Greenpeace protests against UK coal plant

By Reuters


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The environmental campaign group Greenpeace staged protests for climate change at the power station Kingsnorth, where E.ON plans to build one of Britain's first new coal-fired power generators in decades.

Dozens of activists on board nine boats, including Greenpeace's famous Rainbow Warrior, landed at the site in Kent in eastern England, displaying images of climate disasters at the existing plant in an attempt to stop the construction.

"Coal is the most climate-wrecking form of electricity generation yet invented," Ben Stewart from Greenpace was quoted as saying at the site.

"A new Kingsnorth would... destroy any chance we have of persuading China and India to stop building coal plants."

While countries around the world try to slash greenhouse gas emissions to alleviate climate change, developing countries such as China and India are building a new fleet of coal plants.

E.ON, headquartered in Germany, wants to replace its existing 1,940 megawatt coal-fired-plant with what it calls two new cleaner coal units.

Britain's new Energy and Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, is expected to decide within the next few months whether to allow the plant.

In restating its position, E.ON said in a statement: "We believe cleaner coal has an important role to play as part of a diverse range of power generation in UK."

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From smart meters to big batteries, co-ops emerge as clean grid laboratories

Minnesota Electric Cooperatives are driving grid innovation with smart meters, time-of-use pricing, demand response, and energy storage, including iron-air batteries, to manage peak loads, integrate wind and solar, and cut costs for rural members.

 

Key Points

Member-owned utilities piloting load management, meters, and storage to integrate wind and solar, cutting peak demand.

✅ Time-of-use pricing pilots lower bills and shift peak load.

✅ Iron-air battery tests add multi-day, low-cost energy storage.

✅ Smart meters enable demand response across rural co-ops.

 

Minnesota electric cooperatives have quietly emerged as laboratories for clean grid innovation, outpacing investor-owned utilities on smart meter installations, time-based pricing pilots, and experimental battery storage solutions.

“Co-ops have innovation in their DNA,” said David Ranallo, a spokesperson for Great River Energy, a generation and distribution cooperative that supplies power to 28 member utilities — making it one of the state’s largest co-op players.

Minnesota farmers helped pioneer the electric co-op model more than a century ago, similar to modern community-generated green electricity initiatives, pooling resources to build power lines, transformers and other equipment to deliver power to rural parts of the state. Today, 44 member-owned electric co-ops serve about 1.7 million rural and suburban customers and supply almost a quarter of the state’s electricity.

Co-op utilities have by many measures lagged on clean energy. Many still rely on electricity from coal-fired power plants. They’ve used political clout with rural lawmakers to oppose new pollution regulations and climate legislation, and some have tried to levy steep fees on customers who install solar panels.

Where they are emerging as innovators is with new models and technology for managing electric grid loads — from load-shifting water heaters to a giant experimental battery made of iron. The programs are saving customers money by delaying the need for expensive new infrastructure, and also showing ways to unlock more value from cheap but variable wind and solar power.

Unlike investor-owned utilities, “we have no incentive to invest in new generation,” said Darrick Moe, executive director of the Minnesota Rural Electric Association. Curbing peak energy demand has a direct financial benefit for members.

Minnesota electric cooperatives have launched dozens of programs, such as the South Metro solar project, in recent years aimed at reducing energy use and peak loads, in particular. They include:

Cost calculations are the primary driver for electric cooperatives’ recent experimentation, and a lighter regulatory structure and evolving electricity market reforms have allowed them to act more quickly than for-profit utilities.

“Co-ops and [municipal utilities] can act a lot more nimbly compared to investor-owned utilities … which have to go through years of proceedings and discussions about cost-recovery,” said Gabe Chan, a University of Minnesota associate professor who has researched electric co-ops extensively. Often, approval from a local board is all that’s required to launch a venture.

Great River Energy’s programs, which are rebranded and sold through member co-ops, yielded more than 101 million kilowatt-hours of savings last year — enough to power 9,500 homes for a year.

Beyond lowering costs for participants and customers at large, the energy-saving and behavior-changing programs sometimes end up being cited as case studies by larger utilities considering similar offerings. Advocates supporting a proposal by the city of Minneapolis and CenterPoint Energy to allow residents to pay for energy efficiency improvements on their utility bills through distributed energy rebates used several examples from cooperatives.

