The Environmental Protection Agency will propose new regulations Thursday designed to cut carbon dioxide from the nation's coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants.
The EPA's long-awaited proposals come after the Supreme Court put new constraints on the agency's authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants last year and represents one of the highest-profile regulatory developments yet under President Joe Biden, who signed the U.S. up to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
SKEPTICISM FROM BOTH SIDES FOR EXPECTED POWER PLAN RULE MECHANISM
The proposed rules also come at a time when grid regulators warn about the increasing fragility of the nation's bulk power system, which is becoming more vulnerable to blackouts in the face of extreme weather due to large-scale retirements of traditional power plants.
Power generators burn fossil fuels to generate a majority of the nation's electricity. Biden set a target of achieving a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
The EPA's proposals, developed under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, would set emissions limits for new gas plants, as well as existing coal, oil, and gas-fired steam generating units. The limits kick in beginning in 2030 and become increasingly more stringent in the following years.
"The proposed limits and guidelines would require ambitious reductions in carbon pollution based on proven and cost-effective control technologies that can be applied directly to power plants," said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
The EPA estimated the health benefits associated with its proposals for new gas and existing coal would include approximately 1,300 avoided premature deaths in 2030 alone.
The Clean Air Act instructs the EPA to find the "best source of emissions reduction" for new and existing sources and to develop a standard based on that system that plants must meet.
The EPA based its new standards on technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration, low-greenhouse-gas hydrogen co-firing, and natural gas co-firing. Co-firing involves the combustion of one fuel in conjunction with another to generate power.
The proposals allow plants different pathways to comply with the standards, which vary by source. For long-lived coal plants, the EPA determined carbon capture to be the best system of emissions reduction.
Implementation of the Clean Air Act and Section 111 has a storied past. The EPA proposed its first-ever greenhouse gas standards for existing plants in 2015 under the Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court stayed and ultimately ruled against in West Virginia v. EPA last June.
The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA cannot employ generation shifting as the best system of emissions reduction, as the Obama-era CPP sought to do. Generation shifting generally means a "shift in electricity production from higher-emitting to lower-emitting producers," as the court defined it.
The Trump administration's replacement to the Clean Power Plan also ran into court challenges and was sent back to the EPA.
Regan said he's confident the new proposals do not implicate the questions involved in West Virginia v. EPA and would be able to stand up in court.
Coal interests and some lawmakers, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and many Republicans, have criticized the direction the EPA is taking its carbon emissions rules and argued it will drive further retirements of coal plants and further threaten grid reliability.
Some criticisms have centered on the agency's reliance on carbon capture to develop the standards, with critics saying the technology has yet to be adequately demonstrated.
The nation's coal fleet has been retiring steadily for years as utilities retire aging plants rather than expend money to bring them into regulatory compliance or otherwise shut units to reduce their emissions, although some utilities have delayed planned retirements to prevent a shortfall in generating capacity.
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"The coal fleet continues to perform an outsized role in many states and communities, providing dispatchable fuel diversity and security, and ramping up power supply during periods of surging demand when other sources of power cannot," the National Mining Association said in a statement. "EPA’s indifference to the repercussions of its decisions on our ability to provide reliable, affordable electricity to Americans is simply reckless especially when other federal officials are calling it a crisis."
Regan said the EPA expects retirements to occur as a result of its proposed rules but passed the buck to stakeholders to decide whether they want to pay for facility improvements. According to Regan, whether a generating unit retires is "really a decision that will be made company by company and state by state."