House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield is readying a series of bills that could place a damper on President Obama’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants. And the Kentucky Republican says the legislation could draw enough bipartisan support to pass.
“We are going to be introducing [the bills] in the next couple of weeks. I would say before the end of March,” Whitfield told the Washington Examiner following a hearing this week on new grid innovations.
Whitfield is working up two bills, both targeting Environmental Protection Agency power plant rules that seek to limit CO2 pollution that are already built and running today, as well as plants that may be built in the future.
Critics say the EPA rules could prohibit building of new coal plants or modifying older plants to limit carbon emissions that the administration argues cause global warming.
“But I think our approach is reasonable. And I think because of the extreme position taken by EPA in these two areas that we have strong arguments to make,” Whitfield says.
One of the bills will be a reintroduction of legislation Whitfield sponsored in the 113th Congress that sought to change the “parameters” by which a new coal plant can be permitted under the “new source” rules.
“One bill addresses the new source, the other bill addresses the existing,” Whitfield explained.
“The original new source bill is what we had last time, it sets parameters that if you meet this criteria you can build a new coal plant,” he said.
But the new bill will have some tweaks compared to last year’s version, he said. Whitfield suggests the tweaks may be part of a political maneuver to gain votes, but was coy on details.
“There is a lot of consensus. We introduced this legislation last year, but we’re just trying to fine tune it a little bit. And there’s a lot of consensus about it” from both the Democrats and Republicans.
“We’re trying to set parameters that would allow” more coal plants to be built, he said. “They [the Obama administration] talk about an all-of-the-above energy policy, but they are in fact removing that option.”
Whitfield wants the coal-fired utility industry to continue to propose and build new power plants that are not constrained by having to adopt new “carbon capture” technology that is expensive and in many cases not commercially available.
What the new source bill will likely do is ease the carbon capture requirement to allow new, highly efficient coal plants to be built. Critics of the EPA rule say it constitutes a “de facto mandate” for CO2 capture.
“Our parameters make it possible to build a new coal plant using the very best control available technology,” Whitfield told the Examiner.
The second bill addresses EPA climate rules for existing power plants. The bill will roll back the rule’s interim timeline for implementation and force EPA to allow more time for utilities and states to comply.
The existing source rule is a completely different animal. It requires the states, not individual utilities, to comply with the standard. States would have a variety of resources at their disposal to comply, including renewable energy, efficiency, natural gas plants and heat-rate improvements at coal plants.
But critics of the existing source rule argue that this is illegal under the Clean Air Act that is EPA’s guiding statute. This argument is the basis for a lawsuit against the EPA brought by 12 state attorneys general and the coal company Murray Energy. That suit is currently in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The legality of the utility rules will be a feature of a March 17 hearing on the existing source standards, also referred to as “section 111d” rules, according to a Whitfield aide.
The bills will be introduced sometime after the hearing, the aide said.
No EPA officials will be present at the St. Patrick’s Day energy hearing. And although the details of the hearing are still being narrowed down, it will feature expert panelists addressing the “legal issues” surrounding the 111d rule, as well as the cost the rule would impose on consumers.
