America’s power sector calls for changes to EPA carbon reduction proposal for power plants
As the U.S. electric power sector continues making strides in the nation’s clean energy revolution, the current limits of advanced technologies could impact the pace at which power plant owners meet proposed federal deadlines for shearing carbon emissions, according to Aug. 8 comments filed by America’s top energy industry representatives.
“As we outline in these comments, electric companies are not confident that the new technologies EPA has designated to serve as the basis for proposed standards for new and existing fossil-based generation will satisfy performance and cost requirements on the timelines that EPA projects,” according to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents all U.S. investor-owned utilities providing electricity for nearly 250 million Americans. “This will impact electric companies’ efforts to deliver affordable and reliable electricity to customers.”
EEI’s comments seek to provide perspectives on the Proposed 111 Rules in the EPA’s May 23 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking entitled: “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions [GHG] From New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.”
Aug. 8 was the comment submission deadline and EEI, as well as several other national organizations, filed responses to the Proposed 111 Rules, which would directly regulate GHG emissions from new natural gas-based units, while also setting guidelines for the states to address emissions from existing coal- and natural gas-based units.
“EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already under way in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan in releasing the proposal in May. “Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people — cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”
In fact, EEI President and CEO Tom Kuhn said Thursday that the organization’s members hold the pole position in clean energy and climate leadership, with more than 40 percent of the electricity that powers U.S. homes and businesses today coming from clean, carbon-free resources, including nuclear energy, hydropower, solar, and wind.
And thanks largely to the clean energy leadership of EEI’s member companies, carbon emissions from the U.S. electric power sector were 36 percent below 2005 levels at the end of 2022.
“Our carbon emissions today are as low as they were almost 40 years ago, while electricity use has climbed 73 percent since then,” Kuhn said, noting that more than 60 percent of the new electricity generation capacity added over the past decade was wind and solar.
At the same time, 50 EEI member companies have announced voluntary, long-term carbon reduction goals, the vast majority of which include net-zero or equivalent goals, according to Kuhn.
“EEI’s member companies have achieved this progress, and continue to make progress, not because they are forced to by federal regulation, but instead because they are committed to delivering resilient clean energy to their customers,” he said.
According to EEI’s comments, its members see a clear path to continued emissions reductions over the next decade using current technologies, including nuclear energy, natural gas-based generation, energy demand efficiency, energy storage, and deployment of new renewable energy — especially wind and solar — as older coal-based and less-efficient natural gas-based generating units retire. These technologies will continue to enable significant, cost-effective carbon reductions, EEI said.
EEI members also are committed to developing and deploying emerging technologies, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen blending, small modular nuclear reactors, advanced renewables, energy storage, long-duration energy storage, and renewable natural gas, among technologies also suggested by the EPA in its proposed rulemaking.
“The successful development and deployment of these 24/7 technologies, along with the continued deployment of wind and solar generation and the operation of the existing nuclear fleet, will be necessary to achieve continued emissions reductions across the power sector and individual electric company commitments to reduce emissions to zero or net zero,” according to EEI’s comments. “They also will contribute to the reliability and resilience of an energy grid that is increasingly dependent on variable renewable generation.
“This will allow electric companies to make fully informed decisions about retiring older assets, bringing on more new, cleaner sources of generation, and building the infrastructure to support the transformation to a resilient clean energy future for all customers,” EEI said.
However, EEI said that the technologies for CCS and hydrogen blending are not far enough along in development, making the proposed emission rates for the gas-fired power plants unachievable.
“EPA’s rulemaking record simultaneously downplays the various infrastructure challenges to deploying these technologies, while overplaying the current state of deployment and demonstration of each technology,” said EEI. “Given these realities, neither CCS nor hydrogen blending are adequately demonstrated today as they are not deployable, available, or affordable across the entirety of the industry, and the attendant supporting infrastructure will take more time than EPA predicts to deploy.
“This assessment factors in the timelines that EPA proposes for standards that may not be applicable until several years in the future,” EEI said. “Accordingly, unit owners and operators have significant concerns about the achievability of the proposed standards.”
The same argument was made in Aug. 8 comments submitted by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), which represents 900 not-for-profit electric cooperatives and other rural electric utilities.
“EPA should withdraw the proposed rules,” NRECA said in its comments. “To put it simply, the proposals exceed EPA’s statutory authority and would jeopardize affordable and reliable electricity by mandating nascent, inadequately demonstrated technologies and unachievable emissions limits on an unworkable timeframe.”
