One organization that hailed President Trump’s decision last week to repeal the EPA’s Endangerment Finding is America’s Power, a group that advocates for coal use.
The group’s President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth praised the repeal of the 2009 declaration which she said became a justification for some of the Environmental Protection Agency’s most far reaching regulations for power plants.
“EPA’s Endangerment Finding has been used as the basis for regulations that threaten the reliability of our nation’s electric grid. These regulations, such as President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and President Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, were designed to force the premature retirement of coal power plants across the U.S. and increase our nation’s reliance on electricity sources that are not as reliable as coal,” said Bloodworth.
She went on to say reversing the decisions by utilities to retire more than 55,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation over the next five years “could help offset the need to build new, more expensive electricity sources” and also “prevent the loss of reliability attributes, such as fuel security, that the coal fleet provides.
Bloodworth said it “makes no sense” to force the retirement of America’s coal fleet and jeopardize the nation’s electricity supply. She explained the U.S. coal fleet is responsible for just 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions while China and India’s emissions account for nearly 40%.
“The U.S. must take advantage of our coal assets, just as our global competitors are relying on coal to fuel their own economic growth.“Overturning bad EPA regulations is necessary but not sufficient. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, Congress, state utility commissions, and grid operators must also take action to prevent the closure of more coal power plants.”
America’s Power is the only national trade organization whose sole mission is to advocate at the federal and state levels on behalf of the U.S. coal fleet and its supply chain. The nation’s fleet of more than 400 coal-fired generating units located across 40 states provides affordable, reliable, dispatchable and energy-secure electricity on a 24/7 basis.