EPA toughens rules on US power emissions By Jeremy Lemer in New York
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday released tough new rules that will impose for the first time nationwide limits on the emission of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from certain US power plants. “This has been 20 years in the making,” Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, said in Washington. “This is a great victory for public health.”
The EPA estimates that the total health and economic benefits of the new standards will be as much as $90bn a year. Power plants are among the largest US source of pollutants such as mercury that have been linked to a range of disorders, including developmental problems in children. Ms Jackson also touted the job-creating potential of the new rules. While the measures will cost about $9.6bn to implement, she said that installing and maintaining new pollution controls would provide 46,000 short-term construction jobs and 8,000 long-term utility jobs. The regulations have provoked a storm of criticism from owners of coal-fired power plants that may have to pay for expensive retrofits to their plants, or even be forced to shut them down, to meet the new standards. Steve Miller, head of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a lobby group backed by US coal miners, said the rules would “destroy jobs, raise the cost of energy and could even make electricity less reliable”. However, the energy industry has been far from united on the issue. Owners of nuclear power and gas-fired power plants such as Exelon have backed the measures, arguing that they will encourage a switch to cleaner technologies. Eric Svenson, vice-president of policy and environment at PSEG, the New Jersey-based power company, said the rules were “overdue” and praised the EPA for adopting a pragmatic approach. In its final ruling, the EPA offered some concessions to the power industry. The agency said it would encourage state authorities to give companies longer to implement new emission reduction technologies and made several technical adjustments to its earlier proposals. Mr Svenson noted that, despite the outcry from some interest groups, much of the industry was already compliant with the new standards. PSEG has already spent about $1.6bn on upgrading three of its power plants. According to the EPA, which has been trying to regulate power plant emissions for about two decades, there are about 1,100 coal units and about 300 oil-fired units at power plants in the US that will be covered by the rules. Susan Tierney, managing principal with Analysis Group and a former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Energy, said the rules would provide “certainty for investment decisions in the electric power industry”, adding that the EPA had already regulated toxic pollution from most other important sources. Frances Beinecke, president of the National Resources Defence Council, said: “We can breathe easier today. After decades of industry-induced delay, the EPA did exactly what it was designed to do: look out for our health and our environment.”
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