Power Plant Regulation and the Rhetoric of Reliability

This post was written by Thomas O. McGarity and Emily Hammond Meazell. The coal-fired power plant industry has always fought air-emissions standards enacted pursuant to the Clean Air Act (CAA). But the industry has increasingly raised the specter of reliability problems, arguing that EPA's recent "tsunami" of regulations will cause a "train wreck," forcing companies to retire aging plants so rapidly that lost capacity will outpace the development of new sources. The result, they maintain, will be such an unmanageable strain on the regional grids that they will have to impose brownouts and blackouts as a consequence. The overheated rhetoric of reliability threatens to overwhelm and run aground meaningful debate about environmental regulation, climate change, and the appropriate mix of fuels for generating electricity. There is no doubt that reliability is a critical concern - but it is being misused to obscure the fact that many updates to our power supply are necessary, achievable, and taking place already as a result of both environmental regulation and market forces. The Rhetoric Facing proposed new regulations under the CAA, the industry attempted to play the reliability trump card in several rulemaking proceedings, including EPA's "Cross-State" rule governing interstate transport of power plant pollutants, EPA's "Utility MACT" rule limiting emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from power plants, and EPA's greenhouse gas rules requiring power plants to install the "best available control technology" (BACT) in new power plants and modifications of existing power plants. Coal interests have even used reliability concerns in their efforts to persuade Congress and the Bush and Obama Administrations to force EPA to terminate enforcement actions against power plants that unlawfully modified their facilities without undergoing "new source review" and installing BACT.