The only way to derail America’s nonsensical national energy policy is to hope for the worst.
This is the grim assessment of career energy executive Bill Coley, who warned of our nation’s uncertain energy future during a May 10 presentation at The Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst. Coley is a part-time resident of Pinehurst.
The green energy movement is unlikely to be deterred until “a major disruption in our energy supply” occurs, Coley said. An obvious scenario would involve “hostile actions by unfriendly nations — that could cause a change in our energy policy.”
Coley characterizes the insistence on the political Left on eliminating fossil fuels to embrace green energy as impractical and dangerous, both to our economic stability and national security.
When as a college student he discovered a cooperative program at Georgia Tech that would allow him to spend half a year in Charlotte, in his native North Carolina, interning at Duke Power, Coley signed on. He did so despite the fact he had “no intention of working in the electric power industry,” Coley told an interviewer in 2001. “When I was in high school and college, the space program was really attractive and creating a lot of excitement.”
Instead, Coley’s 57-year career beginning in the 1960s was spent entirely in the energy industry. He was named President of Duke Power in 1997 just as Duke was merging with PanEnergy Corp. Coley retired from Duke Energy in 2003, but soon was back at work with a new job in a different country. As CEO of British Energy, the United Kingdom’s largest electricity provider, Coley was credited with completing a turnaround of an organization described as “a basket case” when he arrived.
Coley led British Energy’s battle with the UK Parliament over who owned the company's aging power plants. British Energy won that dispute and become ideally positioned to lead the way as the transition to nuclear power began.
Observed the Evening Standard in 2012, “Coley has turned round British Energy … into a company at the center of the debate over the future of UK power and which, to boot, has been for the last month the hottest buy order in the FTSE 100 (London Stock Exchange).”
More than a decade later, Coley is on the sidelines but he can not ignore the travesty unfolding before him and fellow Americans rightfully skeptical about green energy.
“Government causes most of the energy problems we face,” he told the CCNC audience. “Do people in government have the will to solve them? Government has forgotten the relationship of energy to the national well being.”
Coal, gas and nuclear generate 24/7 with generation plants that run for more than 70 years. Comparatively, wind turbines generate at a 35% rate, must be replaced after 20 years, and generate at a cost three times higher than fossil and nuclear. Solar panels are even less reliable and cost five times higher per kilowatt hour.
Nonetheless, Coley said, coal generation in the U.S. has fallen from 51% of overall power generation in 2007 to 22% as of 2021. Natural gas has doubled as a source over the same timeframe, but gas now finds itself in the Left’s crosshairs.
The decline of reliable energy generation has the U.S. “on a path to becoming a second-rate economy,” Coley warns. “We are moving toward a North Korean model (zero reliable energy production). We’re moving fast in that direction.”
Even if the ruling elite caved on nuclear power as a reliable source, building a conventional nuclear power plant is a process that requires 10 to 12 years. In other words, time is running out.
Coley’s wake-up call is chilling. “The laws of physics always win over government overreach,” he said.
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