Organizations that manage, coordinate and monitor electricity service for 156 million Americans across 30 states are warning that the Biden-Harris administration’s power plant rule will be catastrophic for the nation’s grid. Four regional trade organizations (RTO), as they’re called, recently filed an amicus brief, also known as a friend of the court brief, in support of a multi-state lawsuit against the EPA over the rule.
The EPA released the rules in April. They require coal-fired power plants that will be operating past 2039 to begin implementing carbon-capture technologies in just eight years. New gas-fired power plants will also need to add the technologies, with those operating 40% of their annual capacity or more to add carbon capture starting in 2032.
Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, co-founder and researchers with Always On Energy Research, performed an analysis on behalf of the North Dakota Transmission Authority on the impacts the rules would have on the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), an RTO that covers a swath of the center of the U.S.
The researchers say they found a number of problems. The EPA grossly overestimated the ability of intermittent wind and solar to deliver reliable electricity during peak demand periods, according to the analysis, and it also found the agency didn’t perform any reliability analysis on the rules. The result would be blackouts lasting days in some cases.
The RTOs’ amicus brief points out these same problems. It argues that the EPA’s timeline is too short. The requirements for compliance assume feasibility of carbon capture technology that has not been “adequately demonstrated,” the RTOs explain, and the rules would result in vast retirements of coal-fired power plants while preventing investments in baseload generators, such as natural gas-fired power plants, to replace the lost capacity. The RTOs also noted that the EPA performed no reliability operational assessments. Baseload generation refers to the minimum level of constant power supply that a utility or power grid must produce to meet the continuous and consistent demand for electricity.
“It would be absolutely devastating for the grid,” Rolling told Just the News.