EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants
The EPA proposal aims to help The White House meet its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by attacking the largest single source in the United States: Power plants pump out 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.
The EPA's new proposal sets a limit for future power plants of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour for large electricity generators that are powered by natural gas. And it sets a slightly higher limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour for small natural gas generators and for coal-fired generators.
Although the EPA says its rule is legally sound, electric utility companies are already arguing that it goes further than the law allows.
The only technologies that exist to make coal plants clean enough to meet this proposed standard, industry executives say, are far too expensive and haven't been proven at a commercial scale. Making coal plants clean enough, they say, would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the already steep price tag of coal plants.
"Our customers have to agree to foot that bill," says Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities.
Akins says his customers won't go for it.
EPA Plan Targets New Coal-Fired Plants March 27, 2012