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Home – Energy & Climate Change Policy News – The EPA Just Removed a Billion-Dollar Barrier to Reliable Power

The EPA Just Removed a Billion-Dollar Barrier to Reliable Power

Energy deregulation is not simply about eliminating rules. It is about removing regulations that exceed statutory authority, impose overly burdensome costs, and make it harder for Americans to access affordable and reliable power, often with little or no environmental benefit.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of the 2024 greenhouse gas standards for power plants does exactly that, according to the EPA. 

After the Supreme Court rejected the Clean Power Plan, arguing that agencies do not have the authority to mandate generation switching under the Clean Air Act, the Biden EPA issued this rule as an alternative approach.

 Instead of directly requiring utilities to shift generation away from coal and natural gas plants, the rule imposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) based standards on many existing and new power plants. According to the EPA’s 2024 rule, coal plants planning long-term operations and new baseload natural gas plants would have been required to achieve roughly 90% carbon dioxide reductions through CCS by 2032. 

There is ongoing litigation over whether that approach is lawful and whether CCS is adequately demonstrated for the plants covered by the rule. But even apart from that legal question, the rule has the same basic problem as the original, struck-down Clean Power Plan. It still uses federal regulation to push generation........

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