Dive Brief:

• To avoid billions in potential costs associated with severe-weather power outages due to climate change, the U.S. government, particularly FERC and the Department of Energy, needs to develop a nation-wide resilience strategy, according to new research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

• "Climate change poses risks to environmental and economic systems, and represents exposure for the federal government," Frank Rusco, director of natural resources and environment at the GAO, told members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. "Climate resilience will take a whole society approach."

• Senate discussion and questioning during Wednesday morning's hearing focused on permitting delays and base load concerns, with an emphasis on the role of natural gas.

Dive Insight:

The recent Senate hearing may have left some key topics unaddressed, but discussion was, according to Rusco, "more bipartisan than usual."

Members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works zeroed in on questions about resource diversity and permitting delays following the presentation of new research by the GAO, as senators sought the answer to a question initially posed by Senator Ben Cardin, D-Md.

"How do we have an electric gird that meets the challenges we have, the realities of climate change, and can reduce carbon emissions?" Sen. Cardin asked. "That needs to be our goal."

Xcel Energy CEO Ben Fowke testified that two-thirds of the Midwestern utility's energy would come from renewable energy by 2030.

"However, at higher levels [of intermittent renewables] the cost of [the energy system] begins to skyrocket and reliability degrades," Fowke said. "Xcel needs some form of new, 24-7 dispatchable energy generation.... With the right policies, I'm confident our laboratories and entrepreneurs can create these technologies and create new jobs."

A balanced, diverse energy portfolio, Fowke said, was the key to a strong energy portfolio — a sentiment many senators and presenters would echo for the remainder of the hearing.

Multiple senators, including James Inhofe, R-Okla., also raised concern about the extended NEPA permitting processes, arguing that permitting delays have delayed needed natural gas, wind and transmission projects.

"I agree that, to be able to build back better, we have to be able to build, and there is room to be able to improve the federal permitting process and streamline it," Rusco told the committee. "I hope that we continue that effort, to get the important infrastructure built to make our system resilient.

After the hearing, Rusco said he hopes to see future discussion around the need for broader-scale grid planning exercises, and who should pay to harden and expand the grid.

"I think in some ways what [the committee] was trying to do was make a case for base load as an answer to resilience," Rusco said. "But there are other ways to create resilient grids that don't require that."

The ideal situation, Rusco said, would look like the integrated resource planning process, but for the whole country, rather than individual regions or utilities. With such an effort, he said, the U.S. could build transmission projects to connect renewable resources to demand centers in ways that would mitigate the intermittency of these resources.

"The wind will always be blowing somewhere, the sun shining somewhere," he said.

The tricky part of these strategies, Rusco said, is that there are few such projects that are "shovel ready" — more planning is necessary to make grid resilience a reality. And it's not clear who should be responsible for building out a more resilient grid. In 2011, Rusco recalled, FERC had recommended the weatherization of energy infrastructure in Texas in case of a cold spell, and ERCOT agreed it was a good idea, but participation in the weatherization project was voluntary. As a result, he said, quite a bit of the recommended work did not take place.

Those recommendations could have been mandatory, Rusco said, but if they were, the financial burden of such regulation would fall disproportionately to low and middle income households, which have less access to energy efficiency upgrades and other means of reducing their electricity bills. That, Rusco said, points to a potential role for federal funding for grid resilience as well.

"My view is, almost anything we do to add resilience to the grid, it won't be free, so somebody has to pay for it," he said, "and the question is what's the smart thing to do?"