West Virginia leaders and industry groups kept coming back to one word in their criticism of a suite of rules federal regulators finalized Thursday to lower greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric power plants.
“Everyone’s really concerned about the reliability,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said during a news conference he held Thursday to blast the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s newly finalized rules. “[T]his administration will throw caution to the wind on reliability, even though they want to tell you, give you all the statistics that they’re meeting this and meeting that.”
“[T]he [Joe Biden] administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda that threatens access to affordable, reliable energy for households and employers across the country,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said in a statement Thursday.
“Our state and national electric systems will become even more unreliable as the grid weakens and base load power supplies are severely reduced,” West Virginia Coal Association President and CEO Chris Hamilton said in a statement.
The EPA rule drawing the most opposition among coal industry supporters will require all coal-fired plants that plan to run long-term and all new baseload gas-fired plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution.
The EPA has projected that power companies can meet grid reliability requirements with a less than 1% effect on electricity prices while complying with the new standards.
The agency says those standards will yield massive public health benefits in 2035 alone that include:
- Up to 1,200 avoided premature deaths
- 870 avoided hospital and emergency room visits
- 1,900 avoided cases of asthma onset
- 360,000 avoided cases of asthma symptoms
- 48,000 avoided school absence days
- 57,000 lost work days
“Despite what you will hear and what they will say, we can do it all while ensuring the power sector can provide affordable, reliable electricity to consumers for the long term,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said during his announcement of the new rules at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Thursday.
The EPA’s latest rule aimed at strengthening carbon pollution standards for new gas and existing coal power plants includes deadlines and flexibility for compliance that extend well into the next decade.
And the agency has a track record of requiring emission-cutting technology that ultimately proved feasible despite red flags raised by many of the same West Virginia political leaders and electric industry stakeholders now claiming the agency’s latest rulemaking is unreasonable.
“We’ve already heard from fossil fuel apologists that these rules are going to endanger the reliability of the grid and will make it impossible for utilities to meet the growing demand for electricity from data centers or new factories,” Amanda Levin, policy analysis director at national environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said during a webinar on the EPA’s new rules Thursday. “Well, there they go again. This is the same argument that polluters have used for 50 years, and we have 50 years of data that shows this is, to use the technical term, hogwash.”
Studies show renewable resource adequacy
The EPA noted a long list of national laboratory, academic and industry-led studies showing that meeting electric resource adequacy needs is achievable using what the agency called “current institutional mechanisms and known operational practices” in a technical support document it published along with its rules Thursday.
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory study published in 2021 showing 100% renewable energy can be reached in the U.S. using existing technologies
Another 2021 NREL study estimating between 1,200 and 2,000 gigawatts of renewable energy can be deployed to produce 70% to 80% of U.S. electricity by 2050 while maintaining resource adequacy
A 2021 federal Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy study finding existing technology portfolio approaches could maintain resource adequacy under high solar deployment and decarbonization scenarios
Researchers from Washington State, Rice and Syracuse universities found in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters in March 2024 that increased solar and wind capacity could be leveraged to meet higher energy demand during widespread hot and cold extremes increasing due to climate change. This could improve the resilience and reliability of energy systems in addition to limiting carbon emissions.
Evidence has mounted in recent years that gas plants touted by fossil fuel supporters fail disproportionately during extreme winter weather.
Gas plants accounted for most of the failed capacity in five extreme winter weather events dating back to 2011, according to a study published in January 2024 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy nonprofit.
“Gas plants can be unreliable, especially during extreme weather events, which are growing increasingly frequent and intense as a result of climate impacts from heat-trapping emissions, which come from gas plants themselves,” study analysts wrote. “This cycle must end.”
The EPA’s final rule released Thursday seeks to curb emissions by establishing rate limits based on application of a technology unproven at commercial scale: carbon capture and storage.
The controversial technology is designed to capture carbon dioxide emissions from sources such as coal-fired power plants and reuse the carbon dioxide to create products or store it permanently underground in geologic formations so it will not enter the atmosphere.
Politicians representing constituencies like West Virginia, where coal still plays a major role in the economy and electric generation, have embraced developing technologies to make those processes easier as a way to keep coal in the energy mix.
