‘So you really want a national energy policy?’

Lamentations Monday at Platts Global Power Markets Conference about the lack of a national energy policy. There should be one. … Why can’t we just get it together and make one?. … Accept it, there never has been one and there never will be.

Benjamin Salisbury of FBR Capital Markets brought it all up short.

Of the talk about how we should have a national energy policy, Salisbury said, “that’s called central planning.”

By saying you want it–some speakers had referred to nations with five-year plans, or 20-year plans–“you’re saying you don’t believe” in democracy and the principles of a capitalist economy, he suggested gently.

The reason utilities get a rate of return on their investment is that “it’s an uncertain thing,” Salisbury, senior vice president at FBR, reminded the hundreds of power project developers, bankers and consultants. “The world is a scary place. … It’s a tough business. But it’s not going to change.”

Another thing that’s not going to change, unless Congress changes it profoundly, is the way environmental rules are supposed to work. “EPA will never be done cleaning the air,” he admonished the crowd. “The way the Clean Air Act works, it’s a constant process.” The law requires regular reassessment of air quality standards and health and welfare effects, he observed, and, here too he might have said “it’s a tough business,” but suck it up.

Despite all railing against EPA regulation and expressions of surprise and alarm about it, “It’s not illogical and it’s not haphazard. It has a … rationale.”

Taking a brief political-year jog, Salisbury also observed that much of what he put at 25-50 GW of coal capacity to be retired as a result of EPA regulations will be in key swing states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, “the industrial and manufacturing heartland of the country,” where cheap electricity and gas for manufacturing is seen as critical. These are the states that will “decide who’s going to run this country.”

Just saying.

Platts