Energy

‘Catastrophic’: Top Grid Official Sounds The Alarm On Biden’s Sweeping Power Plant Rules

Official White House Photo by Oliver Contreras

Mark Christie, a top power grid regulator, is deeply concerned that the Biden administration’s aggressive power plant regulations will severely diminish energy reliability, he wrote in a letter to lawmakers this week.

Christie, who serves as a commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), warned that the power plant rules finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in April could be “catastrophic” for the U.S. if they come into effect, according to his letter to three Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The EPA’s regulations, which have been challenged in court by Republican state attorneys general and a top utility trade group, will require existing coal plants to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to capture 90% of their emissions by 2032 if they want to stay operate beyond 2039, and certain new natural gas plants will also have to slash their emissions by 90% by 2032.

“If the EPA’s new power plant rule survives court challenge, it will force the retirements of nearly all remaining coal generation plants and will prevent the construction of vitally needed new combined-cycle baseload gas generation,” Christie wrote in his letter. “This loss of vitally needed dispatchable generation resources will be catastrophic. There is very little FERC can do to reverse the effects of the EPA’s power plant regulation. FERC, as well as state regulators, who are responsible for resource adequacy in their states, will have to attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of the rule on reliability and consumer costs. I emphasize, however, that once critically needed power plants retire, they are gone.”

Mark Christie Letter by Nick Pope on Scribd

Christie also suggested strongly that the CCS requirements within the EPA regulations are not feasible in his letter, which he wrote in response to Republican lawmakers who had sent him questions about the EPA’s proposal.

“The overwhelming weight of the expert evidence indicates that a 90% carbon capture standard applied to generation units fueled by gas or coal is neither technically nor commercially feasible,” Christie wrote. “I am not aware of any generating units that are commercially successful in energy or capacity markets today that have met such an unrealistic standard.”

Christie further emphasized that FERC cannot simply order retired capacity to come back online on a whim if it is needed in the future.

Power grid experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the CCS mandate is not realistic, and that the EPA’s rules will harm grid reliability if enacted. The Biden administration has also pursued policies — including an electric vehicle “mandate” and broad electrification — that will drive up electricity demand in the coming years, a trend that is also being driven in part by data centers being built to sustain artificial intelligence (AI) products.

Christie has raised the alarm about the potential for blackouts and brownouts occurring in the future if the U.S. continues to retire reliable fossil fuel-fired capacity at a faster rate than intermittent renewables can come online as replacements, telling Congress in June 2o23 that “we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences” if the trend toward a power shortfall continues.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has warned that large swaths of the country are already at elevated risk of power shortages under stronger-than-usual summer and winter conditions.

The EPA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.