Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would withdraw its Biden administration’s greenhouse gas emission standards on power plants. [emphasis, links added]
This is good news for consumers, and without the repeal of the rules, they will suffer widespread power outages and billions of dollars in fees.
The rules finalized by the Biden administration in May 2024 will allow millions to roll out the power outages by effectively forcing reliable coal-fired power plants to retire and establishing barriers to build new gas plants needed to reliably replace them.
According to Biden's rules, Coal and new gas plants will be forced to spend billions of dollars to install unproven carbon capture and sequestration technologies to capture 90% of emissions or close by 2039.
Almost all coal-fired power plant owners would rather close their stores than bear such high compliance costs. As a result, these rules will make the U.S. power grid dangerously dependent on unreliable wind, solar and battery storage technologies.
There is no worse time for a reliable power plant to retire.
North American Electricity Reliability Commission (NERC) warns in 2024 A regional grid is at risk of power outages under “normal peak demand” conditions in 2025 and beyond, and more places may expect them in the near future.
NERC correctly identified “resource increase does not keep up with the retirement of generators and demand growth.”
The unreasonable shortening of the compliance deadline and wide range of Biden's rules has prompted the four largest grid operators in the U.S. to serve 30 states and 155 million people to warn of the EPA's terrible impact on grid reliability.
The grid is obviously stuck when the person running it says “hopefully is not an acceptable strategy.”
The country's grid operators have good reasons to worry. Our organization modeled the cost and reliability impact of Biden regulations in Southwest Electric Batteries, which spanned 13 states from North Dakota to New Mexico, represented North Dakota transmission authorities and concluded and ended These rules would cost taxpayers billions of dollars and result in huge power outages.
Using EPA based on the forecast of which power plants serve SPP grids in regulations, We determined that building enough wind, solar and battery storage to replace coal, gas and nuclear power plants on the system will cost households and businesses in the region $65.6 billion in losses Exceed the cost of operating the current grid.
In the context, Biden EPA believes that by 2047, compliance costs across the United States will only cost $19 billion.
These rules not only cost a lot of money, but they also lead to devastating power outages.
Our model modeled Biden EPA’s grid portfolio assumptions, and our model predicts that if the hourly demand, wind and solar generation are the same as in 2021, there will be 13 separate outages on February 12, 2040.
A power outage will last for 41 hours. The shortage will total 1,365 hours, or 15% of all times of the year, most in the evenings and winter. The EPA does not perform any hour of reliability modeling.
Bad energy policies impose real costs in life and pain: February 2021 brought a winter storm Uri, which caused 246 people in Texas.
In the SPP, a long power outage will affect about 5.2 million people — in part of the U.S., Texas suffered a tougher winter.
Under President Donald Trump, the EPA is wise to be prepared to redefine grid reliability while continuing to protect the environment.
Reviewer Reading Break in Washington
