Panel I: Regulatory Obstacles to Grid Reliability
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] so you you know the order right it’s Mario it’s up Mario Michael Tad yes so so we only have three for this panel so so you you so I’m not going to say anything you just turn it over to Mario oh turn it over to Mario yeah okay great I I think Mario’s perfect problem he’s starting the car yeah that’s great hey good morning good morning I’d like to introduce this first panel which is regulatory obstacles to grid reliability I’ll keep uh introductions uh brief so we can get right to the discussion um all of these experts are incredibly impressive and you can check out their uh bios on fed.org that’s fed.org uh first is Mario lyola who’s a senior research fellow for the environmental policy and regula uh regulation in the Heritage foundation’s Center for Energy climate and environment Mario served in the Trump Administration as associate director for atory reform at the White House Council on Environmental Quality we are also proud that he is an RTP energy and environment working group member Michael Bush Bacher is a partner at boen gray pllc he served as the US Department of just at the US Department of Justice as Council to the Assistant Attorney General for the environment and Natural Resources Division he is also rtps enforcement and agency coercion working group chair uh Ted bowling is a partner at Perkins kui LLP uh Ted advises clients on renewable energy projects resource resource development transportation and infrastructure he served at the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the US Department of the interior and in the US Department of Justice in both Democratic and Republican administrations and our moderator is uh Jeff holmstead partner at bracewell who heads the firm’s environmental strategy group and and informally served under George W bush in the epa’s agency for air and radiation um turn it over to Mario thank you uh thank you very much can hear me okay great uh thank you very much Steve for uh putting this event together and um and thank you to everyone for coming um so if you if you were among the people who were hoping that uh EPA would feel chastened by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia versus EPA you have been sorely sorely disappointed uh the EPA uh has just finalized in the last week a power plant rule that is far more ambitious and some would say Reckless than the obam clean power plan uh and um this rule if you add up the numbers will do nearly if it’s fully implemented would do nearly nothing um about global temperatures but it will uh or further America’s electricity grid and Usher in a painful New Era of energy scarcity um uh we’ve been looking at some of the same things that LF was talking about and I will just say with the possible exception of our failure to do anything about Iran’s multiple nuclear weapons programs this is the most alarming thing I’ve ever seen in my Decades of working in public policy um this the EPA rule requires all existing coal plants and new natural gas plants that run frequently to eliminate virtually all carbon emissions by using carbon capture technology starting in 2032 uh the new standards will be virtually imp possible for you electrical utilities to meet for a variety of reasons um and uh as Lewis mentioned the Energy Information Administration expects virtually all coal plants um or 155 gwatt of coal plants from which Americans get uh 16% of their electricity to shut down by 2032 under the new rule and meanwhile the main target of the new rule is new natural gas the new source performance standards apply to large new natural gas plants uh um and I will argue that that’s the only way that you could realistically fill this shortfall is by a rapid build out of natural gas which the rule is now uh M uh making impossible we’ve already seen this actually since last summer um uh so the impossibility of meeting the new standards is a major legal vulnerability under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act the new standards have to be based uh on technologies that have been adequately demonstrated uh which means that somebody in the industry has successfully used it to achieve the man dated emissions rate um uh which is elimination of 95% of the of of of the aggregate emissions of carbon from the power plant um no fossil fuel plant in the world has used carbon capture to get anywhere near 95% reduction in carbon emissions uh mandated by the rule and um and the Very cases that EPA cites uh in the in the in the rul making for its explication of adequately demonstrated section 111 uh very much cut against uh epa’s position EPA is hoping that you don’t read them carefully so I invite you to read them carefully um these CA these cases clearly suggest and in one case explicitly say that section 111 adequately demonstrated under Section 111 is not a technology forcing provision uh it is not meant to deploy new technology it has to be looking at the industry and looking at somebody in the industry who’s using that technology for the purpose and at the scale for which regul utilities are going to have to do it uh and successfully achieving that emissions rate uh EPA also has to consider cost and what it’s done here is really a a fairly Brazen accounting trick uh it has said it has reduced the cost of implementation by the amount of the inflation reduction act subsidies uh which is which is like saying that costs disappear when you shift them from people in their capacity as electricity rate payers to people in their capacity to the same people in their capacity as taxpayers uh and the only Authority they can point to in the law this is not like title two of the Clean Air Act there’s no basis for the DC circuit has been very clear that cost means cost indirect cost whoever ends up paying for them and the only basis uh EPA says in the preamble to the proposed rule uh Congress clearly intended that the IRA would be its only Authority for this uh for the proposition that Congress intended cost to be reduced uh in this way under Section 111 is a single statement by one Congressman on the floor of the house and as just Scalia if he were alive today would point out we don’t know how many other congressmen were even present to hear that statement um so uh okay um uh Princeton’s and the and the larger picture is even more alarming Princeton’s prominent Ned zero America study estimates that 68,000 miles of carbon transport pipelines would have to be built to decarbonize the power grid most of that would have to be built by 2032 to for utilities to be able to comply with this rule but that infrastructure buildout uh is entirely outside epa’s jurisdiction and entirely beyond the control of the regulated utilities which raises the same kind of beyond the fence line major question that led the Supreme Court to strike down uh the Obama Obama’s clean power plan and because pipelines are outside epa’s jurisdiction they are also outside its expertise something that I hope to talk about a little bit more uh with chairman Danley and administrator wheeler in the lunch hour uh and so in in fact EPA has no idea how long it would take or how much it would cost to build the enormous infrastructure that would be required for utilities to be able to comply with this rule um um which raises prohibitive risk for investment Capital the cumulative impact of the new EPA rule with the chaotic rush to deploy heavily subsidized intermittent solar and wind capacity to the grid it uh is having another consequence which is that it’s poisoning the economics of Basel load generation in the US we’re going to have a panel on infrastructure