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America’s Power recently released a three-minute video to highlight the importance of the nation’s coal fleet and its role in maintaining reliability, resilience, and fuel security. The video can be viewed here.

The America’s Power video emphasizes the importance of a technology-based approach to addressing carbon emissions from the electric sector, and it highlights the need for research and development, as well as policies to incent the deployment of advanced technologies like carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS).

In the announcement accompanying the release of its video, America’s Power makes the following observations:

• The nation’s electricity grid is undergoing a transition that is causing an increasing reliance on intermittent energy sources — such as wind and solar — and shifting away from dispatchable (always available when needed) electricity sources such as coal.
• There are many economic and technical challenges associated with the grid transition that policymakers must address to ensure that we maintain a reliable and affordable supply of electricity during and after the transition.
• The recent electricity emergencies in Texas last month and California last August serve as warnings about the risks of losing fuel diversity —and relying too much on just one or two sources of electricity — and reducing fuel security by shutting down power plants that are reliable because they always have fuel available, regardless of extreme weather and other disruptions.

With comments from Don Gaston, CEO of Prairie State Energy Campus, and Steven Winberg, former Assistant Secretary of Energy, the America’s Power video highlights some of these challenges and also emphasizes the importance of research and development, as well as establishing policies to incent the deployment of advanced technologies like carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) to address the challenge of reducing carbon emissions even further from the electric sector, while still maintaining fuel diversity and fuel security.

America’s Power is the only national trade organization whose sole mission is to advocate at the federal and state levels on behalf of coal-fueled electricity and the coal fleet. Its membership is comprised of major industries — electricity generators, coal producers, railroads, barge operators, and equipment manufacturers — involved in generating electricity from coal.