To accommodate those concerns, according to sources, the administration is including a presidential memorandum clarifying that the EPA administrator can invoke existing authority under the Clean Air Act to provide a one-year extension to companies that can demonstrate they need an extra year to come into compliance.
In certain instances, the EPA can issue an administrative order that would give utilities up to five years to install pollution controls.
Among utilities in the Washington area, some are prepared for the stricter standards. Baltimore-based Constellation Energy has already spent three years upgrading its plants, said James L. Connaughton, an executive vice president.
“We may have to make some modest adjustments,” he said, adding that his firm did not object to other utilities getting an additional one-year extension “as long as it’s done fairly and consistent with the law, and without giving an unfair economic advantage.”
He said one way the administration could ensure that outcome would be by letting polluting plants provide electricity only when a region was facing a shortage.
AEP spokesman Pat Hemlepp said Friday that he had not seen the final rules but noted that his utility and others wanted “a few years” beyond 2014 to meet the standards.
“Doing so will reduce the cost of compliance, allow retirements and retrofits to take place in a more logical manner and provide time for addressing reliability issues while still achieving the EPA’s objectives,” Hemlepp wrote in an e-mail. He said that getting state utility regulators’ approval for any project would take up to 41
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2 years.
Congress exempted toxic pollution from power plants — which can include arsenic, chromium, lead, formaldehyde and dioxins, among other substances — when it amended the Clean Air Act in 1990. In 2000, under the Clinton administraion, the EPA determined that it should be regulated, but a lengthy legal and lobbying battle ensued.
The EPA finalized the rules Friday to meet the terms of a court-ordered settlement with several advocacy groups that had sued the agency over its 10-year delay in issuing the regulations.
As recently as Wednesday, executives from the Edison Electric Institute, a major utility trade association, met with Office of Management and Budget officials to appeal for a delay in implementation of the rules. Several environmental and public health groups, including the American Lung Association and Environment America, made the opposite pitch to OMB in the past couple of weeks.
John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that the EPA had issued 110 rules in the past 20 years regulating toxins at everything from oil refineries to steel mills. He called coal- and oil-fired plants “the largest emitters of toxic pollutants and the last holdouts to be controlled.”
Meanwhile environmental groups were also anxious about the administration’s moves on Arctic drilling. The approval of Shell’s exploration plan by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management was “an important step,” said company spokesman Kelly op de Weegh. But BOEM said it would require Shell to stop drilling by Sept. 24, 38 days before ice forms around the drill site. Sources said that 38 days was the length of time Shell said it would take to get a relief well drilled in the event of an oil spill. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said, “This arbitrarily curtails an already very short drilling season, unnecessarily putting the project at risk.”
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