per permitting and the need for infrastructure permitting reform uh this afternoon but even if we were to reform infrastructure there’s now another problem uh uh uh beyond the permitting stuff which is that even if we did have all of what we’ve been asking for for years in streamlined permitting um the the subsidies for solar and wind uh under the inflation reduction act are making it uneconomical for base load generation to operate and be able to recoup costs uh so even if we were to miraculously open up uh uh the infrastructure permitting of nuclear few nuclear plants are likely to be built as long as the inflation reduction act subsidies are operating um so uh um uh epa’s timing couldn’t be worse as Lewis finle as you heard in the presentation from lsfl um supercharged by electric vehicles and power hungry AI data centers and end use electrification of residential um residential p uh Power needs uh a tsunami of demand is headed for America’s electricity grid uh Lewis mentioned uh that e eia expects 80% uh uh 80 gws of of demand growth uh by 2030 just last week every time you look at a forecast it’s double the last forecast that you saw just last week urot announced that just in the state of Texas alone they’re going to be adding 80 or 90 gws of demand load to the Grid in the next five years uh so these the the forecasts are soaring uh by the month um uh meanwhile America relies on uh uh on coal for 16% of its electricity on natural gas for another 40% so if you add up the expected retirements of coal and the tsunami of demand headed our way uh America is facing a shortfall of maybe 30% in Grid capacity maybe 400 gaw uh in Grid capacity by 20 32 just to understand how staggering that is consider that building a 100 or 200 new nuclear plants would barely be enough to cover um that much demand uh and and of course that figure is I just throw that out purely academically because we’ve only built like two nuclear plants since 1979 uh and the economics uh uh have only gotten worse for base load Nuclear So the Biden Administration is counting on Renewables to come to the rescue but that is a an absolute fantasy if you look at 2023 a record year America the United States added barely 20 gwatt of new solar capacity and just over 5 gaw of wind but the accredited capacity uh of that of those additions are barely 10 gaws and the real number to pay attention to is the amount of utility scale battery that capacity that has been added to the grid which was only four uh gws of utility scale battery utility scale battery is the limiting factor on the ability of intermittent solar and wind to be able to fill anything like Basel load generation uh and so I’m also like lisfl not uh don’t have a background in mathematics but at 4 gaw of battery additions per year it’ll take us a 100 years to fill the demand the Gap the shortfall uh in Grid capacity that we’re facing just in the next decade uh and by the way the Biden Administration can’t even get out of its own way on renewable energy a new Bureau of Land Management rule would almost certainly severely constrict the development of new solar power uh in western states um uh the just just this week President Biden rolled back several of several more of President Trump’s innovated permitting reforms which disproportionately benefited renewable energy projects um the politics of this are something that I hope we can get into over the lunch hour as well and of course the Princeton study Net Zero study suggests that 600,000 miles of new transmission lines would be required to connect uh a a net zero grid uh with renewable energy to the Grid in a low carbon scenario yet building even a 700 mile transmission line in the middle of absolutely nowhere takes 15 years um so the only way to make up the looming shortfall would be through a massive expansion of new natural gas capacity but of course the new source performance standards in the rule are the that principally Target new natural gas base load capacity uh in fact uh it’s already Frozen investment in this sector the new source performance standards under under Section 111 go into effect when they are proposed in an nprm which was last May uh and uh we I I did some research and I’ve come across there’s not a single natural gas uh new natural gas project permit applicate whose permit was pending for modification or expansion or a new plant last May that has been able to obtain financing since then so we’ve already Frozen uh investment uh in capital formation in the one sector that could fill uh this Gap so with soaring demand for electricity America’s already facing energy poverty in the years ahead the new EPA problem rule will make that much worse and at some point you have to start asking yourself 700 people died in the Texas ice storm because of the difficulty of managing a grid with all of these Renewables on it at some point we have to start asking ourselves wait a second what is it that we’re being why is it that climate change is a danger what risks is society facing from climate change disruptions in food system disruption in health um death due to severe weather some of these climate policies are starting to cause these exact problems today not 50 years from now uh and uh and you know uh as trosky might said you you may not be interested in cost benefit analysis but cost benefit analysis is interested in you and it people do it and they’re going to vote you out of power if you don’t pay attention thank you very much thank you um so much of what I had planned on covering was table setting and explaining the what’s happening and and thankfully I think that has been done better than I could by administrator wheeler and by U Mr fle as well and and by Mario so I’m going to focus on the how uh it’s the regulatory transparency project after all I’m going to try to make some regulations transparent and I think that’s all the more pressing because we’ve got this whole of government approach this is from day one in the Biden Administration is this kind of Chinese style united front approach to regulation uh that makes opacity a feature um designed to hide the costs uh to lie about the benefits to insulate things from judicial review and to generally make it harder to stop because there are so many missiles in the air you know if your Iron Dome of litigation doesn’t knock them all out you’ve got Rockets Landing in your proverbial backyard so uh let me start quickly on on um on the generation side on on the supply side uh I I think it’s important to understand how the market works or doesn’t work um for how we pay for electricity generation because that show that’s the mechanism by which these subsidies have this Market distorting effect that uh that’s so damaging to reliability so uh you know traditional vertical uh vertically integrated utilities were the the way of the past and a lot of folks mightbe 20 years ago thought well if we add some Market competition to this we can do better get more efficient lower costs improve reliability and that led to the uh proliferation of regional transmission organizations RTO and independent system operators or isos and basically real-time auctions about who’s going to provide uh the power at any given uh point in time and so it’s it’s an Open Access system to whatever extent that may have been a market at some point that’s gone because now we have these enormous subsidies for Renewables and those subsidies have a market distorting effect so they can out compete things uh that uh especially base load stable base load generation coal nuclear uh that uh that you need um and and then these systems also don’t have uh adequate disciplinary um uh procedures in place to make uh to