By Tom Kleckner

SPP’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) Task Force was given an advance look last week at a webinar that will open the dialogue with state and utility officials charged with implementing the Environmental Protection Agency’s CO₂ emission rule.

SPP is hosting the webinar Tuesday for air quality regulators, utility commissions and government contacts at its member utilities in each of the RTO’s 14 states. More than 70 had registered to attend as of last week.

SPP met its goal of having each state represented by at least one registrant, said SPP Vice President for Engineering Lanny Nickell, the RTO’s point person on the CPP.

“We want to introduce ourselves as an RTO, particularly to the air quality and environmental regulators,” Nickell said. “We haven’t done that before in a programmatic approach. They don’t all know who SPP is and how it works.”

Southern States Slower to Embrace Regional Compliance

The webinar attendees will hear from SPP that state-by-state compliance with EPA’s final CPP rule will be more costly than regional compliance, and that more new generation and transmission infrastructure will likely be needed. In addition to being more expensive, SPP says state-by-state compliance would be more difficult for the RTO to manage.

Asked about the SPP states’ early plans, Nickell said, “The states in our north have expressed the most interest in working with each other.” Pausing, he said, “I don’t get that same sense from the states in the South.”

Several of SPP’s states — Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — are led by Republican governors and legislatures that have pledged to battle EPA’s final rules rather than comply.

SPP’s Sam Ellis, who led a staff team that “pored over” the final rules, said states have flexibility under the regulations, but “they would lose it if they don’t implement their own plan.” EPA says it will implement a federal plan in the states that do not submit an “approvable” plan of their own.

Trading Framework

The final rule provides a framework for trading of CO₂ allowances. Nickell is expected to tell the webinar attendees that there are merits to developing regional carbon trading markets and will encourage states to develop their own plans.

Ellis told the task force EPA will consult with “planning authorities” in developing the federal plan and accept comments on whether to include allowances for reliability emergencies. He said the agency believes its rate-based and mass-based approaches contain sufficient flexibility to mitigate reliability issues without having to seek extensions under the reliability safety valve.

“The EPA may not have considered interactions between the federal plan and potential state plans for a given region,” Ellis said.

The Clean Power Plan Task Force was formed under the Strategic Planning Committee’s direction to review EPA’s federal implementation plan and recommend the role SPP should play in assisting states’ compliance. The group will also work to ensure regulators have a clear communications path to SPP.

“Our hope is SPP develops concepts and policies the states can embrace,” said Michael Desselle, SPP’s chief compliance and chief administrative officer and the task force’s staff secretary.

The webinar is the beginning of SPP’s communication effort. Besides the broad overview of SPP and its responsibilities, registrants will receive SPP’s take on the CPP and a high-level overview of the three analyses it has already performed on the CPP — though, as Nickell noted, those assessments were done on the EPA’s earlier draft rules. (See SPP: State-by-State Compliance Would Hike Costs.)

“We want to talk about what we believe our role to be, and that’s reliability,” he said. “We want to encourage the regulators in our states to talk with us, and to do so early in the process.”