Capito warns on electrical reliability under Biden's Clean Power Plan 2.0

U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va, is raising an alarm about the impact of President Joe Biden’s proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 on the nation’s ability to sustain electric reliability.

Capito, Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Ranking Member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, are asking Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Willie L. Phillips and FERC Commissioners James Danly, Allison Clements and Mark Christie to schedule a series of conferences to analyze the impact of the Clean Power Plan 2.0 on the ability of the nation to sustain reliable electric service.

Capito and Barrasso made the request this week in a letter to Phillips and the FERC Commissioners.

In the letter, the West Virginia lawmaker warns that the proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 presents “unjustifiable claims about the future availability of technologies – including carbon capture, clean hydrogen, and the related infrastructure” used to power the nation’s electric grids.

According to Capito and Barrasso, Congress has directly charged FERC in the Federal Power Act with protecting electric reliability through mandatory reliability standards and to safeguard the quality of the nation’s interstate electric and natural gas service.

The Republican lawmakers point to two recent hearings where the FERC commissioners warn of “unprecedented and growing risks to electric reliability” in the U.S.

“In the first hearing, Chairman Phillips and Commissioners Danly and Christie outlined these risks,” Capito and Barrasso said in the joint letter. “Commissioner Danly warned of ‘an impending, but avoidable, reliability crisis’ caused by “public policies that are otherwise designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar assets or to drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.’ Commissioner Christie explicitly warned about a ‘looming reliability crisis’ if ‘the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas’ continues unabated.”

In the second hearing, Capito and Barrasso said the Chief Executive Officers of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (“NERC”), the Regional Transmission Organization PJM, and one of America’s largest electric cooperatives also warned about increasing risks to the stability of the electric grids in the United States.

West Virginia, an energy producing state, has a long history of fighting past variations of the Clean Power Plan, which dates back to the Obama administration, when Joe Biden was vice president.

On the state level, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has been at the forefront of the past battles against the Clean Power Plan variants. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 6-3 in the West Virginia vs EPA case that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. However, new rules have since been proposed by the Biden administration, including the Clean Power Plan 2.0 introduced last month by the EPA.