to punish those who fail to deliver um on top of this you then add uh the regulatory push that Mario was talking about um I think pjm recently uh had a uh report uh saying even before you factor in the new rule uh uh what’s going to happen on on their uh on their Turf and uh they predicted 40 gaw um of Capac largely coal and natural gas are going to retire by 2030 so buckle up for blackouts in other words um and uh the the real effect of of these regulations is going to be to drive up costs everyone’s going to be asking for their own subsidies or they’re just going to shut down all of which is going to be very bad for everybody um transmission often gets touted as as sort of a way of solving this I don’t think that’s the case I think if you look at things like what FK is going to uh do in its new transmission rule uh it’s just a joke I think it’s like trying to in introduce policy like blue State policy for uh being paid for by Red States is basically what the rule is trying to accomplish uh that’s great if you want more subsidies for your renewable business it’s terrible if you want uh reliable and affordable electricity um what I want to focus on though is the demand side um uh and and this data centers that’s just driven by technology but the the demand with electric vehicles is driven entirely by regulation and unlike the clean power plan which was one Marquee rule that mandated a transformation of that sector the electrification transformation is being accomplished by a bunch of different rules all of which interlock and interact in in ways I think is are a novel regulatory approach that has not yet been fully appreciated um either by administrative law Scholars and practitioners or uh or by the public about how to actually understand what’s happening so there are three legs to this stool one is epa’s uh greenhouse gas emissions tailpipe standards for vehicles uh the second is the Department of transp uh Transportation Nitsa um fuel economy standards and and the third is California’s special status under the Clean Air Act uh which it has uh leveraged to move away from doing things about smog which is why they had that special power uh to doing things about global climate change so let me let me take them in order and then I’ll I’ll hit a few of the um ancillary rules that support all this so EPA um has promulgated um an initial there are two phases to this we’re in the middle of the second phase right now so the first phase started in 2021 uh with uh light duty vehicle standards that would force electrification to about 177% of the new vehicle Market uh and they did this through um setting standards that internal combustion engine cars cannot on average meet um and they much like the clean power plan it’s set an unachievable standard with the traditional technology and requires you to average in electric vehicles to get to those uh those standards so in other words they reverse engineered the preferred outcome that they had again it really reminds me of the clean power plan in the way in which it took a power design to control pollution from the tailpipe of internal combustion engines and use that for this other purpose of mandating uh a certain type of vehicle that doesn’t even have a tailpipe um EPA has no explicit averaging Authority if you actually look at the statute and the regulatory history here EPA back in the 80s said well uh we don’t think there’s anything explicit here authorizing us to do averaging but we think it’s a good idea as a flexibility uh that flexibility as with so many flexibilities has now become uh a mandate um similar regulations uh similar similar structured regulations were just uh finalized a couple weeks ago uh these are much more ambitious I I think was already mentioned today they’re going to drive up electrification to 62% of the new car market by uh 2032 59% or sorry yeah 59% I believe is electric and then the rest is plug-in hybrid um uh currently there are no internal combustion engine vehicles at all that can meet that standard um then there’s a similar rule for the heavy duty sector which is going to drive it to about 40 to 50% % um and then uh you have the cafe standards right historically uh CA what’s amazing is greenhouse gas emissions and um fuel economy there’s a direct scientific regulation between correlation between the two actually the way we measure uh efficiency is by uh actually seeing how much carbon’s coming out of the tailpipe so it’s the same job but because uh the cafe statute prohibits Nitsa from considering electric vehicles the Biden Administration split these two regulatory efforts apart uh and so now they operate on a different schedule we’re waiting for the new Cafe standards um but they also will drive uh they’re very similar driving electrification and like it’s so illegal they say that uh we can consider uh electric vehicles when we’re talking about the years prior to the standard setting years and after and in so far as they’re part of the Baseline of what we think is already going to be out there we just can’t mandate any more electric vehicles for those years um uh even judge shy Boson uh when this was argued in the DC circuit uh last September was very skep skeptical of this and he said sounds like you’re reading a statute that says you may not as if it said you may if uh so I very much hope that they lose on that um oh I should disclose I I’m like in eight of these lawsuits already so and I’m going to be in way too many more but um then the third prong is this this California part right and California under the Clean Air Act uh there’s a uniform uh preemption provision in section 209a of the Clean Air Act says that states can’t adopt or uh enforce um or even attempt to enforce uh any emission standards for for uh mobile sources but California gets this carve out if it can show that it needs it to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions uh in the State uh like I said before that was initially a smog thing and it’s been transformed into a climate thing even though California doesn’t have compelling and extraordinary read unique climate challenges uh like they with smog so they’ve got a mandate called Advanced Clean Cars 2 uh which will drive to 100% electrification uh by 2035 uh other states can adopt this currently I believe 13 other states have so about 40% of the new car market is subject to California’s regulations it’s got similar rules for the truck sector and what’s called Advanced Clean trucks they even have a purchase mandate if you are a fleet operator under Advanced Clean fleets you know if these cars were and trucks were so Advanced people would presumably be buying them already uh but they’re not so you have to mandate it uh Advanced Clean fleets is then going to drive um uh if you have a certain Fleet size over 50 vehicles or you make 50 million Revenue per year you’ve got to Electrify uh your Fleet um on top of this there is uh the petroleum equivalency Factor when you’re doing your Cafe calculation you get to multiply uh the equivalency of an EV whatever the mpg equivalent is so for like Tesla Model y it’s 49 miles per gallon you get to multiply that by 6.67 and then plug that number into your Cafe calculation it’s an enormous uh regulatory cross subsidy for EVS there’s a huge market for this not that it’s transparent no one except for the automakers knows what it is um and then you have a number of other regulatory efforts like the Federal Highway Administration has been pushing uh decarbonization plans uh on States as well um all of these things like like I said are interlocking one of the most pernicious ways is the cafe standards that Baseline I mentioned they actually bake into that