You might be surprised to hear that we get quite a lot of criticism here at Greenpeace when we say there’s no need for new nuclear or coal power plants.

‘You want us all to go back to living in caves,’ people cry. ‘You want us all to live in the cold and the dark,’ they shout. ‘Greenpeace are anti-technology,’ they tell us (via our email addresses, blogs, websites and Twitter feeds).

So, some people aren’t happy with our beliefs and assertions. They don’t want to believe our rigourously-researched reports that we commission from independent sources. Fair enough.

If that’s the case, they should listen instead to Jon Wellinghoff. He’s the chairman of the US’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an independent and self-funding regulatory agency within the Department of Energy. FERC ‘regulates and oversees energy industries in the economic, environmental, and safety interests of the American public’ and has a vision of ‘abundant, reliable energy in a fair competitive market’.

We think you’ll agree that FERC aren’t a bunch of technophobes who want to send us back to the dark ages. So, make of this what you will…

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.

"We may not need any, ever," Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.
…

Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

We could have written that ourselves. We wish we had. Meet Jon Wellinghoff, ladies and gentlemen, an energy law specialist of 30 years experience, appointed to FERC by President Bush in 2006 and made its chairman by President Obama in March this year. Worth listening to?