Despite the pace of innovation on load management, electric cooperatives have been relatively slow to transition from coal-fired power. More than half of Great River Energy’s electricity came from coal last year, and Dairyland Power, another major power wholesaler for Minnesota co-ops, generated 70% of its energy from coal. Meanwhile, Xcel Energy, the state’s largest investor-owned utility, has already reduced coal to about 20% of its energy mix.

The transition to cleaner power for some co-ops has been slowed by long-term contracts with power suppliers that have locked them into dirty power. Others have also been stalled by management or boards that have been resistant to change. John Farrell, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Energy Democracy program, said generalizing co-ops is difficult. 

“We’ve seen some co-ops that have got 75-year contracts for coal, that are invested in coal mines and using their newsletter to deny climate change,” he said. “Then you see a lot of them doing really amazing things like creating energy storage systems … and load balancing [programs], because they are unique and locally managed and can have that freedom to experiment without having to go through a regulatory process.”

Great River Energy, for its part, says it intends to reach 54% renewable generation by 2025, while some communities, like Frisco, Colorado, are targeting 100% clean electricity by specific dates. Its members recently voted to sell North Dakota’s largest coal plant, but the arrangement involves members continuing to buy power from the new owners for another decade.

The cooperative’s path to clean power could become clearer if its experimental iron-air battery project is successful. The project, the first of its kind in the country, is expected to be completed by 2023.

 

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How Canada can capitalize on U.S. auto sector's abrupt pivot to electric vehicles

Canadian EV Manufacturing is accelerating with GM, Ford, and Project Arrow, integrating cross-border supply chains, battery production, rare-earths like lithium and cobalt, autonomous tech, and home charging to drive clean mobility and decarbonization.

 

Key Points

Canadian EV manufacturing spans electric and autonomous vehicles, domestic batteries, and integrated US-Canada trade.

✅ GM and Ford retool plants for EVs and autonomous production

✅ Project Arrow showcases Canadian zero-emission supply capabilities

✅ Lithium, cobalt, and battery hubs target cross-border resilience

 

The storied North American automotive industry, the ultimate showcase of Canada’s high-tensile trade ties with the United States and emerging Canada-U.S. collaboration on EVs momentum, is about to navigate a dramatic hairpin turn.

But as the Big Three veer into the all-electric, autonomous era, some Canadians want to seize the moment and take the wheel.

“There’s a long shadow between the promise and the execution, but all the pieces are there,” says Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association.

“We went from a marriage on the rocks to one that both partners are committed to. It could be the best second chapter ever.”

Volpe is referring specifically to GM, which announced late last month an ambitious plan to convert its entire portfolio of vehicles to an all-electric platform by 2035.

But that decision is just part of a cascading transformation across the industry, marking an EV inflection point with existential ramifications for one of the most tightly integrated cross-border manufacturing and supply-chain relationships in the world.

China is already working hard to become the “source of a new way” to power vehicles, President Joe Biden warned last week.

“We just have to step up.”

Canada has both the resources and expertise to do the same, says Volpe, whose ambitious Project Arrow concept — a homegrown zero-emissions vehicle named for the 1950s-era Avro interceptor jet — is designed to showcase exactly that, as recent EV assembly deals in Canada underscore.

“We’re going to prove to the market, we’re going to prove to the (manufacturers) around the planet, that everything that goes into your zero-emission vehicle can be made or sourced here in Canada,” he says.

“If somebody wants to bring what we did over the line and make 100,000 of them a year, I’ll hand it to them.”

GM earned the ire of Canadian auto workers in 2018 by announcing the closure of its assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont. It later resurrected the facility with a $170-million investment to retool it for autonomous vehicles.

“It was, ‘You closed Oshawa, how dare you?’ And I was one of the ‘How dare you’ people,” Volpe says.

“Well, now that they’ve reopened Oshawa, you sit there and you open your eyes to the commitment that General Motors made.”

Ford, too, has entered the fray, promising $1.8 billion to retool its sprawling landmark facility in Oakville, Ont., to build EVs.

It’s a leap of faith of sorts, considering what market experts say is ongoing consumer doubt about EVs and EV supply shortages that drive wait times.

“Range anxiety” — the persistent fear of a depleted battery at the side of the road — remains a major concern, even though it’s less of a problem than most people think.

Consulting firm Deloitte Canada, which has been tracking automotive consumer trends for more than a decade, found three-quarters of future EV buyers it surveyed planned to charge their vehicles at home overnight.

“The difference between what is a perceived issue in a consumer’s mind and what is an actual issue is actually quite negligible,” Ryan Robinson, Deloitte’s automotive research leader, says in an interview.