Baseline the California mandates even before they have a waiver and so it’s like uh I’m a millennial so I think about things in Harry Potter terms and I apologize for that I have actually read other books but this is the perfect metaphor right it’s like a regulatory hor Crux the soul of the thing you know even if you kill the California regulations the soulle of that thing then we’ll live on in Nas uh and and mandate uh the the at the end of the day effect just the same uh kind of a Voldemort way of approaching regulation uh so I happy to get into more of of how I think this is all going to play out but it’s it’s all illegal and so the enormous demand that’s being driven by this um is is in my view built on a foundation of sand but actually defeating that’s going to really require running the table on all of these cases and that’s largely going to come down to whether the Supreme Court agrees to take it um the DC circuit just a couple weeks ago said on our challenge to uh ACC1 the initial uh EV mandate that California had that was granted in 20 uh got a waiver in 2012 uh the DC circuit said well we don’t think it’s uh you’ve shown redressibility we’re not so sure that you’ve shown petitioners that this EV mandate will actually mandate that anyone buys EVS I think that’s pretty implausible certainly the automakers like Toyota said uh different things in their their own regulatory comments but um with that I I’ll I’ll I’ll end I just uh I want to highlight then the interlocking way that this on the demand and supply side is driving um what I think is the crisis we’ve been all talking about you’re gonna have something a bit more optimistic to talk to us about oh yes I’m just brimming with optimism that’s my that’s my role here um I’m afraid not I mean I’ve got a long experience in this in this area now I’m I I’m also not brimming with literary references um and uh and I never quote trosky um but um but I’m um I’m here to talk about um well sort of queuing off of a report I I worked with the nanan center on uh with regard to to our transmission uh crisis has really sort of the the focal point for just generally U what I consider to be sort of a an implementation crisis I mean it’s just the the the the work a day problems of actually trying to get the federal government or you know federal state and local agencies to work together for infrastructure preventing uh my particular Focus has been on transmission mostly because that’s where clients are um are U are are in Dire Straits right now I should note um nothing I’m going to say represents the views of Perkins koi or any of its clients um so if I Stray into specifics please it’s just Ted talking um but um we’ve had some hard experience we I’m amongst uh my my clients we’ve got some offshore wind projects um you know uh administrator wheeler uh noted that uh the Dominion project was um one one project that was actually on track um there’s an ominous note in in the trade press this morning about um how um judge laurren Ali KH uh had ordered in a pi hearing uh B to report back about uh the impacts of wind projects on the North Atlantic right whale um I I just came from an offshore wind conference uh last week where I moderated as guest host on a game show about the complexities of The Marine Mammal protection act um it’s it’s a it’s an Exquisite articulation of the precautionary principle which sort of presumes perfect knowledge about whale populations around the world um but that’s significant for any project that’s trying to build in the water um be it you know backbone transmission lines to string together uh offshore wind projects or the individual projects themselves um as well as all you know all manner of of infrastructure projects related to that I mean there’s a there’s the um you know working your way Inland there’s a reason why there are no big power lines that reach right to the seashore because you don’t typically have a lot of demand there um not in Atlantic City or or Virginia Beach and so you know we have a a a crisis of transmission planning to integrate this you know potentially vast renewable resource in the offshore um but and we also have a number of barriers uh to actually developing uh those resources there’s a reason why it’s taken so long to develop offshore wind projects I mean I I’ve been working on this since well it was you know 2008 when um the Bureau of O the predecessor agency to the Bureau of ocean Energy Management the Marine rather the minerals Management Service did a programmatic e laying out sort of the regulatory framework as best it understood at that point but really the complexity is not just that it’s it’s all the interactions between agencies and the fact that there’s really no one entity that’s in charge there’s there’s no um coordinating entity that that can bring them all to uh together and the transmission sector I think is the perfect example of that is we’ve all been citing the um the Princeton Net Zero report and I won’t I won’t lace my comments with various projections on uh demand growth because you know we just know demand growth is going through the roof um you know the the Princeton study uh talked about how we um you know we are falling behind in our investment in transmission large power lines you know 100 KV or above um and that are transmission investment requirements are going to reach more than 40 billion annually by 2031 so we’re falling behind as data centers and other sources you know Skyrocket our demand now at the same time that transmission system is as balkanized as it was when the federal power Act was enacted uh back in 1920 um you have a transition from radial systems where you know generators um basically you know ated uh the the growth of the transmission system um to a network that is imperfectly regulated um we’ll see what the firk ru making that’s on the docket for this may um will produce um but the um the the coordinated inter agency transmission authorization and permits program ctap uh which doe uh released its final 26h Ru making um uh last um just recently um you know it’s it’s it’s sort of you know doe saying okay we’ll be the lead agency but without a lot of the metrics the capacity that the the ability to actually ride her to to to um engage uh at the federal the state the local level um to to bring this to bear and uh frankly in my humble opinion it would be a wonderful thing if we had better transmission planning um for managing both load growth and the development of generation from whatever sources um with a a a focus on um inservice stes uh for transmission projects so we knew exactly where are the priorities I’ve I’ve seen a priority-based approach work in the federal government we were able to you know at times you know Corral resources get things through the NEPA process and it’s not just NEPA it’s you know NEPA and the interaction of all the various Federal agency authorizations authorities and working with the uh the state and local authorities but you know to to focus on what are we going to do and when are we going to do it you know what’s our what’s what’s the need here and um and not have as we have in in some courts you know and a maybe a Federal Land Management agency or a federal judge um at the district court level generalist federal judge questioning basically power demand projections and um and whether you know why do we really need transmission here couldn’t you just do distributed generation couldn’t you just do you know grid enhancing Technologies or you know fairy dust or whatever uh mechanism is uh is is you know to that person’s mind necessary to evaluate the purpose and need of agency action so I’m very focused on the crisis of