The Original Clean Power Plan vs Its Replacement

WASHINGTON, DC—A new analysis being posted today by Resources for the Future (RFF) and coauthors at three universities suggests that standards for power plants—a major source of greenhouse gas emissions—as envisioned in reforms by the Trump administration may only modestly reduce total CO2emissions and may lead to emissions increases at many facilities, making the meeting of emissions goals in certain states costlier.

In 2018, the Trump administration proposed repeal of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) via an executive order on energy independence. Now, as EPA moves to repeal the CPP, it is obligated to propose a replacement standard to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The proposed replacement rule to the CPP calls for an emissions rate improvement, or “at-the-source,” standard that targets efficiency improvements at individual coal plants. The state-by-state implications of this type of policy have not been examined, until now.

In a new study by RFF, Carbon Standards Examined: A Comparison of an At-the-Source and Beyond-the-Source Power Plant Carbon Standard, researchers examined the potential effects of this type of standard on national and state emissions of harmful air pollutants like carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX) in 2030 using 2014 results from the Integrated Planning Model. At the time that the original CPP was finalized, it was estimated to decrease CO2 emissions by 415 million tons, or 19 percent, below a business as usual base case level by 2030, or 30 percent below 2005 levels. In contrast, an at-the-source approach finds that several states might experience higher emissions compared to having no federal carbon standard. Further, nearly all states will have higher emissions compared to a CPP-like policy. These outcomes will make meeting state emissions goals costlier. At a national level, they find an increase in SO2 is another possible unintended consequence of an at-the-source standard.

The authors, Dallas Burtraw, RFF Senior Fellow; Amelia T. Keyes, RFF Research Assistant; Kathleen F. Lambert, Harvard School of Public Health; Charles T. Driscoll, Syracuse University; Jonathan J. Buonocore, Harvard School of Public Health, and Jonathan I. Levy, Boston University, note: “Our novel analysis provides information on the impacts of an at-the-source standard on national and state-level emissions of CO2 and conventional pollutants, indicating that outcomes under an at-the-source standard could deviate substantially from simple expectations. This information should be an element of EPA analysis in its proposed repeal and replacement of the CPP.”

Read the whole study: Carbon Standards Examined: A Comparison of an At-the-Source and Beyond-the-Source Power Plant Carbon Standard.