Attorneys General from 23 states– including South Dakota and North Dakota– filed a motion late last week (June 7, 2024) asking the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to stop implementation of EPA’s new MATS Rule while legal challenges are heard.
The new MATS Rule mandates that coal-fired power plants further reduce emission rates for mercury and certain other chemicals by 66-70%. The plan was announced by the Biden Administration in April 2024 as part of a “suite” of regulations targeting coal-fired power plants. The Attorneys General says EPA acknowledges that there are no quantifiable health benefits from the Rule’s mandated emission reductions.
Power plant operators, grid operators, and state regulators from around the country submitted affidavits in support of the States’ motion explaining that unless the Rule is stayed while legal challenges are heard power plants may be forced onto retirement tracks and power grid reliability may be undermined.
North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley said, “It is abundantly clear that the Biden administration’s EPA designed this rule to intentionally set emission standards that are unattainable with current technology, and they did so for the purpose of forcing coal-fired plants to retire.” He says the EPA Administrator has repeatedly said that is what his agency would be doing, and this Rule is the product. With this Rule, Wrigley says EPA is actively threatening to undermine reliability of the nation’s power grid.
As the States allege in their motion, this isn’t the first time EPA has leveraged the MATS Rule to force coal-fired power plants to shut down. The last time EPA issued a MATS Rule, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately held that the EPA acted unreasonably when it failed to consider the costs the Rule would impose. But in the years that it took to reach that decision, power plants around the country were forced to spend billions of dollars or begin retirement operations to come into compliance with a Rule that was eventually deemed unlawful. In the motion filed Friday, the States allege that EPA is trying to do the same thing again, except that this time our country’s power grids do not have the same buffer of dispatchable energy that they did a decade ago, so the situation is even more dire than before.
Along with South Dakota and North Dakota, other states signed on to the letter are West Virginia, Alaska, Georgia, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming.
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