The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday announced it would propose to repeal burdensome greenhouse gas emissions standards for the power sector.
The press release states:
Ensuring affordable and reliable energy supplies drives down the costs of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing while boosting our national security. Coal and natural gas power plants are essential sources of baseload power that are needed to fuel manufacturing and turn the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world. The proposed repeals would remove regulatory barriers that limit access to our Nation’s energy resources and unleash America’s true potential…
The first Clean Power Plan was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022. Many have voiced concerns that the last administration’s replacement for that rule is similarly overreaching and an attempt to shut down affordable and reliable electricity generation in the United States, raising prices for American families, and increasing the country’s reliance on foreign-made energy.
In West Virginia v. EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the major questions doctrine barred EPA from misusing the Clean Air Act to manipulate Americans’ energy choices and shift the balance of the nation’s electrical fuel mix. The Biden Administration issued its own rule in 2024, which many critics say is just another attempt to achieve the unlawful fuel-shifting goals of the Clean Power Plan.
The Clean Power Plan 2.0 would have devastated grid reliability across MISO and other regional grids due to coal-fired generator shutdowns. American Experiment submitted a 35-page comment on the Biden administration’s original draft of the rule in 2023, which would have also required existing natural gas plants to capture emissions as well.
American Experiment’s reliability analysis showed that the EPA’s modeled MISO grid would “result in large capacity shortfalls that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars” and that shoring up those shortfalls would cost an additional $246 billion. Those costs would have outweighed the estimated net benefits that the EPA found for the entire country.
The EPA estimates its proposal to repeal power plant emissions rules would save $19 billion over 20 years in compliance costs. However, to avert blackouts and maintain reliability, hundreds of billions of dollars would have been spent replacing retiring coal plants with intermittent wind and solar.
Once the proposed rules are published in the Federal Register, there will be a public comment period of 45 days.