According to a recent study commissioned by the state government in North Dakota, President Joe Biden’s extreme climate regulations, which target fossil fuel-fired power plants, will cause widespread network instability and cause widespread blackouts that will affect millions of Americans.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s just finalized restrictions, according to the study conducted in May by the company Often On Energy Research, are not technologically transferable and will undoubtedly lead to the pension of coal power generation products. Intermittent and weather- centered alternative energy sources, like as wind and solar, may replace for retired generators, leading to unsatisfactory conditions, the study found.
The study generally echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U. S. network guardian, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, local network operators, and energy power companies. Following the initial public hearings on the EPA regulations last year, four regional grid operators that control the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warned that grid reliability would “dwindle worryingly” under the regulations. The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U. S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA’s finalized regulations.
” Biden’s Green Agenda is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid and is shutting down baseload power. Electricity costs are up 30 % under Biden already”, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum ( R. ) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. ” Re-election will continue to go up in prices as real power demand for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI dramatically increases for the first time in decades.”
Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden’s regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to “higher prices AND less reliability”.
The first stage of a multi-pronged effort to reduce the country’s power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions was completed by the EPA in April. The regulations could force the vast majority of coal-fired plants across the nation to shut down over the next two decades because they require existing coal plants to reduce their carbon footprint by 90 % by 2032. Additionally, new natural-gas-fired power plants that operate more than 20 % of the time must significantly reduce their emissions.
The finalized regulations are likely to have a significant impact on Midwestern states like North Dakota, where coal-fired power plants account for more than half of the electricity produced and where the state’s four largest power plants are all coal-fired. Additionally, North Dakota is the state with the sixth-largest coal-producing capacity in the nation.
The economic effects of the rules, according to Always On Energy Research, include raising the cost of compliance for coal plant operators, lowering competition with alternative power sources, lowering the rate of coal retirements, leading to higher electricity prices, and creating supply chain issues for industries dependent on coal.
” The Finalized Rule will increase costs, which, compounded with inflation, will negatively impact the affordability of electric and gas services, resulting in a disproportionate effect on low- income citizens”, the study stated. Given the high rural population of North Dakota, pricing low-income people out of a reliable energy source has devastating [sic]sic]sic effects on North Dakotans ‘ lives.
In addition, under EPA’s plans, coal plants—considered dispatchable power, or power that can quickly be turned on in times of high electricity demand—will largely be replaced by new solar and wind power generators, which are highly dependent on proper wind conditions.
Solar panels, for example, produce just 25 percent and wind turbines produce 34 percent of their listed capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Coal and natural gas plants, meanwhile, respectively produce 49 percent and 54 percent of their listed capacity.
Taking that disparity into account, Always On Energy Research predicted that the Midwest’s grid would experience nearly 9 million megawatt hours of unreliable power, leading to blackouts that would cost tens of billions of dollars.
According to Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute,” the EPA power plant rule is exactly the wrong thing to be doing right now” for grid reliability. ” To be intentionally closing and, essentially, banning the facilities that are keeping the grid functioning while, at the same time, encouraging the penetration on the grid of things like wind and solar that are making the grid less reliable is going to have incredibly poor aftereffects,” said one analyst.
According to additional Energy Information Administration data, coal plants produced another 16 % of the total electricity produced in 2023, while natural gas plants produced roughly 43 percent of that figure. By comparison, wind power generated 10 percent of total electricity in the United States, and solar produced less than 6 percent.
In the upcoming months, the EPA is expected to finalize a second set of regulations that will target existing natural gas power plants.
Democrats and climate advocates have focused on the power sector for a long time as part of their efforts to combat global warming and reduce pollution. Electric power generation in the United States accounts for 25 % of all total national emissions, only trailing only the transportation industry, which generates about 28 % of the total emissions.
Angela Hackel, a spokeswoman for the EPA, claimed that “over the years, EPA regulations like the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and Good Neighbor Rule have significantly reduced pollution from electricity generation while supporting reliability.”
” This rule will do the same”, Hackel said. She further stated that the North Dakota study is being looked at by the EPA.