implementation um part of the crisis of implementation is just a lack of capacity in agencies um a lack of of just technical capacity but it’s also um you know judgment capacity me the the um the 2020 reforms to the Neer rules that uh that Mario and I worked on were very built on Executive War 13807 very much focused on accountability uh throughout the federal agencies um that uh senior agency officials would be designated to resolve issues not you know dictate from on high this is you know who wins or loses um you know res resolve them on their merits but that we actually get resolution that we proed on schedule that that’s the the major advance of title 41 of the fast act and have the permitting Council have some transparency on what we’re doing and when we’re doing it but I’m I’m concerned that the fiscal responsibility act amendments their their Mandate of one year for Nea and two years for NIS has just sort of driven the prog Pro the the problem underground um i’ I’m working with a number of clients who are just finding it difficult to impossible to actually just get to the starting point can we just please start that onee or two-year process um you know things can take forever if you don’t start um and you know I used to think that there was sort of an irreducible minimum amount of environmental analysis there’s been some very good work done out of the University of Utah that talks about you know for for simple projects they generally go clear um relatively quickly whether you call them a categorical exclusion EA or an Eis uh for complicated projects they’re going to go through you know a certain amount of time whether you try to do them as a CA uh C uh EA or Eis um but now I’m beginning to think there’s a there’s a a third category there it’s just the projects in limbo the projects that can’t get the the prioritization the resources the uh the Imp perimeter uh necessary to um you know resolve issues that you know may be a poorly trained you know combat biologist as a as a former um boss of mine used to refer to them as you know is you know to get resolution and and make sure that we actually meet the inservice date uh so that you know power planning done by say like the Midcontinent independent system operator which leads amongst the isos in um in developing um plans for expansion of the grid that they that those plans are not hung up at at you know the various levels of of the federal bureaucracy and I I refer to the federal bureaucracy with all the due respect of someone who was part of the federal family for 30 years um I mejoy being outside and and and getting a fresh perspective on it um but the challenge is real and it’s a it’s it’s a challenge that I think um administrator wheeler um you know noted has real National Security implications you know the an efficient and functioning federal government is really what um Neo is designed about and it’s designed to facilitate decisions consideration of Alternatives consideration of short-term long-term consequences but make a decision and that’s what I’m most interested is what actually gets us to decision making on things that are recognized at a national level to be in the National interest so there you go well thanks to to all of you um I I I have just a couple of kind of big picture questions so if power pares start to increase significantly or there are reliability issues all it takes is you know one blackout to change to change the politics I all of the requirements that you’ve been talking about seem to be completely infeasible to me um and ultimately politically unacceptable how do you see it playing out I mean what what is going to happen we talked about all these problems and you know and and you know one solution is hopefully to curtail some of this in the courts but it’s kind of a remarkable situation to think about there there was actually a piece this morning in the Washington Post that talked about how climate change policy has driven voters in the EU to the right as they’ve seen increases in in the cost of fuel and the cost of electricity that could very quickly happen here too and so I’m just wondering if anybody wants to put on their their uh or look into a crystal ball and and and how how how does this eventually get fixed well so I the purpose I I’m don’t fully adhere to this way of looking at the world but I think it’s a very useful shortcut the purpose of a system is what it does and this complicated regulatory push with a bunch of I didn’t even get into the cost benefit stuff and it’s it’s nonsense and the social cost of carbon projections the way that this has been Justified economically really doesn’t hold up under scrutiny to give just one example of how even on epa’s view these things are so imprecise the proposal for the new light duty uh vehicle rule had about $380 billion in projected benefits uh the the final rule has 1.3 trillion because they found a new social cost of carbon metric well you that’s all you have to all you have to do is plan around with the disc discount rate you discount rate you can drive from miles on that um so I think the ultimate goal of this is degrowth and I think it’s to make something that’s hard to undo and that when when it when the pain is felt uh it’s going to be hard to walk back because a lot of the decisions to make these things the way they are will have been accomplished uh and pushed forward uh in a way that that you don’t have an immediate fix I mean people will revolt against it and I think that will be a serious consequence but it’s you know I think what the Biden Administration is hoping is it’s not going to be us so I think I’m if I can jump in I’m I’m more a little more pessimistic uh about that and I don’t I don’t actually ascribe a goal to what the administration is doing I think the administration is triangulating among multiple political constituencies um the BLM the new blm’s new solar rule which would should be called an anti-solar rule uh which has just grown up hundreds of new roadblocks to Solar Development in the western states is clearly being driven by a small constituency of environmental advocacy groups that are anti-development uh in those in those areas uh and uh even though the initiative started probably on the front end by people saying somebody saying in the White House hey we’ve got an energy supply problem here we’re not deploying solar nearly quickly enough uh to come up with these demand projections uh and uh and yeah people do cost benefit analysis but you know now we clearly see around the world that climate policies are being Advanced are being filtered selected and advanced precisely on the criteria that their costs can be hidden from the public so um prep candidate Vice President Biden ran on a carbon tax uh a a neutral carbon tax would entail a tax on gasoline of course U by the summer of 2021 if you’ve never seen Joe Biden run he was uh sprinting from the idea of a carbon tax uh and by the end of that year was actually was actually proposing which I still laugh about um to suspend the existing gas tax uh and and why because people can actually see that that tax is is uh is a is a policy whose cost they can immediately understand right now we see in Europe uh in a very alarming report alarming even for Americans uh that came out from the European Commission in January that shows industrial production in freef fall in Europe uh down 10% in the last year at least uh because why because electricity prices have tripled uh since 2019 uh of course most Europeans are under the impression that this is because Russia invaded Ukraine and uh the Europe Europeans had to react with sanctions that cut off that important supply of natural gas that is