivering hydropower than building and operating plants, meaning they would face a steep learning curve if tasked with a massive buildout in wind and solar power.

"The wind and solar industries have scaled up tremendously over the past decade," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. "Sanders' plan would ignore the competitive wind and solar development markets in favor of PMAs and transform them into the largest renewable energy developers in the world."

Peskoe also questioned how exactly the PMAs would function under Sanders' climate strategy. "Will they develop and build projects themselves or contract with established developers?" he asked. "If it's the latter, I wonder what value PMAs serve as middlemen between existing developers and utilities. If it's the former, how will PMAs quickly develop the expertise to design, develop, and construct [gigawatts] of new projects?"

Representatives from the federal power marketing authorities said they could not comment on presidential campaign plans. But they emphasized that their current role is primarily to market hydroelectric power and other energy in certain states.

Any additional duties outside of that "would have to be authorized by Congress," said Elizabeth Nielsen, public utilities specialist with the Southwestern Power Administration.

Although the PMAs mostly focus on transmission and marketing of energy, TVA owns a substantial amount of generating capacity. That portfolio is already shifting away from coal-fired generation, although a large portion of TVA's existing installed capacity is powered by natural gas and nuclear energy.