New reports indicate that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hid from internal concerns that new regulations could damage the reliability of the U.S. electric grid, as a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently warned.
“The reality is that the EPA’s own staffers are—or used to be—worried,” writes the Wall Street Journal, “and their political superiors have erased the warnings.” Apparently, an internal EPA report on the Utility Mact rule suggested that “this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electric grid,” but the WSJ notes that those comments were scrubbed from the report that the EPA released to the public in May.
That report complements recent remarks made by Philip Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “I think the pace EPA is going at is too aggressive,” he said at recent meeting of the North American Generator Forum. He reportedly added that new EPA rules are “creating chaos” and could threaten the reliability of the electric grid.
The EPA recently proposed a Utility Mact air quality regulation which will result in many utility companies shutting down their coal-related operations. Coal industry advocates also say that the rules will “cause an average loss of 183,000 jobs per year.”
EPA head Lisa Jackson dismissed the idea that her rules could damage the U.S. electric grid in a testimony before Congress, saying that “In 40 years the Clean Air Act has never caused [an electricity grid] reliability problem.”
