Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that it will repeal the agency’s Endangerment Finding, a 2009 declaration originally intended to address greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks that later became the justification for some of the agency’s most far reaching regulations for power plants. In response, America’s Power President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth released the following statement:
“EPA’s Endangerment Finding has been used as the basis for regulations that threaten the reliability of our nation’s electric grid. These regulations, such as President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and President Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, were designed to force the premature retirement of coal power plants across the U.S. and increase our nation’s reliance on electricity sources that are not as reliable as coal.
“Utilities have announced plans to retire more than 55,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation over the next five years. Reversing these retirement decisions could help offset the need to build new, more expensive electricity sources and prevent the loss of reliability attributes, such as fuel security, that the coal fleet provides.
“Forcing the retirement of America’s coal fleet and jeopardizing our electricity supply makes no sense because the U.S. coal fleet is responsible for just 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions while China and India’s emissions account for nearly 40%. The U.S. must take advantage of our coal assets, just as our global competitors are relying on coal to fuel their own economic growth.
“Overturning bad EPA regulations is necessary but not sufficient. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, Congress, state utility commissions, and grid operators must also take action to prevent the closure of more coal power plants.”