NRECA said the EPA’s proposal hinges on the widespread adoption of nascent technologies (clean hydrogen and CCS) that are promising, but not yet widespread or commercially available. Nor have they been “adequately demonstrated” as required by the Clean Air Act, the association said.
CCS “has not been shown to work at a commercial scale on either coal or natural gas units, and certainly not at the 90 percent capture rate that the agency proposes,” commented NRECA.
CCS is also heavily reliant on “outside-the-fence line infrastructure” that does not currently exist and will not exist by the proposed compliance dates, the group said.
“Clean hydrogen is even further behind CCS in its development,” said NRECA. “There is currently no supply of clean hydrogen to meet EPA’s standards. Like CCS, there is also no infrastructure in place to transport or store it, even if it was available in the needed amounts.”
Similarly, there are also heavy limits to currently using clean hydrogen as a steady, ongoing fuel source for combustion turbines, “making EPA’s proposed co-firing levels based on conjecture and aspiration,” NRECA said.
“EPA couples these inadequately demonstrated technologies with unworkable timelines that will be impossible to achieve,” said NRECA. “The agency also substantially underestimates what it would cost to comply — assuming compliance is even possible. As a result, the always available generation that will be necessary to meet the increasing electrification needs of the future will be forced to retire.
“These retirements will pose direct threats to electric grid reliability that EPA fails to appropriately assess and inaccurately models,” the association added.
Likewise, the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), which represents America’s competitive power suppliers, recommended in its Aug. 8 comments that if the EPA goes forward with the proposed rules, then it should recognize the challenges to building a carbon reduction (CCS and hydrogen co-firing) industry from the ground up and provide a more realistic and expanded compliance timeframe.
Among other considerations, EPSA also said the EPA should appreciate why the proposal to reduce emissions from the generator sector is unlike past power plant rulemakings, which based regulations on available technology and existing infrastructure.
“We understand the desire to reduce emissions economy-wide, but policies to do so cannot jeopardize Americans’ access to reliable and cost-effective electricity,” said EPSA President and CEO Todd Snitchler on Monday.
Snitchler said that EPSA’s comments detail the continued need for dispatchable natural gas-powered generation to balance intermittent renewables and keep the system running.
“We also enumerate the many factors that must be considered when it comes to grid reliability and the energy transition,” he said. “A more electrified economy, extreme weather, and political and logistical hurdles to building lower emission technology all show we are going to need more — not less. We will need all types of technology and resources to power the nation’s cleaner energy future.”
Grid operators also sounded the same alarm.
Collectively known in their jointly submitted comments as the Joint ISOs/RTOs — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Inc. (ERCOT), Midcontinent Independent System Operator Inc. (MISO), PJM Interconnection LLC, and Southwest Power Pool Inc. (SPP) — they voiced concerns with the potential reliability impacts of the EPA’s proposed GHG rule.
Specifically, the Joint ISOs/RTOs said that as the penetration of renewable resources continues to increase, the grid will need to rely even more on generation capable of providing critical reliability attributes.
“With continued and potentially accelerated retirements of dispatchable generation, supply of these reliability attributes will dwindle to concerning levels…,” according to their comments. “New technologies and industry practices are developing to enable the integration of significant inverter-based generation that provide needed essential reliability services, but the Joint ISO/RTOs are concerned about a scenario in which… needed technologies are not widely commercialized in time to balance out large amounts of retirements.”
The group urged the EPA against adopting the final rule before allowing “for a more thorough exploration of the reliability impacts of the proposed Rule and its impact on investment decisions, and to discuss these conclusions with the ISOs/RTOs.”
EEI also said that given the status of these technologies today and the uncertainty inherent in EPA’s future projections — especially regarding the ability to deploy the needed infrastructure that complements these technologies across the industry in a timely fashion — the “EPA’s assessments are not legally or technically sound based on the record before the agency.”
EEI also pointed out that while there are challenges presented by the Proposed 111 Rules, they are technical in nature. Kuhn said EEI’s comments are aimed at ensuring that the EPA’s final standards are aligned with other regulations and their compliance timelines; afford states maximum flexibility so that they can work with unit owners and operators on affordable, reliable compliance options for all existing units; and provide a regulatory framework that supports continued industry investment in the clean energy transition.
“As we make clear in our comments, EEI and our member companies support regulations for GHG emissions. In fact, we participated in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court last year in defense of EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate these emissions,” said Kuhn. “We appreciate EPA’s willingness to engage constructively with us over the past several years as the agency worked to develop the Proposed 111 Rules, and we share EPA’s long-term clean energy vision for our sector.”
Most of these associations also said that they look forward to having continued productive discussions with the EPA as it works to finalize these regulations.
