Clean Power Plan: Utility Industry Says It Will Do The ‘Right Thing’
Despite their disparate interests and diverse geographies, U.S. utilities have locked shoulders, especially when it comes to federal energy policies. At the core of their communique is the will to work with the Obama administration to reduce carbon emissions.
At the Edison Electric Institute’s meeting in New Orleans, chief executives from the nation’s biggest investor-owned utilities acknowledged that companies based on the West Coast and in the Northeast were already using cleaner electric generation fuels than those located in the Mid Atlantic and Southeast. But they said that they would develop policy positions that considered all factors — and ones to keep the industry in-step with the demands of customers.
With that, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan is expected to be finalized this summer, requiring carbon reductions of 30 percent by 2030. Simply, the rule would give the states and their utilities the flexibility to achieve such aims by replacing coal-fired plants with cleaner ones, by installing energy efficient technologies or by trading credits as they do in California and the Northeast.