“It’s still an issue, full stop, and that’s something that the industry is going to have to contend with.”

So, too, is price, especially with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic still a long way off. Deloitte’s latest survey, released last month, found 45 per cent of future buyers in Canada hope to spend less than $35,000 — a tall order when most base electric-vehicle models hover between $40,000 and $45,000.

“You put all of that together and there’s still, despite the electric-car revolution hype, some major challenges that a lot of stakeholders that touch the automotive industry face,” Robinson says.

“It’s not just government, it’s not just automakers, but there are a variety of stakeholders that have a role to play in making sure that Canadians are ready to make the transition over to electric mobility.”

With protectionism no longer a dirty word in the United States and Biden promising to prioritize American workers and suppliers, the Canadian government’s job remains the same as it ever was: making sure the U.S. understands Canada’s mission-critical role in its own economic priorities.

“We’re both going to be better off on both sides of the border, as we have been in the past, if we orient ourselves toward this global competition as one force,” says Gerald Butts, vice-chairman of the political-risk consultancy Eurasia Group and a former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“It served us extraordinarily well in the past … and I have no reason to believe it won’t serve us well in the future.”

Last month, GM announced a billion-dollar plan to build its new all-electric BrightDrop EV600 van in Ingersoll, Ont., at Canada’s first large-scale EV manufacturing plant for delivery vehicles.

That investment, Volpe says, assumes Canada will take the steps necessary to help build a homegrown battery industry — with projects such as a new Niagara-region battery plant pointing the way — drawing on the country’s rare-earth resources like lithium and cobalt that are waiting to be extracted in northern Ontario, Quebec and elsewhere.

Given that the EV industry is still in his infancy, the free market alone won’t be enough to ensure those resources can be extracted and developed, he says.

“General Motors made a billion-dollar bet on Canada because it’s going to assume that the Canadian government — this one or the next one — is going to commit” to building that business.

Such an investment would pay dividends well beyond the auto sector, considering the federal Liberal government’s commitment to lowering greenhouse gas-emissions, including a 2035 EV mandate, and meeting targets set out in the Paris climate accord.

“If you make investments in renewable energy and utility storage using battery technology, you can build an industry at scale that the auto industry can borrow,” Volpe says.

Major manufacturing, retail and office facilities would be able to use that technology to help “shave the peak” off Canada’s GHG emissions and achieve those targets, all the while paving the way for a self-sufficient electric-vehicle industry.

“You’d be investing in the exact same technology you’d use in a car.”

There’s one problem, says Robinson: the lithium-ion batteries on roads right now might not be where the industry ultimately lands.

“We’re not done with with battery technology,” Robinson says. “What you don’t want to do is invest in a technology that is that is rapidly evolving, and could potentially become obsolete going forward.”

Fuel cells — energy-efficient, hydrogen-powered units that work like batteries, but without the need for constant recharging — continue to be part of the conversation, he adds.

“The amount of investment is huge, and you want to be sure that you’re making the right decision, so you don’t find yourself behind the curve just as all that capacity is coming online.”

 

 

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Saskatchewan to credit solar panel owners, but not as much as old program did

Saskatchewan Solar Net Metering Program lets rooftop solar users offset at retail rate while earning 7.5 cents/kWh credits for excess energy; rebates are removed, SaskPower balances grid costs with a 100 kW cap.

 

Key Points

An updated SaskPower plan crediting rooftop solar at 7.5 cents/kWh, offsetting usage at retail rate, without rebates.

✅ Excess energy credited at 7.5 cents/kWh

✅ Offsets on-site use at retail electricity rates

✅ Up to 100 kW generation; no program capacity cap

 

Saskatchewan has unveiled a new program that credits electricity customers for generating their own solar power, but it won’t pay as much as an older program did or reimburse them with rebates for their costs to buy and install equipment.

The new net metering program takes effect Nov. 1, and customers will be able to use solar to offset their own power use at the retail rate, similar to UK households' right to sell power in comparable schemes, though program details differ.

But they will only get 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour credit on their bills for excess energy they put back into the grid, as seen in Duke Energy payment changes in other jurisdictions, rather than the 14 cents in the previous program.

Dustin Duncan, the minister responsible for Crown-owned SaskPower, says the utility had to consider the interests of people wanting to use rooftop solar and everyone else who doesn’t have or can’t afford the panels, who he says would have to make up for the lost revenue.

