The nation’s electricity watchdog says the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules cannot be implemented without major changes to the nation’s energy system, requiring the agency to delay the rule.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation published its findings Tuesday in a long-awaited reliability study, advising policymakers that the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would require a “transformative shift” in energy infrastructure to meet the plan’s goals.
The shift “leads to the need for transmission and gas infrastructure reinforcements, which will require additional time beyond currently proposed targets,” the report’s executive summary reads.
Although the report does not say the EPA rules would cause power outages, it does assess the changes in the energy mix that would be required for states to comply with the proposed rules. The rules would force the nation away from coal-fired power generation beginning in the next five years, and toward greater reliance on natural gas, the study says. That could be too much for the grid to bear if done within EPA’s current 2020-2030 timeline, the study says.
The shift from coal to natural gas would require the construction of more gas pipelines to fuel gas-fired power plants, which can’t be done under EPA’s current timeframe. Utilities say the report reinforces their goals for delaying the rules to better assess the reliability hurdles posed by the rules.
The report says EPA’s interim target date will require “notable reductions” in carbon dioxide emissions, totaling “approximately 80 percent of the total reductions” under the rules by 2020. But it “is likely that infrastructure to support the required interim reduction in…emissions at this pace will not be in service by 2020,” the report reads.
EPA is pushing back, calling the report “premature” because the agency has not issued a final rule, expected this summer, and states are still formulating their compliance strategies.
Meanwhile, utility groups lauded the findings. “This study from the regulatory authority charged with ensuring reliability bolsters arguments made by electric co-ops and others that the EPA’s interim deadlines are, quite simply, not workable,” said Jo Ann Emerson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
“While we wish EPA had not given reliability such short shrift prior to issuing the draft Clean Power Plan, we firmly believe it is now incumbent on the agency to heed [the reliability report’s] warnings before the rule is finalized.”
The Clean Power Plan is at the center of President Obama’s strategy to combat global warming by targeting greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s existing power plants. Many scientists say the emissions are the cause of manmade climate change.
The reliability corporation is overseen by the government’s grid regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and was designated by Congress to serve as the nation’s reliability organization in 2005.
