Important Takeaways:
- US grid operators warn Biden’s power plant crackdown could trigger ‘significant power shortages’
- The nation’s largest power grid operators, which collectively provide power to 154 million Americans, joined a chorus of voices expressing concern about the Biden administration’s crackdown on gas-fired plants.
- In joint comments filed Tuesday with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), four major grid operators — PJM Interconnection, Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas and Southwest Power Pool — stated that under the proposal announced earlier this year, grid reliability will “dwindle to concerning levels.” The four nonpartisan entities operate across 2 million square miles in all or parts of 30 states.
- “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,” they wrote in their comment letter. “With continued and potentially accelerated retirements of dispatch able generation, supply of these reliability attributes will dwindle to concerning levels.”
- The grid operators further warned that if carbon capture technology isn’t developed as quickly as EPA anticipates it will be, the U.S. would be left without sufficient power supply. Carbon capture technology is being used at just one large-scale facility in the world, the Boundary Dam Power Station in Canada.
- “This proposal also strips states of important discretion while using technologies that don’t work in the real world — so it sets up the plants for failing to meet the standards dictated in the rule, leaving the plants with no other option but to cease operations,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement.
- “This is designed to scare more coal-fired power plants into retirement — the goal of the Biden administration’s so-called green new deal,” he said. “That tactic is unacceptable, and this rule appears to utterly fly in the face of the rule of law.”
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