(Click here for an interactive version of the map above showing brief details for each coal plant.)
The Biden-Harris administration on Thursday released its final rules to curb emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants. This will force electricity-generating plants fueled by coal to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2039 or shut down. That is a year earlier than the draft version of the rules. The rules are authorized by provisions of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That doesn’t mean Republicans won’t line up with fossil fuel companies to contest the rules in court.
If the change stands up to the inevitable litigation, it will mean the end of the line for coal-fired plants that 25 years ago generated 52% of America’s electricity. Last year this had fallen to just 16%, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, with 382 coal plants having been shut down over the preceding two decades, leaving 148 still in operation. Currently, coal generates 19% of annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that there are some 42,000 jobs linked directly to coal mining today, down from 73,000 in 2014.
Said President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi: “This year, the United States is projected to build more new electric generation capacity than we have in two decades—and 96% of that will be clean. President Biden’s leadership has not only sparked an unprecedented expansion in clean electricity generation, his leadership has also launched an American manufacturing renaissance. America is now a magnet for private investment, with hundreds of billions of dollars committed and 270,000 new clean energy jobs created. This is how we win the future, by harnessing new technologies to grow our economy, deliver environmental justice, and save the planet for future generations.”
Some provisions from the rule announced today:
- A final rule for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants that would ensure that all coal-fired plants that plan to run in the long-term and all new baseload gas-fired plants control 90 percent of their carbon pollution.
- A final rule strengthening and updating the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal-fired power plants, tightening the emissions standard for toxic metals by 67 percent and finalizing a 70 percent reduction in the emissions standard for mercury from existing lignite-fired sources.
- A final rule to reduce pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired power plants by more than 660 million pounds per year, ensuring cleaner water for affected communities, including communities with environmental justice concerns that are disproportionately impacted.
- A final rule that will require the safe management of coal ash that is placed in areas that were unregulated at the federal level until now, including at previously used disposal areas that may leak and contaminate groundwater.
The EPA estimates the new rules would eliminate 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide between now and 2047. The cost of complying, according to the EPA, would run $19 billion over that period. But that’s peanuts compared with the $270 billion in economic benefits EPA says will be gained during the same time period. The benefits from not pumping that carbon into the atmosphere could mean a reduction of a whole range of climate change impacts, from wildfires to droughts, as well as soaring commodity prices.
Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport at The New York Times report:
The E.P.A. expects the regulation would also prevent other pollutants, such as soot, from escaping into the air, resulting in $120 billion in public health benefits between now and 2047. In 2035 alone, the E.P.A. projects that the rule will prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360,000 asthma attacks, 48,000 school absence days and 57,000 lost workdays.
“Today is a good day for public health, particularly kids’ health,” said Harold Wimmer, president and chief executive of the American Lung Association. [...]
“This barrage of new E.P.A. rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” said Jim Matheson, chief executive officer of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which supplies electricity to many of the nation’s rural and suburban communities. “It undermines electric reliability and poses grave consequences for an already stressed electric grid. ”
Shutting down coal operations requires replacing them with clean energy sources to meet electricity demand, which has been rising for the first time in decades. There has been a deluge of proposed clean projects, including those noted by Ali Zaidi. Getting those projects approved for connecting to the nation’s privately owned electrical grid, however, has been a serious obstacle to this clean energy replacement.
From when an electricity-generating project using any energy source is proposed to when it gets connected can sometimes be a decade. Currently, according to the Berkeley Lab, there are 2,600 gigawatts of proposed solar and wind projects and energy storage capacity now in an interconnection backlog. For comparison, total U.S. generating capacity from all energy sources is 1,160 gigawatts. So the backlog is no small matter.
Consequently, completing an effort stretching across several administrations, the Biden White House announced along with its coal-killing rule on Thursday the creation of a one-stop shop for federal permitting of transmission lines. This, it is hoped, will help cut through the patchwork of state regulatory controls that has stalled new and upgraded power lines from being built. The Department of Energy will be the lead of nine agencies that deal with permitting transmission lines.
A year ago, the congressional debt ceiling deal didn’t do anything substantive about accelerating power line construction, but it did require the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to study the transmission issue and come up with recommendations by January 2025. It’s said that ordering a study is often just a call for building another shelf. But maybe this time will be different. At any rate, the NAER should have a good head start given that the Department of Energy published its 191-page draft of the National Transmission Needs Study report in February 2023.