Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
7/25/2014
Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy defended the EPA’s recently proposed emissions reductions standards for existing coal-fired power plants in testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week. “We’re doing exactly what everybody has asked EPA to do for a long time, which is, ‘You set the standard based on science, we’ll get there in the cheapest most cost effective way that we can.’ We’re actually telling states to go do that,” McCarthy said. Republicans on the committee challenged several characteristics of the regulations during the hearing including outside-the-fence measures, potential costs and benefits related and the means by which they were drafted.
The proposed regulations, which were announced in June, set emissions reduction targets for each state and mandates that the states develop implementation plans to meet these targets. In the regulations, four “building blocks” to reductions are presented, though it is up to the states which “blocks” to include in their plans. The building blocks address carbon emissions through both inside and outside the fence measures. Inside the fence, emissions are reduced through heat rate improvements. Outside the fence building blocks include fuel switching, demand-side energy efficiency and reducing emissions from the most carbon-intensive units in the amount that results from substituting generation at those units with generation from less carbon-intensive units.
Proposal ‘Truly Unprecedented,’ Senator Says
Committee Ranking Member David Vitter (R-La.) described the EPA’s proposal as “a truly unprecedented outside-the-fence set of regulations that will have major negative impacts on our nation’s electricity system.” Vitter accused the EPA of having overstepped its bounds and taking powers from other regulatory organizations. “EPA’s proposal does a number of things, but fundamentally, it hijacks [our nation’s] electricity system all in the name of flexibility. In reality EPA usurps the role of state government and public utility commissions as well of FERC, DOE and other federal agencies that do have the authority over and expertise in electricity generation issues,” he said. “Unfortunately for EPA, electricity is not directly under its jurisdiction, changing dispatch rules to require the most expensive power be delivered first, mandating efficiency and the use of renewables are examples of intrastate generation transmission and distribution matters reserved to the states by the federal power act.” Vitter also introduced legislation this week which would require the EPA to withdraw its proposed rule.
Cost/Benefit Analysis of New Regs. Looked at Nationally, Not State-by-State
Committee Republicans also accused the EPA of not having performed an adequate cost/benefit analysis of the proposed regulations. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) asked if the EPA’s analysis was done state by state or nationally. McCarthy explained that the analysis was done nationally due to the unpredictability of state implementation. “The challenge here sir is we’ve given so much state flexibility that [the analysis] can only be illustrative because it really is going to be up to the individual states how to design their strategies to achieve these reductions,” McCarthy said.
EPA Comes Under Criticism for Outreach
While McCarthy stated several times throughout the hearing that the agency’s outreach prior to drafting the regulations was “unprecedented,” and that the agency reached out to all stakeholders before “putting pen to paper,” Senate Republicans challenged that the regulations have essentially been written by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Noting that no public hearing had been held in coal states Kentucky and Wyoming prior to the release of the proposed regulations Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said, “The EPA administrator has literally gone out of her way and the EPA has gone out of its way to avoid hearing from unemployed families who have lost, or will lose everything, their jobs, their homes, retirement savings, issues relating to their health, all because the EPA has decided to push a rule that was drafted behind closed doors by powerful wealthy Washington lawyers and lobbyists at the NRDC.”
Democrats on the committee voiced their support for McCarthy and the proposed regulations saying that the benefits outweighed the cost. “I appreciate very much the concern of my colleagues here; I know that Sen. Barrasso is representing the state of Wyoming. I know that the state of Wyoming has a very significant coal economy,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said, further stating that he understood why Barrasso would have reservations about regulations which he believes will harm his state’s coal industry. “He has every reason to expect the rest of us to listen to his concerns and try to work with him to see what we can do to try to help with those concerns. What I can’t have is to have a dialogue in which Wyoming gets its concerns ventilated but has no interest whatsoever in what’s happening in Rhode Island,” Whitehouse said.
Whitehouse went on to say that it may be possible to develop a system to pass along benefits of the regulations which coal states like Wyoming may not directly gain from. “But, we can’t do that if they pretend that the other side of the ledger doesn’t exist,” he said. “We can’t do that if they continue this pretense that coal isn’t harming people all across the country as well as benefiting people in their states.”
