Farris Willingham
GHG Monitor
06/29/12
Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) co-wrote a letter to President Obama this week urging him to codify an extension to the compliance period for the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury regulations. The letter asks the President to issue an executive order extending the compliance timeframe for EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS) for two more years, allowing utilities a total of six years to comply with the recently finalized rulemaking. The pair said a six-year implementation period, a length initially requested by utilities such as Southern Company, would help MATS compliance be “more reasonable, practical and cost effective” for utilities. A two-year extension would contribute several benefits to utilities, Alexander and Pryor said, such as allotting for more time to apply for permits, order and install equipment and ultimately minimize potential disruptions to the power grid. “The certainty of a full six years for implementation will spread out costs and minimize increases on electric rates,” the letter says. “It will improve the ability of utilities to develop more realistic implementation schedules to ensure that an adequate supply of pollution control technology is available from manufacturers.”
Finalized in December, the rule as it currently stands enforces technological standards for roughly 1,400 coal- and oil-fired units nationwide, requiring operators to install pollution-control equipment such as scrubbers, baghouses, dry sorbent injection technology or electrostatic precipitators within a three-year timeframe. States currently have the option to extend that compliance timeline by a year under the Clean Air Act, while the Administration can greenlight an extra fifth year to individual units if the local reliability of the power grid is threatened. The duo said that providing an extra two years of implementation for MATS via an executive order will “help citizens of our states achieve the health benefits of clean air at the lowest possible cost and with the least possibility of disruption of electric service,” they wrote.
Letter Parallels Legislative Provisions
The letter requests that the Administration essentially codify provisions central to a bill expected to be introduced by the pair next month. When that legislation was announced recently, it was widely seen as an alternative to a resolution of disapproval in the Senate sponsored by James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would have scrapped the current standard in its entirety. Last week, the upper chamber voted down that resolution 46-53. At the time, Inhofe said that the Alexander-Pryor legislation would act as political cover for coal-state Democrats and moderate Republicans. “The counter measure is a cover bill, pure and simple,” Inhofe said in a floor speech earlier this month. “The American people are pretty smart and they know that there is only one real solution and that’s to stop, not just delay, EPA’s war on coal.”