certainly what drove the crisis last winter when electricity prices hit 10 times their uh uh 2019 level uh but you know the reason why uh in Germany for example all of this nuclear power had to be retired wasn’t that the greens arrived and uh Angela uh Merkel decided to give in them all of a sudden uh it was that this uh inordinately UHA chaotic to use McKenzie type language uh chaotic deployment of uh solar and wind uh 15 years ago to the grid made the entire grid incompatible with base load generation so there was not if you look at the amount of intermittency on the German electricity grid the nuclear plants couldn’t operate economically anymore because they couldn’t operate at greater than 30 or 40% capacity and people don’t understand this stuff like people in Europe you ask people in Europe why their electricity is Three Times Higher and the answer is not you’re you’re you’re not liable to get from many people the answer that they’ve mismanaged their electricity grid and so by the time what I worry about is that by the time Americans understand why we’re facing uh electricity shortages uh you know and then of course you know the problem with socialism is that it’s never really been tried and you know so now its failures you know are an excuse to try you know to do for more of it um uh it’s it could be a very long time before people figure out what’s gone wrong uh and develop a consensus for what to do about it well I um not being a politician but um I would expect that there would be a great Hue and cry about um tradeoffs that don’t seem to make sense where you know the juice is not worth the squeeze um the the process takes so long you know the public process ostensibly for the public benefit uh doesn’t really benefit the public because it’s so opaque um or that mitigation requirements don’t have the sort of Nexus and proportionality that you know makes sense I mean it’s and I’ll just give you the example of you know the kind of negotiations you go through to develop an offshore wind uh facility and and you’ll have you know a a group for one reason or another say well could you build fewer Towers out there like okay let’s look at the tradeoff in terms of lost power versus what’s the benefit to you know the clams the whales or whatever is being um uh supposedly protected by fewer wind turbines on that lease um those trade-offs if if they were made clear wouldn’t really stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny like you know but um we’re we’re constantly making those trade-offs and and they and opacity is is the real problem there it’s sort of like you know different groups want different things the way in which we reconcile them should ultimately make sense and be clearly articulated um but if it’s not um that’s that’s where I think you you’re going to find a real um uh you know a great H and cry now I also think that um litigation is is a is a a real problem it is more problem in perception than in reality because you know it’s fear of litigation that is the mind killer uh to you know you’re quoting a book all right all right right I I saw the movie recently so um that’s Dune that’s Dune for yeah it’s it’s one of the greatest passages um but um you know it’s fear of litigation stying agencies I I used to love to run into court let’s get let’s get that administrative record together we’re going to go defend this project it’s the right thing that should be the attitude of the federal government you know we make good decisions we went through the right process we did it um but there’s a there seems to be this um this uh you know fear of litigation uh mostly by non- litigators um that um that that rules the day um and and frankly I I you know I’m I’m currently fairly down on district court judges but I I think a lot of these projects you know you go through summary judgment briefing and then you know you go all over again at the court of appeals they got denovo review of a summary judgment briefing I like what did we just go through at the district court level why you know the natural gas act you go directly to courts of appeals and frankly everything that’s a policy priority an infrastructure policy priority that’s in the National interest you know if it’s on the permitting dashboard you you know part of putting a project on the pering dashboard ought to be you get a shorter statute of limitations and you get to go straight to the court of appeals so now that’s pure Ted advocacy there but that’s I think some some judicial reform might be in order to can I respond very quickly to one thing this is hearkening back to the wonderful conversations Ted and I used to have when we were working on these issues in the white house um I think that it’s uh agencies win 70% of the time is that right the arbitrary and capricious standard actually works out the way you’d expect it agencies usually win unless you’re the forest service so I think that this s fact check so I think that this 70% statistic is actually a terrible statistic if agencies spend this is like uh you know in the criminal context if a if a if a uh you know if a if a prosecutor’s title 3 wiretap affidavit only gets uh uh a results in a warrant 70% of the time that person’s going to lose their job uh and uh you you agencies that spend millions of dollars of taxpayer resources and thousands of Staff hours trying to comply with the law uh should be able to have some idea of what the law requires and the fact that their E’s only get upheld 70% of the time means that these agencies have no idea and only are going to find out in court what the law required uh and that is a problem right that fails that means that NEPA at the way that it’s been administered by courts fails a basic principle of law Fuller’s principles of the rule of law which is that nobody knows what in the hell the law requires and that is a problem and I’ll I’ll say m is familiar with this line of reasoning he’s just looking under the lamp post as to the projects that actually get sued on which you know if you’re doing an Eis level infrastructure project you probably have a 50-50 chance because infrastructure projects by NE you know necessarily they go through somebody’s backyard they’re you know they’re they’re real trade-offs there you know down at the EA level those are rarely suit on categorical exclusions it was once in a blue moon we we’re sort of pushing the envelope on categorical exclusions so you’re starting to see a little bit more litigation but nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of categorically excluded decisions that are made in a year in a year um so again I think um the the litigation uh is uh risk is is blown out of proportion and another part of it is you know federal agencies have to respond to applicants and it’s it’s not their project so unlike you know the the wild wiretapper you know having had a search warrant denied um I I know you you pick your battles there um federal agencies have to respond to the applications so Michael I want to go back to you on the on the EV mandates you know California has kind of a long history of setting um unrealistic requirements you know they they’re sort of reasonable for the first few years and the idea is well you know we’ll push the pain out and Industry will respond and then after a few years and that turns out to be implausible they just push them out a little further and make them even a little stringent but they put that they keep pushing that out are we likely to say see the same thing with EPA and uh no I don’t think so because California California doesn’t operate under the rule of law like the rest of the country like you read these no you read these RS and they have like