NC poised against EPA’s Clean Power Plan

North Carolina is joining the pushback against the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan with doubts about high costs and legality — but proponents argue the legislation and its deadlines are workable.

The legislation, announced in early August, requires states to lower their carbon emissions by 2030, but the N.C. Senate barred a recent N.C. House Bill’s attempt to order the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to develop a state plan in compliance with the CPP.

An amendment to HB 571 forced the Senate to allow the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources leeway in creating a plan in partial compliance with the CPP — but Rex Young, UNC’s Environmental Law Project spokesman and a student at the UNC School of Law, said the plan is designed to fail.

“It doesn’t go far enough to reduce emissions,” he said. “It would eventually result in the EPA denying the plan so that there would eventually be a legal conflict between the EPA and the state.”

The current bill allows the secretary of environment and natural resources to take legal action if the CPP is deemed to be contrary to other federal law.

But Brian Balfour, director of policy for Civitas Institute, said implementing this plan could result in high costs and potentially negative economic consequences for the state.

“There’d be significant costs on states like North Carolina in terms of lost jobs, higher utility bills and reliability — in terms of our electricity — if these rules were to be enforced,” he said.

The Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank, published a study stating that an attempt to meet the EPA’s new goals would result in the loss of more than 30,000 jobs and a price increase in electricity bills of as much as 21 percent by 2030.

Phil Barner, director of UNC Energy Services, said Duke Energy would be affected, which could impact UNC in the long-term, but the extent of the changes depend on the type of individual plan North Carolina implements.

“In all probability, I would guess electricity prices will rise as result of this, but we really don’t know until we see what the state actually does,” he said.

But Young said a time extension that pushed the compliance deadline to 2022 should give the state more time to implement changes and minimize any harm.

“(They’re) the same complaints that we’ve seen over and over again, and every single time we have had a rule, the cost of the rule has ended up usually half the cost that opponents have argued.”

At least 12 other states have already taken legal action against the EPA in response to the new legislation.

It specifically targets carbon emissions, with the goal of lowering the rate to 1,305 pounds per megawatt hour for coal or oil power plants and 711 pounds per megawatt hour for natural gas plants by 2030. The CPP requires states to submit individual plans for meeting these new rates by Sept. 6, 2016.

But with North Carolina’s projected emission rate for 2020 already well below the new goal, the CPP set a target of reducing the state’s emissions to 1,136 pounds per megawatt hour by 2030 — a 36 percent decrease from the 2012 rate.

“North Carolina has certainly been ahead of the curve, especially in the last couple of years,” Balfour said.

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