The potential for a regional carbon dioxide pipeline buildout has raised concerns due to potential risks of induced seismicity and carbon dioxide leakage during storage.
Manchin and Capito have championed massive taxpayer investments in carbon capture despite its history of being widely cost-prohibitive, supporting the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that provided over $8 billion for carbon capture and storage technology development.
But now EPA critics say carbon capture is too unreliable for coal plant operators to be required to build toward in the next decade-plus.
“CCS is not yet ready for full-scale, economy-wide deployment, nor is there sufficient time to permit, finance, and build the CCS infrastructure needed for compliance by 2032,” Dan Brouillette, president and CEO of Edison Electric Institute, an industry group representing investor-owned utilities, said in a statement.
Under the EPA’s new rule, existing coal-fired units that are intended to operate after Jan. 1, 2039, will have a numeric emission rate limit based on application of carbon capture and storage with 90% capture, which they must meet by 2032.
Units that have committed to cease operations by Jan. 1, 2039, will have a numeric emission rate limit based on 40% natural gas-cofiring that they must meet by 2030.
FirstEnergy and American Electric Power-controlled coal-fired power plants in West Virginia have been slated as meeting the ends of their useful lives between 2035 and 2040. Spokespeople for FirstEnergy and AEP subsidiary Appalachian Power said Thursday they are reviewing the EPA rules to see how they may impact power plant operations.
Fifteen carbon capture and storage facilities were operating in the U.S. as of December 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The facilities had the capacity to capture 0.4% of the nation’s total annual carbon dioxide emissions, with an additional 121 carbon capture and storage facilities under construction or in development.
“What kind of so-called conservative demands that taxpayer dollars get wasted on something that they think does not work?” Jim Kotcon, chair of the West Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, said.
EPA’s track record bests critics on changing standards
Ceres, a Boston-headquartered sustainability advocacy nonprofit, found in a study published this month that the EPA’s forecasts of technological progress have a “strong track record.”
- Vehicle emission standards established under 1970 and 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act
- Scrubbers to reduce sulfur dioxide under 1970 and 1990 amendments to the law
- Selective catalytic reduction technology proving easier to install than expected in the early 2000s
- A 2011 proposal to reduce toxic air pollution from the power sector being met by 2017 for $7 billion less than the EPA’s initial $9.6 billion estimate
Ceres concluded regulatory design and incentives can lead to novel technological innovations, and that the EPA works closely with industry and stakeholder groups and includes flexibility in its standards to address legitimate industry concerns.
In 2014, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority that oversees bulk power system owners and operators, predicted the Obama-era EPA’s then-proposed Clean Power Plan to set limits on power plant pollution would be a problem.
“Developing suitable replacement generation resources to maintain adequate reserve margin levels may represent a significant reliability challenge, given the constrained time period for implementation,” the group said in a paper on the subject.
In a 2022 majority opinion prompted by a West Virginia-led coalition of 18 Republican-controlled states, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the EPA overstepped its bounds in planning under the Clean Power Plan, which never took effect, to restructure the nation’s electricity generation mix to transition from 38% to 27% coal by 2030.
But even after the Supreme Court had put the Clean Power Plan on hold following another West Virginia-led lawsuit, the U.S. far surpassed the plan’s coal reduction target.
Coal comprised just 21.8% of U.S. utility-scale electricity generation in 2021 — barely surpassing the 20.1% that came from renewables.
Coal plants set up to fail?
Whether carbon capture fails to advance to commercial scale under the EPA’s plan, environmental advocates say West Virginia already has failed through being captured by coal.
Coal comprised 91% of West Virginia’s electricity generation in 2021, far more than any other state.
State ratepayers faced a 90% climb in average residential electricity retail price from 2005 to 2020, per U.S. Energy Information Administration data. Only Michigan had a greater increase by percentage.
During Manchin’s news conference Thursday, he aimed his fire not at the coal industry but at President Joe Biden’s climate advisors. Their mistake, he said, was taking Biden prematurely down what he called “the primrose path.”
“I hope [Biden] wakes up soon enough to understand what damage they’re trying to do to America,” Manchin said. “They’ve lost before on the Clean Power Plan. They’re going to lose again on this.”
