Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials said last week that the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon emission rule appears to provide enough flexibility and time for compliance to address potential reliability concerns.
Acting FERC Chair Cheryl LaFleur and nominee Norman Bay gave their preliminary assessments in written comments to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which is considering their nominations to the commission.
“My understanding is that EPA’s proposal offers broad flexibilities that will empower states to design state implementation plans that ensure resource adequacy and reliability,” said Bay, thedirector of FERC’s Office of Enforcement. “In addition, the proposal does not require any compliance until 2020, and it gives states flexibility over a 10-year period through 2029 to reach their overall emission rate targets.”
LaFleur said the proposed rule “gives significant flexibility to states and permits regional approaches to compliance.”
She said that FERC provided input to the EPA “from a reliability perspective” as part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) interagency review process.
“FERC has a role in ensuring that the energy infrastructure and markets adapt to new environmental requirements through its authority over transmission ratemaking and natural gas permitting and ratemaking,” she said. “For example, if additional gas generating capacity is needed and more gas pipelines need to be built, FERC has a role in certificating those pipelines. FERC also has a role in ensuring that the regulations under its jurisdiction are sufficient to attract needed investment in electric transmission and gas pipelines.”
Their responses didn’t satisfy Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Energy Committee. “I am even more troubled that EPA, which has conceded that a single rule may have `localized’ effects, has not sought from our grid regulators, FERC and NERC [the North American Electric Reliability Corp.], an analysis of the cumulative impact its rules may have,” Murkowski said in a statement. “Instead, EPA appears to be morphing into an industrial planning agency for the energy sector.”
The senator criticized LaFleur and Bay for not being more involved in the rule-making process.
“The current chairwoman of FERC, while not calling for a formal official role for the commission as many of us would like, is certainly up to that task, in my view,” Murkowski said. “Unfortunately, the White House does not want her in charge. Its nominee to serve as chairman [Bay] is both short on energy experience and largely unaware of the electric reliability implications of EPA’s rules. In response to a hearing question about grid reliability from Sen. [Joe] Manchin [D-W.Va.], the nominee conceded that he ‘has not been following the decisional process at EPA closely enough to know.’
“That response is not only disturbing, it raises the question of whether anyone in the administration is actually following EPA’s process ‘closely enough to know’ what will happen to our electric grid,” she said.
