‘Inevitable And Foreseeable’: Grid Operators Beg Court To Nix EPA Rules To Save Electricity System From Collapse
Nick Pope
Contributor
September 17, 2024
The Biden-Harris administration says that its stringent power plant rules won’t harm long-term power reliability, but four grid operators stated the exact opposite in a legal brief filed Friday.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its aggressive emissions rules for America’s power plants in April, saying at the time that the regulations would “improve public health without disrupting the delivery of reliable electricity.” However, four major regional grid operators argued the exact opposite in an amicus brief filed in support of red states’ legal challenge against the rule, stating explicitly that the rules will jeopardize Americans’ ability to reliably secure sufficient amounts of power if they are enforced as is.
“Their proffered brief outlines in detail that without additional modification, the compliance timelines and related provisions of the Rule are not workable and are destined to trigger an acceleration in the pace of premature retirements of electric generation units that possess critical reliability attributes at the very time when such generation is needed to support ever-increasing electricity demand because of the growth of the digital economy and the need to ensure adequate back-up generation to support an increasing amount of intermittent renewable generation,” the grid operators wrote in their amicus brief. “Such inevitable and foreseeable premature retirement decisions resulting from the Rule’s timelines will substantially strain each of the Joint [independent system operators’] / [regional transmission
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/17/epa-power-plant-rules-grid-operators-reliability/
