E&E News: "Hundreds of Gas Plants Could Escape EPA Climate Rules"
RFF Senior Fellow Dallas Burtraw shares his predictions on how an upcoming EPA power plant rule proposal may handle natural gas-fired power plants.
Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow with the think tank Resources for the Future, said EPA would be reluctant to issue a rule that would prompt a significant segment of gas power plants to abruptly retire, perhaps compromising grid reliability.
“If a facility is only running 10 or 20 percent of the time, it may not be able to support the major capital investment associated with the post-combustion controls. And so it might choose to retire,” he said. “But then, it was obviously filling a niche in the power system. And if there were a lot of plants that retired, then there would be a hole in generation capacity for those peak time periods.”
