The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules for natural gas and coal-fired power plants are aimed at eliminating nearly all of their carbon emissions by 2040, but those who provide and distribute the nation’s power say it will undermine the grid by forcing plants that generate most of the nation’s electricity to shut down or use less reliable green sources.
Critics warn that if the new rules are adopted, the rolling blackouts that threatened California and Texas last summer and power outages such as those that afflicted eight states during bitter-cold temperatures over the Christmas holiday could become the norm in many areas of the country.
Plants powered by fossil fuels, which now make up 60% of U.S. electricity production, will struggle to meet the proposed emission caps and some will disappear from the grid in favor of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar.
Jim Matheson, who as head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association represents the interests of electricity producers and distributors that provide power to 42 million people, warned the new caps would significantly reduce what he calls “always available power generation.” And it will happen as the nation’s demand for electricity is significantly increasing, particularly in extremely cold or hot weather.
“We think that puts grid reliability at risk,” Mr. Matheson told The Washington Times.
The proposed rules, announced last week by EPA Administrator Michael Regan, would require the nation’s 3,400 coal and natural gas plants to implement carbon capture and storage technology, which is still in development and not yet considered viable, to meet the new emission caps. Carbon capture technology has been hobbled by the EPA, where approval awaits for a significant backlog of permits for the construction of storage wells.
Electric utilities could cut emissions by switching to renewables such as wind or solar, which currently provide 13% of energy to the nation’s power grid, or hydropower, which provides about 6%.
Plants that now use fossil fuels but cannot implement carbon capture technology could comply with the new standards by substituting more expensive green hydrogen, obtained from the electrolysis of water and requires massive amounts of renewable energy to produce.
The EPA provides a third option for the natural gas and coal plants to meet the standards: Shut down.
In fact, the proposed standards incentivize the shuttering of coal-fired power plants by waiving many of the new requirements if they pledge to close by 2035.
The nation’s utilities “will follow the path of least resistance,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the free market Institute for Energy Research. “They’ll figure out the best way to comply with the regulation and if it means shutting down the plant because you get credit, that’s the nature of the business. It’s a numbers game.”
Green energy groups celebrated the new rules after leaning heavily on the Biden administration to end the nation’s use of fossil fuels, which they believe are a significant cause of climate change. Environmental groups argue renewables make the energy grid more reliable and point to failures at natural gas and coal-fired plants last winter that contributed to the power outages in the Tennessee Valley.
Mr. Regan, who acknowledged some coal plants would shutter under the new rule, said the EPA’s primary responsibility in proposing the emissions limits was to protect health and the environment.
The new rules, issued by the EPA under the Clean Air Act, would reduce emissions through 2042 by the equivalent of 137 million passenger vehicles and would prevent approximately 1,300 premature deaths, more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits, and more than 300,000 asthma attacks, according to the EPA.
“This is one of the most important steps we can take to confront the climate crisis,” said Lissa Lynch, federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It targets the source of a third of the nation’s carbon footprint — the climate pollution from power plants that burn coal and gas. It’s long past time to rein it in.”
Mr. Matheson, whose association represents 900 energy cooperatives, said the EPA officials appear to have ignored the impact the rules would have on the reliability of the power grid.
“From our perspective, it doesn’t appear that reliability was ever even a factor that was even considered by the EPA as it puts together this rule,” Mr. Matheson said. “And we see a rule that we think is going to compromise the specific, mission-driven thing we do, which is to keep the lights on for our consumers.”
The new rules are subject to a comment period and public hearings before they are finalized next year.
They’ll also face significant legal hurdles.
Recent court decisions suggest the proposed standards could be thrown out when an inevitable lawsuit seeking to block them eventually reaches the Supreme Court.
The high court ruled in 2022 that Congress did not empower the EPA with the authority to impose emissions caps.
The agency faces the same skepticism from the Supreme Court with this new proposal. But proponents of the new rules believe the green energy and tax increase legislation signed last summer by President Biden will help the EPA standards survive legal challenges because it codified carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Critics say the EPA is not empowered by Congress to determine the makeup of the U.S. energy grid.
A final court decision could be years away and in the meantime, the new rules are likely to impact the power grid by discouraging the construction of new natural gas plants or hastening the closure of existing plants that use fossil fuels.
“The wheels start turning,” Daren Bakst, deputy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, said. “As a result of trying to switch, you might start seeing plants shut down, costs passed on to consumers and grid reliability problems.”
Mr. Bakst said EPA officials may be proposing drastic but legally dubious rules because it will force some plants to shut down and others to convert to renewables before the rules get thrown out.
“Some of the mindset is, ‘We’ll just push this rule and if the Supreme Court doesn’t uphold it, we may still get the benefit of the rule,’” Mr Bakst said.
