Some power sector officials urged EPA to retain its authority to regulate power plants by crafting a modest climate rule, exposing tensions over the agency’s plan to stop regulating the sector for carbon altogether.
The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, wrote in comments last week that the agency should issue “a final rule that will survive legal scrutiny and provide long term certainty to support the effective deployment of capital.”
It amounts to an endorsement of EPA’s less-favored Plan B for revoking the power plant climate rule enacted under former President Joe Biden. The agency’s preferred option is to kill the rule and employ a legal strategy to prevent it from ever being replaced — by this or any other administration. But that scenario has spurred concern among some utility sector leaders who say it could inject uncertainty into their investment decisions.
EEI pointed to a string of Supreme Court decisions that it said raises questions about EPA’s plan to leave power plants unregulated for climate pollution. The industry group, on the other hand, said the agency’s “alternative proposal” for regulating power plant carbon — which preserves the Biden-era standards for coal and new gas plants through 2030 — is “grounded in established law and well positioned to survive judicial scrutiny.”
