A top Environmental Protection Agency official expressed confidence Friday that a power-plant emissions rule that a court has put on hold will survive a legal challenge from several states and utilities, including Texas and Dallas-based Luminant Generation Co.
EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which would reduce interstate transport of certain pollution from power plants, an “extraordinarily well-researched rule” that will save lives and reduce diseases at an affordable cost.
“We believe it will prevail and will deliver those public-health protections,” McCarthy told a forum in Washington sponsored by NDN, a progressive think tank.
The rule would require electric-generating plants in 28 mostly Eastern states including Texas to cut particulate- and ozone-forming emissions that can drift to downwind states, making it harder for them to achieve U.S. air standards for those pollutants. In late December a federal appeals court agreed to temporarily block the January implementation of the rule’s first phase to assess the regulation’s merits.
McCarthy said her confidence grew this week when the Washington-based court hearing the case set a timetable for reviewing litigants’ petitions that was much quicker than what EPA requested.
“They clearly sent us a signal that they want to look at the merits quickly, recognizing that every month that goes by we are losing health benefits associated with this rule and we need the health benefits restored,” McCarthy said.
Starting in 2014, the original time for complete implementation, the rule would result in the prevention of up to 34,000 premature deaths a year and deliver annual health benefits of up to $280 billion versus costs of less than $1 billion, EPA says.
Luminant had planned to shutter two coal-fired generating units to comply with the rule but decided to keep operating them after the court stayed the rule.
Texas politicians contend that rule would have raised the risk of blackouts on the state’s main grid, whose operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, nearly ordered them twice during last summer’s record drought and heat wave. With Luminant’s units the grid should meet its power-reserves target, according to ERCOT — barring an EPA court victory that leads to the rule’s implementation this summer and causes the company to decide again to idle its units.
The EPA has long said it has special tools it can use to stop possible local-reliability threats in their tracks.
Environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and some generating companies, including Chicago-based Exelon Corp. and Houston-based Calpine Corp., have said power companies had plenty of time to prepare for rules that they knew were coming.
