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New EPA rules could impair power grid
Upcoming Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules could have a “significant impact” on electric grid reliability by forcing the closure of many power plants, according to a report Tuesday that EPA immediately attacked as a gloom-and-doom scenario.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) report could provide political ammunition to critics — including top GOP members of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee — who allege EPA is proposing onerous mandates.
It suggests EPA, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department and state regulators should take various steps to “moderate reliability impacts,” including extensions to install emissions controls.
“To ensure bulk power system reliability, the proposed rules should provide sufficient time to acquire replacement resources, offsetting the reductions in capacity from unit retirements and deratings from environmental control retrofits,” said NERC CEO Gerry Cauley in a statement.
The NERC report assesses the effects of four planned EPA rules over the next five to eight years. NERC is the federally sanctioned, industry-funded group that sets and enforces grid-reliability standards.
The regulations address power plants’ cooling water intake structures, hazardous air pollutant standards, ozone and particulate pollution and disposal of wastes from coal-fired plants.
The rules could eat into the cushion needed to ensure the grid can handle peak demand in some regions, the report finds. Power generating capacity in several regions of the country could dip below NERC-recommended levels to ensure reliability, it finds.
Under the report’s “strict case,” about 77 gigawatts of power capacity would be either retired or lost due to installation of energy-using pollution controls in 2015. That represents about seven percent of total U.S. electric power capacity.
But EPA attacked the report Tuesday in a statement.
“By NERC's own admission, its projections about electricity supply impacts rest on its own fortune-telling about future regulations that have not even been proposed yet. Despite the fact that the substance of those rules remains open to a range of possible outcomes, this report only assumes the worst-case scenarios,” said EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan.
“In reality, EPA has some discretion and will be more sensitive to reliability than NERC gives us credit for,” he added.
This post was updated at 3:50 p.m.