Duncan says the idea is to create a green energy option, with wind power gains highlighting broader competitiveness, while also avoiding passing on more of the cost of the system to people who just cannot afford solar panels of their own.

Customers with solar panels will be allowed to generate up to 100 kilowatts of power against their bills.

“It’s certainly my hope that this is going to provide sustainability for the industry, as illustrated by Alberta's renewable surge creating jobs, that they have a program that they can take forward to their potential customers, while at the same time ensuring that we’re not passing onto customers that don’t have solar panels more cost to upkeep the grid,” Duncan said Tuesday.

Saskatchewan NDP leader Ryan Meili said he believes eliminating the rebate and cutting the excess power credit will kill the province’s solar energy, a concern consistent with lagging solar demand in Canada in recent national reports, he said.

“(Duncan) essentially made it so that any homeowner who wants to put up panels would take up to twice as long to pay it back, which effectively prices everybody in the small part of the solar production industry — the homeowners, the farms, the small businesses, the small towns — out of the market,” Meili said.

The province’s old net metering program hit its 16 megawatt capacity ahead of schedule, forcing the program to shut down, while disputes like the Manitoba Hydro solar lawsuit have raised questions about program management elsewhere. It also had a rebate of 20 per cent of the cost of the system, but that rebate has been discontinued.

The new net metering program won’t have any limit on program capacity, or an end date.

According to Duncan, the old program would have had a net negative impact to SaskPower of about $54 million by 2025, but this program will be much less — between $4 million and $5 million.

Duncan said other provinces either have already or are in the process of moving away from rebates for solar equipment, including Nova Scotia's proposed solar charge and similar reforms, and away from the one-to-one credits for power generation.

 

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The Cool Way Scientists Turned Falling Raindrops Into Electricity

Raindrop Triboelectric Energy Harvesting converts falling water into electricity using Teflon (PTFE) on indium tin oxide and an aluminum electrode, forming a transient water bridge; a low frequency nanogenerator for renewable, static electricity harvesting.

 

Key Points

A method using PTFE, ITO, and an aluminum electrode to turn raindrop impacts into low frequency electrical power.

✅ PTFE on ITO boosts charge transfer efficiency.

✅ Water bridge links electrodes for rapid discharge.

✅ Low frequency output suits continuous energy harvesting.

 

Scientists at the City University of Hong Kong have used a Teflon-coated surface and a phenomenon called triboelectricity to generate a charge from raindrops. “Here we develop a device to harvest energy from impinging water droplets by using an architecture that comprises a polytetrafluoroethylene [Teflon] film on an indium tin oxide substrate plus an aluminium electrode,” they explain in their new paper in Nature as a step toward cheap, abundant electricity in the long term.

Triboelectricity itself is an old concept. The word means “friction electricity”—from the Greek tribo, to rub or wear down, which is why a diatribe tires you out—and dates back a long, long time. Static electricity is the most famous kind of triboelectric, and related work has shown electricity from the night sky can be harvested as well in niche setups. In most naturally occurring kinds, scientists have studied triboelectric in order to avoid its effects, like explosions inside of grain silos or hospital workers touching off pure oxygen. (Blowing sand causes an electric field, and NASA even worries about static when astronauts eventually land on Mars.)

One of the most studied forms of intentional and useful triboelectric is in systems such as ocean wave generators where the natural friction of waves meets nanogenerators of triboelectric energy. These even already use Teflon, which has natural conductivity that makes it ideal for this job. But triboelectricity is chaotic, and harnessing it generally involves a bunch of complicated, intersecting variables that can vary with the hourly weather. Promises of static electricity charging devices have often been, well, so much hot, sandy wind.

The scientists at City University of Hong Kong used triboelectric ideas to turn falling raindrops into energy. They say previous versions of the same idea were not very efficient, with materials that didn’t allow for high-fidelity transfer of electrical charge. (Many sources of renewable energy aren’t yet as efficient to turn into power, both because of developing technology and because their renewability means even less efficient use could be better than, for example, fossil fuels, and advances in renewable energy storage could help.)

“[A]chieving a high density of electrical power generation is challenging,” the team explains in its paper. “Traditional hydraulic power generation mainly uses electromagnetic generators that are heavy, bulky, and become inefficient with low water supply.” Diversifying how power is generated by water sources such as oceans and rivers is good for the existing infrastructure as well as new installations.

