WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Monday defended President Donald Trump’s call to bolster struggling coal-fired and nuclear power plants, saying a rash of plant retirements is “alarming” and poses a looming crisis for the nation’s power grid.

Experts disagree and say Trump is attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

In a speech in Austin, Texas, Perry said coal and nuclear plants “are retiring at an alarming rate that, if unchecked, will threaten our ability to recover from intentional attacks and natural disasters.”

“The president is right to view grid resilience as a serious national security issue,” Perry said at a conference on cybersecurity.

A regional transmission organization that oversees the power grid in 13 Eastern and Midwestern states said there’s no immediate threat to system reliability. PJM Interconnection said Trump’s proposal to force electricity sales from coal and nuclear plants would damage markets and be “costly to consumers.”

“There is no need for any such drastic action,” the group said, calling the electrical grid in a region that stretches from Illinois to Virginia “more reliable than ever, with 23 percent reserve and billions of dollars of new investment” in a range of power sources.

John Hughes, president and CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Counsel, an association of large industrial electricity users, said Trump’s proposal would “devastate U.S. manufacturing.”

“Fuel security and resilience are phony issues,” Hughes said, calling concerns about national security a “pretext” that allows the federal government “to pick winners and losers in the energy markets” by propping up uneconomic power plants.