Legal & Regulatory

Seminole G&T Challenges Clean Power Plan in Federal Court

It took only minutes for opponents to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants to head for the courts. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan became official, published in the Federal Register on Friday morning. The race to the courthouse was on.

The first electric utility in line at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where challenges to EPA rules get filed, was Florida’s non-profit Seminole Electric Cooperative. It is of the nation’s largest generation and transmission cooperatives. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), the Washington lobbying group for cooperative electric utilities, joined the Seminole petition.

Tampa-based Seminole asked the appeals court to review the EPA plan, as well as to stay implementation of the rule until the review has been completed. Seminole CEO and general manager Lisa Johnson said the EPA plan “represents a massive overreach of EPA’s regulatory authority.” She said that there is “no commercially viable technology that we can install at our plants to meet the emissions requirements of the Clean Power Plan.”

NRECA’s Debbie Wing said, “These complicated regulations will force cooperatives to close power plants, which are producing affordable electricity for consumers who were counting on them for decades to come. Co-op consumer-members will be saddled with higher energy bills as a result of this regulatory over-reach.”

Seminole, subject of a current online POWER magazine profile (it will appear in print in December), is uniquely challenged by the administration’s plan to combat global warming. The cooperative, which supplies wholesale power to nine distribution cooperatives with about 1.4 million customers in 42 counties, has two major generating assets. The Seminole Generating Station in Palatka, Fla., consists of two 650-MW coal-fired units, the utility’s primary source of base load generation. Seminole also owns the 810-MW gas-fired Midulla Generating Station in Bowling Green, Fla., comprising a 500-MW combined cycle unit and 310-MW of combustion turbine peaking power.

“While compliance options such as buying carbon emissions credits, or interstate carbon trading, may become available in the future,” said Johnson, “they are not available today. Without protection from the court system, Seminole will need to begin making planning decisions as if our plants are going to be shut down….We’re just trying to keep the lights on in rural Florida.” Seminole’s filing is available at http://www.seminole-electric.com/pdf/compliance/33399966_Final_Seminole_Declaration-c.PDF.

Publication of the final EPA rule Friday morning set off a blizzard of filings in the federal court. In addition to the Seminole and NRECA petition, 24 state attorneys general, led by coal-dependent West Virginia joined together in a filing at the D.C. appeals court challenging the rule. Also on that petition were several state environmental and energy regulatory agencies. West Virginia’s AG Patrick Morrisey said that the regulations are a “blatant and unprecedented attack on coal.” Florida was among the states asking for court review, although the governor has not yet decided whether his state will submit a state implementation plan to EPA or force the feds to impose a “federal implementation plan.”

Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, put a partisan spin on the filings. “I am not surprised that our Republican critics have rushed to the courts to try to prevent something they were not able to do legislatively,” he said. Only one of the attorneys general signing the letter – Missouri’s Chris Koster – is a Democrat. But dependence on coal appears to be what unites those filing to oppose the EPA rule, not political affiliation.

Kennedy Maize is a long-time energy journalist and frequent contributor to POWER.

 

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