NICK POPE
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A massive trade group for utility companies is reportedly poised to sue the Biden administration over one of its most ambitious climate policies, according to E&E News.
The Edison Electric Institute (EEI) — a trade group that represents all investor-owned utility companies in the U.S. — will soon file a legal challenge against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized regulations for power plants, according to E&E News, which cited four unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter. The trade association did not sue the Obama administration when it promulgated its similar and since-overruled Clean Power Plan, but it is now taking a more confrontational posture to battle the Biden administration’s power plant rules.
The EPA finalized the regulations in question in April; the rules effectively require existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants to use costly carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to control 90% of emissions by 2032 if plant operators want to keep the covered facilities online past 2039, according to the agency. EEI reportedly plans to angle its lawsuit around the EPA’s reliance on CCS to meet emissions reductions targets, according to E&E News. (RELATED: ‘The Swamp Is Getting Deeper’: EPA Awards Billions From Biden’s Landmark Climate Bill To Orgs Loaded With Dem Insiders)
A spokesperson for EEI indicated that a decision about a lawsuit has not yet been made.
“EEI and our member companies continue our efforts to evaluate EPA’s final power plant rules and their impact on electricity customers,” a spokesperson for EEI told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We take all potential litigation decisions seriously and are still considering our options.”
Critics of the EPA’s power plant regulations — a group that includes some Biden administration officials — have pointed out that CCS is not close to ready to play the major role in the U.S. power grid that the agency envisions. Technologically, CCS is still in its early stages and not yet energy efficient, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, while other challenges, such as a major permitting backlog, persist.
“While we appreciate and support EPA’s work to develop a clear, continued path for the transition to cleaner resources, we are disappointed that the agency did not address the concerns we raised about carbon capture and storage,” EEI President and CEO Dan Brouillette said of the final regulations when they were made public in late April. “CCS is not yet ready for full-scale, economy-wide deployment, nor is there sufficient time to permit, finance, and build the CCS infrastructure needed for compliance by 2032.”
EEI officials reportedly made the decision to sue on Thursday, but the organization has yet to formally announce that it is taking the federal government to court. More than two dozen Republican state attorneys general have already filed their own lawsuit against the rules.
The administration has hailed the rules as a major step toward decarbonizing the American power grid and wider economy in the coming decades, both of which are key goals of the Biden administration’s sweeping climate agenda. The agency has expressed confidence that the rules will be able to withstand incoming legal challenges and will not impact grid reliability when enacted, but power grid experts previously told the DCNF that the new policies are probably beyond the agency’s statutory authority and also likely to diminish grid reliability in the long-term.
EPA declined to comment, citing its policy of not weighing in on pending litigation.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comment from EEI.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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I’m surprised more Americans don’t go in for law. It’s obviously a very lucrative profession especially now they have the possibility of hooking ‘climate change’ up to just about anything imaginable. And they do have vivid imaginations. That migraine…. climate change. Lost your wallet? Climate change did it.
Should one feel some sympathy with the judges who have to sit through it?
Addressing climate change and mental health is also a field ripe for lucrative employment, e.g., see invitation to zoom call below.
https://cires.colorado.edu/events/intersection-climate-change-and-mental-health
Why the hell is the EEI licking the boots of the EPA? Nobody with a lick of sense should “appreciate” stupid policies that will wreck the economy chasing non-solutions to an imaginary problem.
nailed it!
I detest book lickers. Got a lot of them in forestry.
EEI’s members are (mostly) regulated utilities. Regulated utilities do what their regulators require and pay them to do, which in many states is to support Climate Alarmism.
I am glad about any and all suits against this monstrosity of a regulation, but it seems judges’ eyes tend to glaze over when presented with the technical details of the environmental cases. Thus, the Chevron decision. That may go away, but the courts will then be left with the task of deciding cases on the merits.
But that’s no fun. They don’t get to use their imaginations.
Cheapest and most efficient CCS is trees. If the generation facility maintained a forest of sufficient acreage to sink all annual emissions, the forest would become the CCS device.
But the premise behind it is bs. There’s no reason for carbon capture.
Is it not telling that climatists never hold mass tree plantings? It is not really about trees or carbon or the climate now is it? It is about power money and control of other people.
💯
Ocean fertilization would be cheaper and potentially greater, and would have the side benefit of increasing the fish stocks – a side benefit that everyone can agree is an actual benefit, unlike CCS and stopping climate change – if climate change was actually real, meaning caused by humans and likely to continue in spite of all the other, larger factors, should we stop it?
Do we have the moral right to stop the world turning back into the warm paradise it was until geologically recently?
From the article:”“While we appreciate and support EPA’s work to develop a clear, continued path for the transition..”
Here in lies the biggest problem. The organization is OK with doing the transition and they support the EPA they just want it slower or different manner.
The transition is based on the faulty idea that CO2 causes the earth to warm. The EEI supports this faulty idea.
Maybe. An alternative perspective is they were just doing the nice nice to not inflame the contest.
Like most cowards, they just want to get eaten last.
Assuming they survive through this period of irrationality, they’ll tell anyone who will listen about how bravely they fought.
Team Biden want to get these regulations going so it’s harder for Trump to rollback Biden’s policies.
Remember, much of Trump’s success came from simply reversing Obama’s policies. Executive Orders are relatively easy to reverse while administrative law must be followed when undoing agency rule and regulations.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/06/donald-trump-joe-biden-congressional-review-act-regulations/
You people simply don’t understand experiments for noble causes-
AEMO issued ‘cry for help’ to government over energy reliability gaps (msn.com)
and the bigger the noble cause the bigger the experiment has to be.
I expect someone, be it a private industry group like EEI, or a bunch of red states getting together to sue the EPA over the very notion of “carbon is a pollutant”, which is a definition that is not in the Clean Air Act and was clearly not intended to be a pollutant at the time (the most recent amendments being way back in 1990). An earlier Supreme Court accepted the premise of carbon as a pollutant, but I rather expect the current SCOTUS to take a different view, using the same rationale used to overturn EPA rules on wetlands – i.e., that Congress did not intend for that overreach to occur. Of course, such a ruling would completely gut the entire Federal climate change regulatory system.
Maybe this is the case that finally bursts the warmunist’s regulatory bubble.
“will not affect grid reliability”. WTF are these people smokng. Anyone with half a brain knows solar works less than one half the time. And wind is only able to generate electricity less than 40% on an annual basis. Basing base load on weather is a road to caveman status.
Barryjo,
people in general and far too many with authority are under the mistaken impression that wind and solar, intermittency apart, are just the same as conventional generators and that there is no problem in replacing conventional with renewables.
Until they learn and understand about all the very real technical problems with renewables government etc will keep pushing them.
> “EPA declined to comment, citing its policy of not weighing in on pending litigation.”
There is no pending litigation. Classic bureaucratic obfuscation.
Just like the “carbon dioxide is a pollutant” the EPA is going to ignore the law and their mandate and do what they want.
Government completely out of control, get the government out of the energy business.
Well Gummint does like to dig holes but once they have we do require them to be filled in again-
NSW secures two-year extension to Eraring Power Station | Watch (msn.com)
Unfortunately we have to pay both ways but don’t you worry that will all be commercial-in-confidence.