Comment on Acadian Consulting Group’s “Report on Nuclear Portion of Senate Bill 877”
Prepared for PSEG and Exelon
Acadian Consulting Group recently released a “Report on Nuclear Portion of Senate Bill 877” (February 6, 2018) examining the nuclear portion of New Jersey Senate Bill 877 (S-877). This portion of S-877 proposes to create a program offering zero emission certificates (ZECs) to selected nuclear plants. A ZEC represents the environmental and fuel diversity attributes of nuclear generation; ZECs would help to support the selected plants and thus preserve those attributes. While the authors of the Acadian report claim to evaluate the economic impact of the nuclear program component of S-877, in fact they evaluate only the ZEC program’s direct costs, which they estimate at $300 million per year. The report entirely ignores the ZEC program’s benefits, and thus offers an incomplete and misleading perspective.