"The Next Big U.S. Power Plant Fight Is Coming"

"The Biden administration will release plans to regulate emissions from power plants this week—a move almost certain to spark a legal battle."

"On Monday, several outlets broke the story that the Biden administration is planning to release a plan to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. And even though the rule isn’t public yet, if history is any indication, conservative forces are already getting ready to take the EPA to court.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of several plaintiffs, including two coal companies and a group of Republican attorneys general, in a case challenging the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, another landmark policy aimed at regulating emissions from power plants. While the Clean Power Plan never went into effect—it was tied up in court challenges for years after being introduced in 2015 and was repealed by the Trump administration—last year’s court case was hugely important symbolically in determining what kind of regulations the EPA could put on dirty power plants. (While nearly 300 coal-fired power plants have closed since 2010, about 40% of the U.S.’s coal-generating capacity, coal-fired power still constitutes almost 60% of the U.S.’s emissions from electricity generation.)

The design of this Biden rule treads carefully around the stipulations laid out in last year’s ruling. The court last year took issue with the Clean Power Plan’s mandates for states to design plans to cut emissions—an approach known as “beyond the fenceline,” meaning that it attempted to regulate pollution outside of the actual physical power plants, which the court decided was not in keeping with the original order to the EPA from Congress. Biden’s power plan rule, according to media reports, appears to deal exclusively with reducing emissions at power plants themselves, through the broad application of carbon capture and storage technologies to clean up gas- and coal-fired power plants."

Molly Taft reports for Earther April 24, 2023.

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"Biden Plans New EPA Power Plant Rule. Will SCOTUS Kill It?" (E&E News)