what are the penalties for violating it 40 different provisions of the California code of health and safety they won’t clarify for you what the penalties of any of those would be if you violated this maybe you’ll go to jail maybe nothing will happen they are also very dynamic they can move very quickly epa’s got the administrative procedure act to deal with it has uh the fact that it can be sued in many different venues often um not so much with the I mean you know the Clean Air Act 307 all the Nationwide emission standards have to go to the DC circuit yeah too too bad about that it’s and that takes forever so that I don’t think they can have the same kind of flexibility that California does um California approaches all of this like a mob takeover the threats are not really there to uh to get to that end it’s to put them in the driver’s seat so to speak so it’s a different modality um and different rules apply um so I I don’t think so um so I which means that it’s going to be hard to undo if we end up in a in a pinch point with this which I think we will um so in just a minute we’re going to take questions from from the audience but but one other sort of high level question especially listening to to Ted but I think all of you um it it seems like unless we can get major changes to the underlying statutes there needs to be more government officials who can move these projects through the through the pipeline yeah I’m I’m I I don’t look to Congress to act in a coherent and Rapid manner in this regard um I think the the onus is a responsibility to take care of see the laws are Faithfully executed it’s in the executive branch and you know frankly it’s that authority to organize federal agencies to to manage I mean that’s that’s the responsibility that’s the the the price of of governing you wanted the job you know you you need to make sure that you know everything from you know student loans to um you know uh permits to build in wetlands are managed in an efficient and coherent way so we need to expand the size of the federal government I don’t know that expansion is really it I mean it’s actually you know frankly it’s it’s the efficiency with which it works it’s not the number of bodies I mean you you throw a lot of money at at problems but that doesn’t necessarily solve the problem in fact you can hire people you know fresh out of undergrad they may come to it with all sorts of ideas I’m going to use my little piece of authority to reform the world they like well that’s that’s what managers have to deal with can I yeah so I think that the resource under current law the these the preparation of these environmental reviews requires such enormous commitments of agency staff resources just to give one example in the the Nevada Office of the Bureau of Land Management they are facing 30 project permit applications uh with the same staff that was processing that has never been able to issue more than one Eis per year uh and that was only working on one or two project applications 10 years ago uh the inflation reduction act tried to address this by I think if I remember correctly it was like a billion dollar of was it a billion what was the figure of like the $200 million for fipsy like Carl say said billions and billions but how how many W I forget what the number was but whatever it was and it sounded like a big number um we did a back of the envelope calculation at the time it would barely have been able to help BLM to clear the backlog of permit application if fact I so uh Professor Jamie PLO and U and uh her colleagues at the University of Utah did a fascinating study of forest service decision making and and and also they also broke down BLM decision making in terms of of really serious the the management of the process and they were able to show that you know like certain field offices of the BLM operated on apds with amazing uh efficiency whereas others didn’t and it it wasn’t intuitive it was like you know the Anchorage office was led the the pack in terms of of their efficiency um Miles City uh Montana I would have thought would have been fairly efficient but you know for some reason they had some management issues here and that was you know I was I was the deputy solicor for land resources I worked with the the BLM and I could see the difference in management and and the quality of management between you know various offices I really you have to get down into the the weeds in order to find the weeds it doesn’t seem like that’s amable to any sort of easy fixes that’s uh no and it’s not like you can say training or diet and exercise will uh will solve this problem are there I I promise we would leave enough time for questions from the audience are there are there questions please step up to the mic I’d like to get the panel’s thoughts on the likelihood of there being an open transparent Fair public debate about trade-offs involved in I think most of us know you but please introduce yourself just hi my name is Justin Schwab I would like to get the panel’s thoughts on the likelihood of open transparent Fair public debate about tradeoffs involved in Environmental policy in light of the fact that the former EPA administrator and then National Climate adviser repeatedly in National media in the 2021 to 2022 time frame called for the very successful approach to uh discussion on such topics as covid-19 vaccines and the 2020 election she repeatedly called for that same model to be imported with respect to what she referred to as climate disinformation I think that this is a fantasy to think that there will be a fair and open public debate debate about tradeoffs involved in environmental policy and I’d like to know if the other panelists agree with me I think there is zero chance uh because they know they will lose uh on basically everything they want to do and the things they want to do can’t happen we’re not getting to Net Zero by 2050 we’re not going to uh have a 100% renewable grid all of these things are are not uh defensible on the merits which is why they have to be dishonest in their regulatory impact analysis it’s why they have to get out there and make sure that true information is labeled disinformation I think the reason why you see that push towards that is precisely because they don’t they fear being uh uh put on the record with an actual real Fair discussion of it yeah I nepo is designed to actually have that kind of dialogue you know short-term long-term tradeoffs what are you know what are the benefits and uh not necessarily getting into discount rates and and that but um but really just you know articulation a reasonable articulation of the significance of what we’re doing and you know what are the consequences going to be and I’ve just been amazed at the number of times I see for say like a renewable energy project we routinely say oh it’ll produce X many megawatts which will you know power x many homes that’s the metric it gets tried out time and time again I was like no but it’s going on a grid at a particular place at a particular you know profile you know what’s this project going to do uh is it you know is it just gonna you know feed a data center or you know how’s this power going to be used and they there’s really there’s no information about that it’s very very seldom do you actually see something that’s actually locality based and says okay so here’s the real world you know you may have a sort of an affinity for greenhouse gas reduction but here are the real world impacts of this project hi I’m Peter HPR I’m an intelligence analyst and a former Diplomat as far as the data centers for artificial intelligence we’re stuck with that it’s going to happen but there’s another