Mel Coleman, CEO of North Arkansas Electric Cooperative
High fuel costs, government regulation and shutdowns of fossil-fuel generation plants are strangling the electric cooperatives’ ability to supply affordable and dependable power to 1.2 million cooperative members in Arkansas.
That’s the view, at least, of Mel Coleman, CEO of North Arkansas Electric Cooperative in Salem (Fulton County) and a board member and past board president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. These factors are outside of the distribution cooperatives’ control, Coleman argued in an interview last week and a commentary article he wrote recently.
His concerns involve higher fuel costs for natural gas, a loss of baseload energy generation as coal-fired power plants close, and what he describes as “railroad manipulation of coal deliveries” to remaining coal plants.
He sees America’s abandonment of nuclear power decades ago as folly, and says the country simply can’t rely on sun and wind power for most of its power needs — at least not yet.
And volatility in natural gas markets, especially during extreme weather, has led to depressingly regular fuel-cost line-item increases in his members’ bills.
“All but one month in the past year there has been a charge [on members’ bills] due to increased fuel costs our wholesale power provider Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. had to pay,” Coleman said.
New nuclear power plants haven’t been commissioned in decades, and coal plants are being shuttered in record numbers, leaving power customers in the lurch, Coleman said. He’s particularly concerned about the planned shutdowns of Entergy’s coal plants in Redfield and Newark in 2028 and 2030, respectively. The cooperatives own a 30% stake in those plants, but have no power to stop the shutdowns.
“If we want reliable, affordable electricity, then the madness of shuttering our power plants must stop,” Coleman said, denouncing 20 years of “attacks” from the Environmental Protection Agency and lawsuits from environmental groups. The 2021 agreement to shut down the Entergy coal plants helped settle a Clean Air Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association.
“Look, I get it, things have to be done,” Coleman said by telephone. “But you’ve got two coal-fired generating plants with a useful life beyond when they’re planning to shut them down. And when you have a winter storm or get the phone calls I get about rolling blackouts because of a shortage of power on the grid, it’s frustrating.
“Or we get these exorbitant fuel costs, because of the price of natural gas or the lack of coal,” Coleman continued. “It’s only going to get worse in 2030 when our largest and least-cost generators go offline. And I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
Coleman said the country “made a huge mistake back in the 1980s when we moved away from nuclear generation. We are good stewards of the environment at the co-ops, so we want to do what’s right. But at the same time, we had to have common sense about the two most important things to my members, reliability and affordability.”
Members want to know that when they flip a switch, the light will come on, he said. They also want to know that their grandma and grandpa will be able to pay the electric bill.
“As far as clean energy, we’re all for clean energy,” Coleman said, noting his co-op has its own small solar plant and that he’s on the board of Today’s Power, a cooperatives subsidiary that builds utility-scale solar projects. “But we’ve got to be realistic about it. Wind and solar have a role in a diverse generation mix, but they are intermittent resources not constantly available. In time, and with new technology, they will provide much more reliable power.”
But shutting down “perfectly good” baseload power sources — those available 24/7, like coal-fired and natural gas generating plants — demonstrates a lack of common sense, Coleman said.
“Nuclear and responsible coal generation need to be back on the table, or we’ll be living with higher and higher energy bills as well as regular threats of rolling blackouts during periods” when severe weather strikes.
“Without a focus on baseload generation resources of nuclear, natural gas and coal, then reliability and affordability will be a thing of the past,” Coleman said, “if it isn’t already.”
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