The Biden-Harris administration says that its stringent power plant rules won’t harm long-term power reliability, but four grid operators stated the exact opposite in a legal brief filed Friday.
“Such inevitable and foreseeable premature retirement decisions resulting from the Rule’s timelines will substantially strain each of the Joint [independent system operators’] / [regional transmission organizations’] ability to maintain the reliability of the electric power grid to meet the needs of the citizenry and the country’s economy.” (RELATED: Grid Operator Warns Dems’ Climate Agenda Is Pushing Populous Blue State Toward Blackouts) Power Plant Rules Amicus Brief by Nick Pope on Scribd The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), PJM, Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) teamed up to file the brief.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its aggressive emissions rules for America’s power plants in April, saying at the time that the regulations would “improve public health without disrupting the delivery of reliable electricity.” However, four major regional grid operators argued the exact opposite in an amicus brief filed in support of red states’ legal challenge against the rule, stating explicitly that the rules will jeopardize Americans’ ability to reliably secure sufficient amounts of power if they are enforced as is.
“Those [best system of emissions reduction] determinations then drive both the rate and timing of compliance which, in turn, will drive the premature retirements of generation sources that will threaten the reliability of the electric grid even before the compliance date in the Rule.” The claims made by the grid operators in their brief are completely at odds with what EPA has said about its rules.
“Their proffered brief outlines in detail that without additional modification, the compliance timelines and related provisions of the Rule are not workable and are destined to trigger an acceleration in the pace of premature retirements of electric generation units that possess critical reliability attributes at the very time when such generation is needed to support ever-increasing electricity demand because of the growth of the digital economy and the need to ensure adequate back-up generation to support an increasing amount of intermittent renewable generation,” the grid operators wrote in their amicus brief.
Specifically, the EPA’s rules will mandate existing coal plants to harness 90% of their emissions by 2032 if they want to stay open past 2039, and they will also require new natural gas-fired plants to do the same in order to stay open past 2039, according to the agency.
“Today, April 25, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a suite of final rules to reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants in order to protect all communities from pollution and improve public health without disrupting the delivery of reliable electricity,” the EPA said on the day it unveiled the final regulations.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/17/epa-power-plant-rules-grid-operators-reliability/
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