Keeping the Lights On With AECC’s Buddy Hasten

Buddy Hasten, president and CEO, Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. in Little Rock

Buddy Hasten, an Iowa boy with bleak job prospects, joined the Navy 35 years ago for a paycheck. What he got was a career in electric power, a dedication to facing facts and a stark understanding of accountability.

“If a U.S. Navy ship runs aground or hits anything, its captain is going to be relieved of command, taken off that ship by helicopter,” said Hasten, who ran the nuclear power plants on Los Angeles class attack submarines and filled other Navy nuclear roles before retiring into a civilian career running power plants.

Now he’s CEO of Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp., and he’s sounding the alarm about accountability and reliability in the regional electricity supply.

“Admiral Rickover said that if he went into a room and couldn’t point to the person responsible, then nobody was responsible,” Hasten said, referring to Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy.

Older Americans grew up in a world where multitudes of separate utilities handled their own power generation, resulting in a great excess of capacity. Over the past decades, these generation capacities have been pooled and shared, and of course market efficiencies cut the supply to just meet demand, with a small cushion.

In February 2021, the risk became brutally clear when a deep freeze and snowstorm overwhelmed the power grid in Texas and even resulted in some rolling blackouts in Arkansas. “That event killed 250 people,” Hasten said, and part of the problem, in his view, was a lack of on-demand generation from “baseload” sources like coal-burning power plants.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned this month that grid reliability is in peril as peak loads arrive this summer, citing risks of capacity shortages, extreme weather and drought. The NERC’s 2022 Summer Reliability Assessment found that every bulk power provider west of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which has its south headquarters in Little Rock. The assessment found MISO North at particularly high risk of “capacity shortfalls from generator retirements and increased demand.”

AECC leaned into coal generation in 2021, largely because of the February storm, which the Weather Channel dubbed “Uri.” The wholesale power cooperative got 39% of its power from coal plants last year compared with 26% in 2020. Renewable sources, which the cooperatives continue to grow, provided more than 20% of the power both years.

“Some people think that this is about pining for the old days and that we just love burning coal, but that’s not true,” an animated and funny Hasten said in a 90-minute talk last week at the Electric Cooperatives’ of Arkansas’ base on Cooperative Way in southwest Little Rock, where the slogan is “reliability, affordability and responsibility.” Hasten is proud that retail electricity is cheaper in Arkansas, at 10.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, than anywhere except Louisiana, Washington State, Iowa and Tennessee.

“We don’t care what it is as long as it’s affordable, reliable and responsible,” he said. “I would say, though, that we’re not against coal. We understand the direction the country’s going, lowering carbon. We’re on that train.

“But Winter Storm Uri woke everybody up,” Hasten continued. “For the first time in our cooperatives’ history, we had to send employees out to shut off people’s power because there wasn’t enough juice. … The NERC is sounding alarms that we may have rolling blackouts this summer in Texas, the upper Midwest, California. Will that actually happen? Hopefully not … But the risk is real.”

Long before the federal alarms, Hasten launched a “Balance of Power” awareness campaign for the 1.2 million electric cooperative members across Arkansas, and now he “feels a little like Nostradamus.” As the wholesale electricity provider to the state’s 17 power distribution cooperatives, AECC commits itself to a coal, natural gas and hydropower mix “to provide dependable baseload energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”

“If you travel the world, there are places where not having 24-hour power is very normal,” Hasten said. “Power is available for portions of the day, because they don’t have enough juice. We’ve always lived in the land of plenty, but there are cracks in the foundation of reliability, and these big federal agencies are finally saying ‘whoa.’ We’ve been pushing this for a long time, but now we may need to slow our roll.”

Again, Hasten returns to his theme of responsibility. “Fifty years ago, if I’d had to send those trucks out and cut people’s electricity, that would have been a firing offense, because my job is reliability. And like the captain of a ship, I’m responsible because I had controlled my own destiny. Now, I’m one market participant, and the rules of the market control what power comes to the market, and reliability depends on the market.”

If he could reliably and affordably provide every kilowatt-hour members use and emit no carbon, Hasten would be happy to, he said. “I just don’t know how, and the honest answer is that no one on the planet knows how.”

Hasten envisions a future AECC powered by solar and battery storage, a combined cycle gas plant foreseen for about 2030, and eventually — if political and market conditions evolve — small modular nuclear power plants. The keys to meeting aggressive carbon goals are what he calls the three T’s: technology, transmission and time. The most essential, he said, is time.

And for now, the baseload power sources remain indispensable.

National security and American life depend on electricity, and Hasten said a nuclear power future could help free the nation from global disruptions like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He worries that Americans don’t weigh the intangible costs of importing millions of Chinese-built solar modules, some built by indentured and child laborers.

The nation could meet net-zero goals, but nuclear power is the only option. Solar energy, he said, is simply not going to power electricity-hungry projects like Big River Steel in Osceola. Small nuclear plants, delivering the same capacity as Entergy’s coal-burning plants in Redfield and Newark, could emerge as emissions-free workhorses, but only if Americans commit to treating decarbonization as an existential threat, Hasten said.

“This is what I did for 20 years in the Navy,” Hasten said, pointing to the two-foot long wooden model of a nuclear sub that rests on a table in his office. “I understand what’s going on inside that nuclear plant better than I understand what’s going on in this office. So the reality is, if you ask me, if America wants to be serious about net-zero carbon, and we don’t want to all go back to fanning each other to cool off in the summer, or not having electricity or having an economy, there has to be a big role for nuclear power.”

A nuclear renaissance would require a mindset of resolve last seen in World War II, Hasten said. “In 1941, when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, we went to war as a nation to stop what we felt was an existential threat of imperialism and Nazism, to save our way of life.

“Everybody went to war, moms went to the factories, and everyone had the will to win,” he said. “Americans leaned into the straps and they made it happen. The point is, you have to have the will to do it. So if you asked me, could we go net zero carbon like that? Absolutely. If we had the will to do it. But the nation would have to get everyone at the table, and tell a lot of truth. People can’t be lining their pockets, and there would have to be real honesty about the physics. So, really, why don’t we do this? Because we don’t have the will.”