The research team found that as simulated raindrops fell on their device, the way the water accumulated and spread created a link between their two electrodes, one Teflon-coated and the other aluminum. This watery de facto wire link closes the loop and allows accumulated energy to move through the system. Because it’s a mechanical setup, it’s not limited to salty seawater, and because the medium is already water, its potential isn’t affected by ambient humidity either.

Raindrop energy is very low frequency, which means this tech joins many other existing pushes to harvest continuously available, low frequency natural energy, including underwater 'kites' that exploit steady currents. To make an interface that increases “instantaneous power density by several orders of magnitude over equivalent devices,” as the researchers say they’ve done here, could represent a major step toward feasibility in triboelectric generation.

 

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Wind and solar make more electricity than nuclear for first time in UK

UK Renewables Surpass Nuclear Milestone as wind farms and solar panels outpace atomic output, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. BEIS data show low-carbon power generation rising while onshore wind subsidies and auction timelines face policy debate.

 

Key Points

It is the quarter when UK wind and solar generated more electricity than nuclear, signaling cleaner, low-carbon growth.

✅ BEIS reports wind and solar at 18.33 TWh vs nuclear 16.69 TWh

✅ Energy sector emissions fell 8% as coal use dropped

✅ Calls grow to reopen onshore wind support via CFD auctions

 

Wind farms and solar panels, with wind leading the power mix during key periods, produced more electricity than the UK’s eight nuclear power stations for the first time at the end of last year, official figures show.

Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions also continued to fall, dropping 3% in 2017, as coal use fell and the use of renewables climbed, though low-carbon generation stalled in 2019 according to later data.

Energy experienced the biggest drop in emissions of any UK sector, of 8%, while pollution from transport and businesses stayed flat.

Energy industry chiefs said the figures showed that the government should rethink its ban on onshore wind subsidies, a move that ministers have hinted could happen soon.

Lawrence Slade, chief executive of the big six lobby group Energy UK, said: “We need to keep up the pace ... by ensuring that the lowest cost renewables are no longer excluded from the market.”

Across the whole year, low-carbon sources of power – wind, solar, biomass and nuclear – provided a record 50.4% of electricity, up from 45.7% in 2016, when wind beat coal for the first time.

But in the fourth quarter of 2017, high wind speeds, new renewables installations and lower nuclear output saw wind and solar becoming the second biggest source of power for the first time.

Wind and solar generated 18.33 terawatt hours (TWh), with nuclear on 16.69TWh, and the UK later set a new record for wind power during 2019, the figures published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy show.

But renewables still have a long way to go to catch up with gas, the UK’s top source of electricity at 36.12TWh, which saw its share of generation fall slightly, though at times wind became the main source as capacity expanded.

Greenpeace said the figures showed the government should capitalise on its lead in renewables and “stop wasting time and money propping up nuclear power”.

Horizon Nuclear Power, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, is in talks with Whitehall officials for a financial support package from the government, which it says it needs by midsummer.

By contrast, large-scale solar and onshore wind projects are not eligible for support, after the Conservative government cut subsidies in 2015.

However the energy minister, Claire Perry, recently told House Magazine that “we will have another auction that brings forward wind and solar, we just haven’t yet said when”.

 

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Trump Is Seen Replacing Obama’s Power Plant Overhaul With a Tune-Up

Clean Power Plan Rollback signals EPA's shift to inside-the-fence efficiency at coal plants, emphasizing heat-rate improvements over sector-wide decarbonization, renewables, natural gas switching, demand-side efficiency, and carbon capture under Clean Air Act constraints.

 

Key Points

A policy shift by the EPA to replace broad emissions rules with plant-level efficiency standards, limiting CO2 cuts.

✅ Inside-the-fence heat-rate improvements at coal units

✅ Potential CO2 cuts limited to about 6% per plant

✅ Alternatives: fuel switching, renewables, carbon capture

 

President Barack Obama’s signature plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electrical generation took years to develop and touched every aspect of power production and use, from smokestacks to home insulation.

The Trump administration is moving to scrap that plan and has signaled that any alternative it might adopt would take a much less expansive approach, possibly just telling utilities to operate their plants more efficiently.

That’s a strategy environmentalists say is almost certain to fall short of what’s needed.

The Trump administration is making "a wholesale retreat from EPA’s legal, scientific and moral obligation to address the threats of climate change," said former Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy, the architect of Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

President Donald Trump promised to rip up the initiative, echoing an end to the 'war on coal' message from his campaign, which mandated that states change their overall power mix, displacing coal-fired electricity with that from wind, solar and natural gas. The EPA is about to make it official, arguing the prior administration violated the Clean Air Act by requiring those broad changes to the electricity sector, according to a draft obtained by Bloomberg.

