The following article by Luke Bassett and Ned Price was posted on the Center for American Progress website August 16, 2018:
After several failed attempts to bail out coal power plants, President Donald Trump and his administration have turned to co-opting national security tools and arguments to pursue their domestic energy agenda. Recently, administration officials have selectively targeted natural gas and renewable energy generation resources, falsely claiming they pose greater risks to the electric grid than do nuclear or coal resources. Specifically, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry misconstrued the facts about certain electricity generation resources and their relative vulnerability to threats, hiding behind his access to classified information to short-circuit a policy debate and thereby strengthen his proposal in a way that circumvents fact-checking.
This unprecedented use of defense arguments to favor certain electricity generators over others defies competitive energy market rules. Furthermore, it impairs the ability of experts, officials, and even the public to assess, prevent, or respond effectively to actual threats to the energy system, thereby undermining national security efforts as a whole.
Vulnerabilities exist across the spectrum of energy resources
All energy resources face vulnerabilities. Natural gas power plants rely on pipeline delivery of fuel for operation, generally without on-site storage. Additionally, natural gas pipelines increasingly depend on electricity at pumps, refineries, compressor stations, and monitoring, all of which present vulnerabilities to natural and man-made events. At the same time, oil and refined petroleum products, renewables, and even coal rely on modes of transmission, distribution, and storage that expose these resources to both physical threats as well as cyberthreats. More comprehensive assessments of the resilience of energy infrastructure, such as large power transformers and reliance on railways to transport energy commodities, have revealed equally or more serious vulnerabilities.