EPA’s final guidance will likely enable industry sources to more easily avoid tougher Clean Air Act permit conditions, based on the details of a 2018 draft version of the document.
States and environmental groups challenging EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) power plant greenhouse gas rule as too weak are also seeking to intervene on EPA’s behalf to defend the agency’s underlying authority to regulate power sector GHGs, asking an appellate court to allow them to weigh in on that specific issue.
Environmental groups are for the first time outlining the issues they intend to raise in their litigation challenging EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule addressing power plant greenhouse gas emissions and its simultaneous repeal of the much more stringent Clean Power Plan (CPP) that ACE replaces.
The Trump administration is continuing to pursue its narrow approach to considering climate change in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, defending the strategy in courts even as it has been ordered to consider broader, cumulative climate effects of its fossil fuel lease approvals.
The agency says that pausing the litigation until it finishes a related rule on new source review requirements “would delay resolution of this case a half year or more.”
A bipartisan coalition of states is urging the Supreme Court to take up a petition from environmentalists to review an appellate decision limiting states’ ability to review Clean Water Act (CWA) section 401 water quality certification requests, arguing the ruling’s “incorrect interpretation . . . threatens to have far-reaching, adverse effects for States.”
EPA is detailing its justification for rejecting battery storage as best available control technology (BACT) in permitting a California natural gas-fired power plant, in response to environmentalists’ lawsuit arguing the Clean Air Act requires battery storage to prevent harmful pollution.
States challenging EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy rule say the agency must first take action on their administrative petitions to reconsider aspects of the rule before litigation can proceed.
SEATTLE -- Acting EPA air chief Anne Idsal is suggesting that the agency could work with states looking to go beyond the requirements of its Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule for power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions, seeming to walk back the rule’s threat to block stringent compliance plans that critics say is a major legal flaw.
Environmental and ratepayer groups are raising concerns about the potential pollution and climate impacts of California energy regulators’ grid-reliability plan to allow several natural gas-fired power plants that use once-through-cooling (OTC) systems to operate for three years longer than the current 2020 retirement deadline for such plants.
