Breaking: Obama administration moving ahead with limits on emissions from power plants [View all]

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Breaking: Obama administration moving ahead with limits on emissions from power plants

by VL Baker

A year after a plan by President Obama to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants set off angry opposition, the New York Times breaks the news that the administration will announce on Friday that it is pressing ahead with enacting the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies.

The proposed regulations, to be announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year. The regulations are certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s “war on coal.”

In her speech, Ms. McCarthy will unveil the agency’s proposal to limit new gas-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt hour and new coal plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to administration officials who were briefed on the agency’s plans. Industry officials say the average advanced coal plant currently emits about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour.

“New power plants, both natural gas and coal-fired, can minimize their carbon emissions by taking advantage of modern technologies,” Ms. McCarthy will say Friday, according to her prepared remarks. “Simply put, these standards represent the cleanest standards we’ve put forth for new natural gas plants and new coal plants.”

Great news that administration is ready to fight opposition, which is expected from the republicans and fuel industry supporters.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/20/1240127/-Breaking-Obama-administration-moving-ahead-with-limits-on-emissions-from-power-plants

EPA chief tells Grist what coal will have to do to survive in a “carbon-constrained” future

By Lisa Hymas

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Under draft rules being announced this morning, new coal power plants will have to be a whole lot cleaner than the ones we’ve got today. In fact, thanks also to market conditions, new coal plants might not get built at all. Perhaps most important, the draft rules lay the foundation for a bigger move to cut emissions from already-existing coal-fired power plants, a plan due to be unveiled in June 2014.

In an interview with Grist, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said the proposed regulations for new plants are not intended to push coal out of the energy mix. Still, the standards are pretty strict. The EPA had released an earlier version of them in March of last year, then decided to rework them, but this new set of regs still takes a hard line with coal.

The proposal calls for any coal power plants built in the future to emit under 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour — considerably less than coal plants emit today, which is about 1,800 pounds on average. The rules are more stringent than some had expected; observers had been saying that they might come in at 1,300 or 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour. (The draft rules set a limit for natural-gas plants, too — 1,000 pounds for large facilities — but new gas plants already pollute less than that. Some advocates had hoped the EPA would push the gas standard down to 800 pounds per megawatt-hour.)

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These new rules are the first big piece of the climate plan President Obama laid out in a speech in June, one of the steps the administration can take without cooperation from Congress.

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http://grist.org/climate-energy/epa-chief-tells-grist-what-coal-will-have-to-do-to-survive-in-a-carbon-constrained-future/