The Edison Electric Institute’s decision to sue the Biden administration over its climate rule for power plants is unusual. The nation’s top trade group for investor-owned utilities generally keeps its nose out of environmental rulemaking given the diversity of opinion among its members, write Benjamin Storrow and Jean Chemnick. Environmental groups have speculated that the organization’s new chief may have something to do with the shift: CEO Dan Brouillette ran the Energy Department under former President Donald Trump, who famously dismissed climate change as a hoax. But Brouillette insists that the basis of the lawsuit, filed Wednesday, is rooted in a more practical concern: technological readiness. The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule relies heavily on carbon capture technology that scrubs heat-trapping pollution from power plants before it hits the atmosphere. EPA’s regulation, finished last month, would effectively require some new natural gas power plants and all coal-fired units to begin capturing emissions for permanent storage by 2032 or retire by 2039. Brouillette said in a statement that the technology is not “adequately demonstrated for broad deployment across our industry” and that “EPA’s implementation timelines do not align with the current reality.” Carbon capture and storage technology has a long track record of failing in the United States. And as of 2021, the world’s operational plants were capable of capturing and storing only a few thousand metric tons of pollution each year. But the technology’s future is looking brighter. Planned projects around the world jumped 102 percent last year amid an uptick in developer interest. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law allocated billions of dollars to grow the nation’s carbon capture and storage capabilities. And the massive, $1 billion Petra Nova plant in Texas — once a symbol of carbon capture’s failure — has reopened after closing down in 2020 amid an economic downturn and fluctuating oil prices. EPA argues carbon capture is ready for prime time — and has drawn parallels to a 1970s-era rule that required power plants to install scrubbers to limit sulfur dioxide pollution. At the time, such scrubber technology was less commercially available than carbon capture is now. The agency has cast the rule as routine, in the hope it will avoid the fate of former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court. The Obama-era rule was all-but-supported by EEI, which filed an amicus brief defending EPA’s regulatory authority. Not every EEI member utility opposes EPA’s new power plant rule. Pacific Gas & Electric, a California-based utility, said it is exploring intervening with other power companies in defense of the new regulation.
| 
