The EPA's Intentional Catastrophe

The EPA has scheduled 28 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity for shutdown early next year. Their own people told them that this would lead to blackouts. So how did the top honchos respond? By blacking out the critics, of course!

Congressional and industry investigators have combed the EPA's rule-making docket that contains hundreds of thousands pages of electronic documents. Many of these files are for some reason not "smart" PDFs (i.e., they're unsearchable). But lo and behold, they uncovered one 934-page EPA draft that was circulated within the Administration sometime before the utility rule was formally proposed.

In a "What are the energy impacts?" section, the EPA concedes that it "is aware that concerns have been expressed by some, even in advance of this proposed rule, that this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electric grid." The agency admits that what it calls "sources integral to reliable operation" may be forced to shut down—those would be the coal-fired plants the EPA is targeting—and that these retirements "could result in localized reliability problems." The EPA insists that it knows how to balance "both clean air and electric reliability," but all along in public it has denied that reliability is in any way at risk.

The draft document also "strongly encourages" the people who run the grid, like regional transmission operators and state regulators, to start planning "as soon as possible" for "potential retired units." The EPA recommends "transmission upgrades, targeted demand side management strategies, and construction of new generation." This helps to explain why even the EPA admits the utility rule is the most expensive it has ever proposed.

Do the Obamatons really think that no one will notice when the lights go out?