EPA to promulgate greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants!
This is big news. The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama Administration is about to propose regulations on new power plants that would limit greenhouse gas emissions per kWh. Juliet Eilperin writes
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt [sic–should be megawatt-hour] of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt[-hour], meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt[-hour].
The article also describes how the older dirtier plants are already under pressure from the air toxic rules as well as cheap natural gas. Many existing plants will be retired because they are no longer economic to run, given these new regulations. And as recent economic analysis has shown, coal fired generation is actually costing us far more than alternatives when you count the costs of pollution to society (which until these new rules came into force weren’t being paid by the operators of coal plants, they were being paid mostly by old people and children hurt by coal related pollution).
Emission control rules like these pay for themselves many times over from society’s perspective, so all the gloom and doom raised by the pro-pollution forces about their dire economic consequences is just nonsense. We are already paying far more for electricity as a society than we need to, and by phasing out many coal power plants we’ll be REDUCING the cost of electricity to society. These regulations will be good for the economy AND good for the environment. For details on the unpaid external (pollution) costs of coal, see the references below.
Muller, Nicholas Z., Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus. 2011. “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy.” American Economic Review vol. 101, no. 5. August. pp. 1649–1675.
Epstein, Paul R., Jonathan J. Buonocore, Kevin Eckerle, Michael Hendryx, Benjamin M. Stout Iii, Richard Heinberg, Richard W. Clapp, Beverly May, Nancy L. Reinhart, Melissa M. Ahern, Samir K. Doshi, and Leslie Glustrom. 2011. “Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. vol. 1219, no. 1. February 17. pp. 73-98. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x…
