The Trump administration’s new proposal for addressing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants will allow states to choose from a menu of options for making plants marginally more efficient.
Pennsylvania regulators and other officials say they liked the old plan just fine.
The rule released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday does away with the Obama-era Clean Power Plan’s broad ambitions for limiting power sector carbon dioxide emissions in favor of modest improvements that coal plants can adopt on-site.
Once, and if, the new Affordable Clean Energy rule is finalized, regulators in Pennsylvania and other states will have three years to come up with a plan to comply with it.
“We are disappointed in the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, which would have been a responsible, cost-effective means of addressing global climate change,” said Neil Shaderm, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
The state agency is reviewing the new proposal “to determine what steps Pennsylvania can take to continue our efforts to grow our energy economy and reduce emissions,” he said.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said he strongly opposes the new rule, which he said “will harm our environmental protection efforts in Pennsylvania and undermine the constitutional protections afforded to all Pennsylvanians.”
Mr. Shapiro has joined other Democratic state attorneys general in challenging the Trump administration’s previous efforts to weaken environmental rules.
The EPA expects carbon emissions from the nation’s 300 affected coal plants to be about 1 percent lower by 2030 under the Affordable Clean Energy rule compared to what they would have been without a rule. Under the Clean Power Plan, carbon emissions would have been 4 percent lower, EPA said.
The difference is relatively small because market forces — especially cheap natural gas and renewable energy — are the biggest factors driving coal out of the U.S. electricity mix, not regulations. Those trends are likely to continue.
Eleven power plants in Pennsylvania have shut down coal-fired generating units since 2010 and another three have converted to run on natural gas. Other coal plants have announced plans to retire or switch fuels.
“The draft rule is not alleviating market pressures, but it is ameliorating some regulatory pressure,” said Kevin Sunday, government affairs director for the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry.
Part of the proposal would change the standard of scrutiny for plant upgrades so that states can evaluate a plant’s emissions on an hourly basis, rather than an annual one.
Mr. Sunday said that change “makes a lot of sense” and is something the chamber would like to see applied for all industrial sectors as a way to lower the costs of adopting new technology.
But Rob Altenburg, director of the energy center at the environmental group PennFuture, said moving to an hourly standard means fewer plant upgrades will be considered “major” and therefore fewer facilities will be required to install top-of-the-line emissions controls, even if plants run more often and end up with higher total emissions each year.
Without a stronger federal baseline, he said, Pennsylvania may continue its trend of lowering power sector emissions, but “we will still be facing emissions from upwind states” that are unlikely to make similar improvements.
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: August 21, 2018, 9:16 p.m.
