EPA announces mercury rules for power plants!
The EPA today announced stricter rules on mercury emissions from power plants, which is an important development for those interested in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s because many of the older coal plants have no pollution controls and have social costs much higher than the value of the electricity they generate. It’s long past time for these plants to retire. And it turns out that there’s plenty of spare natural gas-fired generation capacity to pick up the slack, so CO2 emissions from these plants will go down a lot
Here’s what I wrote in Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs:
“About 15% of existing US coal plants (about 50 GW out of 300 GW total) are old, inefficient, polluting plants that were grandfathered under the Clean Air Act, so they have few or no pollution controls.[1] More than half of US coal plants are 35 years of age or older.[2] The total social cost of running many of these plants is higher than the cost of alternative ways of supplying that electricity (even without counting the damages from greenhouse gas emissions),[3] so they represent an obsolete capital stock from society’s perspective. The most effective action we as a society can take would be to enforce existing environmental regulations, develop new ones (as the US EPA is now considering for mercury, mining, and other environmental issues), and charge these plants the full social cost of the damages they inflict upon us, which would double the cost per kWh of existing coal-fired plants even using low estimates of pollution costs. This will force lots of old polluting coal plants to retire, many others to reduce their hours of operation, generate lots of economic benefits in reduced health costs, give a boost to coal’s competitors, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so it’s a win all the way around.”
[1] Celebi, Metin, Frank C. Graves, Gunjan Bathla, and Lucas Bressan. 2010. Potential Coal Plant Retirements Under Emerging Environmental Regulations. The Brattle Group, Inc. December 8. [http://www.brattle.com/documents/uploadlibrary/upload898.pdf]
[2] See Figure 5-6 in Lovins, Amory B., Mathias Bell, Lionel Bony, Albert Chan, Stephen Doig, Nathan J. Glasgow, Lena Hansen, Virginia Lacy, Eric Maurer, Jesse Morris, James Newcomb, Greg Rucks, and Caroline Traube. 2011. Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, p. 175.
[3] For details, see Muller, Nicholas Z., Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus. 2011. “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy." American Economic Review vol. 101, no. 5. August. pp. 1649–1675, and Epstein, Paul R., Jonathan J. Buonocore, Kevin Eckerle, Michael Hendryx, Benjamin M. Stout III, Richard Heinberg, Richard W. Clapp, Beverly May, Nancy L. Reinhart, Melissa M. Ahern, Samir K. Doshi, and Leslie Glustrom. 2011. ”Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal.“ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. vol. 1219, no. 1. February 17. pp. 73-98. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x].
