Biden Finalizes Plan To Overhaul Dirty Power Grid And Reduce Blackouts

The regulatory package will set the first greenhouse gas limits on power plants and halve the time it takes to get new transmission lines permitted.

The Biden administration rolled out its plan Thursday to overhaul the United States’ aging patchwork of fossil-fueled electrical grids, finishing work on a suite of regulations designed to rein in rising utility bills and stem worsening blackouts while cutting planet-heating pollution from power plants.

The regulatory package includes the nation’s first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, tighter restrictions on mercury gas and coal ash, and a new way to speed up construction of badly needed transmission lines.

Paired with the billions of dollars in carrots for manufacturing, building and buying modern energy equipment that came with President Joe Biden’s landmark climate-spending laws, the rules chart a path for the U.S. to avoid nearly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047. That’s equal to taking 328 million gasoline-fueled cars off the road or a full year of emissions from the U.S. electric power sector today.

The most hotly anticipated part of the package is the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule requiring most existing coal-fired and new natural-gas-burning power plants to capture 90% of carbon from smokestacks before it enters the atmosphere or to shut down as early as 2039.

The existing natural gas plants that today provide more than 43% of the country’s electricity are exempt from the regulation, as are new natural gas stations that primarily switch on to shore up supply on the grid when demand is especially high or output from weather-dependent sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines, is shaky. Faced with industry blowback to its initial plan to regulate existing gas plants, the EPA opened a formal question-asking session last month to gather information on ways to approach cutting emissions from today’s fleet.