Leading Republicans on the U.S. Senate's energy and environment committees on Friday urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to thoroughly investigate whether the Biden administration's proposal to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants will destabilize the nation's electrical grid.
U.S. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who serve as their party's leaders on the senate's environment and energy committees, respectively, said in a letter to FERC commissioners that it's not doing enough to review the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposed power plant rule.
They noted that although FERC has responded to a similar request they made in June by scheduling a discussion about the EPA's proposed rule at its annual Reliability Technical Conference on Nov. 9, it must go further.
The senators admonished the commissioners to develop a robust administrative record and submit it to the EPA "in order to inform Congress, the commission, the EPA and the public of the facts and circumstances necessary to safeguard reliability of electric service."
"Unless the EPA withdraws or significantly revises its Proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0, the EPA will unnecessarily and significantly increase risks to electric reliability," Capito and Barrasso said in their letter. "It will also increase dramatically the costs of generating electric power and make electricity less affordable for American families."
The Clean Power Plan was the Obama administration's effort to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants; it was swept aside by the Trump administration, which passed its own version that the Biden administration is now attempting to replace.
Capito and Barrasso said that if FERC does not use the powers at its disposal "to dissuade" the EPA from finalizing its proposed rule, the commissioners "will bear at least partial responsibility for any blackouts and brownouts that occur as result of electric resource shortages that would be attributable to compliance with a final rule resembling the Proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0."
In May, the EPA proposed greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants, a crucial piece of the Biden administration's regulatory efforts to combat climate change and one observers had been watching for since the U.S. Supreme Court last year narrowed the federal government's authority under the Clean Air Act.
The proposal focuses on reducing power plants' carbon dioxide emissions through a variety of control methods, including carbon capture and storage, low greenhouse gas hydrogen co-firing and natural gas co-firing. New gas-fired combustion turbines, existing coal, oil and gas-fired steam generating units, and certain existing gas-fired combustion turbines would be subject to the new rule.
Close to 1.4 million public comments were filed in response to the proposal, representing a spectrum of perspectives from strongly against to strongly in favor.
Capito and Barrasso characterized the power plant rule in their letter as part of the Biden administration's intention "to remake the American power sector in order to meet the administration's publicly-stated climate goals."
"We intend to follow the record you develop and the extent to which the commission communicates that record to the EPA," the senators told FERC commissioners. "We expect you to develop the record with the utmost transparency and include input from all parties participating in the conference."
The EPA and FERC declined to comment Friday.