The agency’s top power grid regulator, Mark Christie, said in a letter to lawmakers this week that he is deeply concerned that the Biden administration’s aggressive regulation of power plants will severely reduce energy reliability.
Christie, who serves on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), warned that power plant rules finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in April could be “devastating” for the United States if they go into effect. letter The three Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The E.P.A. RulesThe bill, which is being challenged in court by Republican state attorneys general and major utility industry groups, would require existing coal-fired power plants to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology by 2032 if they want to continue operating beyond 2039, and would also require certain new natural gas plants to do so. Slash Reduce emissions by 90% by 2032.
“If EPA’s new power plant rules survive court challenges, they will force the retirement of nearly all remaining coal-fired power plants and prevent the construction of critically needed new combined cycle baseload gas power plants,” Christie said in the letter. “The loss of critically needed dispatchable generating resources would be devastating. There is little FERC can do to reverse the effects of EPA’s power plant rules. FERC and state regulators responsible for resource adequacy in their states should work to mitigate the negative impacts of these rules on reliability and consumer costs. But we want to emphasize that when critically needed power plants are retired, they are gone.” (Related: Dozens of energy groups urge Congress to repeal Biden’s green power plant rules)
Mark Christie’s letter by Nick Pope On Scribd
In a letter responding to Republican lawmakers who had sent questions about the EPA proposal, Christie also strongly suggested that the CCS requirements in EPA regulations were not feasible.
“The overwhelming weight of expert evidence indicates that a 90% carbon capture standard applied to gas- and coal-fired generating units is technically and commercially unfeasible,” Christie wrote. “To my knowledge, there are no generating units commercially successful in energy or capacity markets today that meet such an unrealistic standard.”
Christie also stressed that FERC cannot simply whimsically order decommissioned facilities back into service if needed in the future.
Power grid experts have previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that a CCS mandate is not realistic and that the EPA rule would undermine grid reliability if enacted. The Biden administration is also pushing policies that will boost electricity demand in the coming years, including an electric vehicle “mandate” and widespread electrification, a trend driven in part by data centers being built to support artificial intelligence (AI) products.
Christie has warned that future blackouts and brownouts could occur if the U.S. continues to retire reliable fossil fuel-fired generating capacity faster than unreliable renewable energy can come online to replace it, telling Congress in June 2023 that if the trend toward power shortages continues, “we could be heading toward very dire consequences.”
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that severer-than-normal summer and winter weather is already increasing the risk of power shortages across large swaths of the country.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As an independent, nonpartisan news service, all content produced by the Daily Caller News Foundation is available free of charge to any legitimate news publisher with a large readership. All republished articles must include our logo, reporter byline, and affiliation with the DCNF. If you have any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact us at licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