 

Possible Replacements

Later, the agency will also ask the public to weigh in on possible replacements. The administration will ask whether the EPA can or should develop a replacement rule -- and, if so, what actions can be mandated at individual power plants, though some policymakers favor a clean electricity standard to drive broader decarbonization.

 

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Such changes -- such as adding automation or replacing worn turbine seals -- would yield at most a 6 percent gain in efficiency, along with a corresponding fall in greenhouse gas emissions, according to earlier modeling by the Environmental Protection Agency and other analysts. That compares to the 32 percent drop in emissions by 2030 under Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

"In these existing plants, there’s only so many places to look for savings," said John Larsen, a director of the Rhodium Group, a research firm. "There’s only so many opportunities within a big spinning machine like that."

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt outlined such an "inside-the-fence-line" approach in 2014, later embodied in the Affordable Clean Energy rule that industry groups backed, when he served as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Under his blueprint, states would set emissions standards after a detailed unit-by-unit analysis, looking at what reductions are possible given "the engineering limits of each facility."

The EPA has not decided whether it will promulgate a new rule at all, though it has also proposed new pollution limits for coal and gas plants in separate actions. In a forthcoming advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, the EPA will ask "what inside-the-fence-line options are legal, feasible and appropriate," according to a document obtained by Bloomberg.

Increased efficiency at a coal plant -- known as heat-rate improvement -- translates into fewer carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of electric power generated.

Under Obama, the EPA envisioned utilities would make some straightforward efficiency improvements at coal-fired power plants as the first step to comply with the Clean Power Plan. But that was expected to coincide with bigger, broader changes -- such as using more cleaner-burning natural gas, adding more renewable power projects and simply encouraging customers to do a better job turning down their thermostats and turning off their lights.

Obama’s EPA didn’t ask utilities to wring every ounce of efficiency they could out of coal-fired power plants because they saw the other options as cheaper. A plant-specific approach "would be grossly insufficient to address the public health and environmental impacts from CO2 emissions," Obama’s EPA said.

That approach might yield modest emissions reductions and, in a perverse twist, might event have the opposite effect. If utilities make coal plants more efficient -- thereby driving down operating costs -- they also make them more competitive with natural gas and renewables, "so they might run more and pollute more," said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director for the Clean Air Task Force.  

In a competitive market, any improvement in emissions produced for each unit of energy could be overwhelmed by an increase in electrical output, and debates over changes to electricity pricing under Trump and Perry added further uncertainty.

"A very minor heat rate improvement program would very likely result in increased emissions," Schneider said. "It might be worse than nothing."

Power companies want to get as much electricity as possible from every pound of coal, so they already have an incentive to keep efficiency high, said Jeff Holmstead, a former assistant EPA administrator now at Bracewell LLP. But an EPA regulation known as “new source review” has discouraged some from making those changes, for fear of triggering other pollution-control requirements, he said.

"If EPA’s replacement rule allows companies to improve efficiency without triggering new source review, it would make a real difference in terms of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions," Holmstead said.

 

Modest Impact

A plant-specific approach doesn’t have to mean modest impact.

"If you’re thinking about what can be done at the power plants by themselves, you don’t stop at efficiency tune-ups," said David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program. "You look at things like switching to natural gas or installing carbon capture and storage."

Requirements that facilities use carbon capture technology or swap in natural gas for coal could actually come close to hitting the same goals as in Obama’s Clean Power Plan -- if not go even further, Schneider said. They just would cost more.

The benefit of the Clean Power Plan "is that it enabled states to create programs and enabled companies to find a reduction strategy that was the most efficient and made the most sense for their own content," said Kathryn Zyla, deputy director of the Georgetown Climate Center. "And that flexibility was really important for the states and companies."

Some utilities, including Houston-based Calpine Corp., PG&E Corp. and Dominion Resources Inc., backed the Obama-era approach. And they are still pushing the Trump administration to be creative now.

"The Clean Power Plan achieved a thoughtful, balanced approach that gave companies and states considerable flexibility on how best to pursue that goal," said Melissa Lavinson, vice president of federal affairs and policy for PG&E’s Pacific Gas and Electric utility. “We look forward to working with the administration to devise an alternative plan for decarbonizing the U.S. economy."

 

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