utility for data centers uh that we’re not stuck with and that’s the production of bit chain of uh of cryptocurrency uh by blockchain and China looked at this and said this is a stunning waste of electricity for our country and so we’re going to forbid it and that means that a Chinese person can uh get a visa to go to the US an investor visa can then go to a state with low energy cost establish a Data Center and produce cryptocurrency using American electricity uh for China I’m wondering if there’s any room at all for our Regulators to say Basta enough we’re done with this we’re not going to help China we’re not going to waste all of our energy on producing uh fake money we’re going to stop it I I’ll just address that quickly by saying that that I think this is this is a significant but in the in the bigger picture um what’s really driving uh what’s really driving data uh Center demand in the years ahead is the astonishing amounts of compute power that training and inference requires in in any kind of a for example large language model um a goog I’ll just have a f one quick fact uh a AI assisted Google search consumes more than a hundred times more electricity than a simple Google search and everybody is adopting AI all uh I we’ve looked at at some of these numbers right now we’ve often heard that Google consumes more electricity than this than the country of Ireland country of Ireland is fairly small at the rate that we’re going in the next 3 or four years um the big four meta Amazon uh Microsoft and Google will be consuming more electricity than the entire country of Australia which is the world’s 10 biggest the world’s 10th biggest uh economy uh so these projections are are really enormous and um doing tamping down cryptocurrency um I’m not sure that that would that that would really register on the amount of demand that’s headed our way so the Chinese were foolish to expulse that the Chinese have a bigger problem I think and we can get into this discussion maybe this is for a future regulatory transparency project but the Chinese have now become the world’s principal exponents of the European West failan nation state system and they uh in in the sense that they claim everything uh National sovereignty and anything that’s blockchained threatens the uh political authority of the state and so they they will move against it no I I agree if it’s so worthless it’s strange that so many people would be investing in it in free market countries right I I’m not a a big Bitcoin booster and that doesn’t interest me that much to be frank but uh the notion that that essentially planned uh communist country is going to have better insight into what’s valuable and what’s not compared to the market seems to me um unlikely to be true and if it’s so expensive that it becomes infeasible to do well then you know know there are Market signals that will that will that increases the transaction cost at some point um for Bitcoin mining or whatever it is that you’re trying to do so I I don’t see that as a necessity for a government regulation to fix energy scarcity and the other thing is that the um uh the notion that um you have uh this is what Mario was talking about like the the central the central planning uh state is threatened by things that it can’t control and if we’re talking about fake money of course that that is basically all money nowadays and and so you know fake money that the government can’t control versus fake money that the government can’t control I mean that it doesn’t strike me as having a strong balance one way or the other on this please um my name is Tamar chattery safe Foundation uh not being a lawyer in by profession as an environmental engineer um involved in environmental um uh controls and environmental uh Improvement uh we have always found that whenever the technical people in EPA provided details to environmental controls and when it went to the lawyers it just did some difficult and lot of problematic things and so but yet from 1970 to this day we have had environmental Improvement so so there may be something good in it now my question is will the election since you say that there are regulatory hurdles and that may result in energy scarcity and uh will the next election have any impact could you analyze that and see tell us if that would make any impact so let so let’s just assume that we have a change in administrations what what what do you think we might see and how much could it make it a difference without without Congressional reforms let’s assume that for now exactly great framing of the question um I think there are rules you know we we worked on the Trump uh era permitting reforms and we tried I I know I tried to um make them as bipartisan as possible because uh because we knew that we would need and I think pering reform is going to have to need a bipartisan consensus uh because nothing is worse than politicizing the permitting uh regime and having it just turn into a ping pong that change it was bad enough already uh to have it change every four years is just going to introduce even more uncertainty into the process EPA on the other hand has been as a as the focal point of of democratic party’s climate uh strategies has been really swinging for the fenes the clean the clean power plan um you know the the Obama Administration knew that that rule was dead as Fried Chicken if the Republicans won the 2016 election and they were they wanted to to and it survived court and if it if it could survive Court review be withdrawn and the same that’s even more true for this rule I mean this rule will be withdrawn power plan was was modest compared to yeah modest compared to this these rules will be withdrawn instantly if the if the Republicans win the next election but look what we did and we’ll go into this in the afternoon panel more what we did in the Trump Administration what the Biden admin what the Obama Administration has done on permitting reform with Trump Administration it’s tinkering at the margins of of a problem that only Congress can solve uh and uh and the politics of it are just a big public Choice problem that has defeated uh any of the significant uh permitting reforms right now even if we were and we’ll get again we’ll get into this more in the afternoon but even if we were to miraculously fix the permitting problems we’ve got another problem which is that the inflation reduction act subsidies are poisoning the economics of Base load generation so uh we and so we now need congressional action to at least have a sunset of those subsidies in some year of Our Lord that’s not this fantasy of reaching 75% of Paris agreement targets which could be like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century before we accomplished that um that was okay not a literary reference that was kind of a literary reference I I would say yes but there are couple of caveats on it one is how effectively repeal rules and settlements of litigation are accomplished we saw at the beginning of the Trump Administration the last time that a lot of attempts to change course were stying in the courts two the courts what are the is the Supreme Court going to police the lower courts or is it going to have a more hands-off approach how much Trump law are we going to get with Trump 2.0 it’s big question I think you’re going to see you know all the all the fun that the Northern District of California was having all the fun that the Montana yeah Montana all the fun that was going on in Hawaii I think we’re going to see a lot more of that how effective that is that stying change and how long they can hold that off it’s interesting question I don’t know uh and the third variable I think is um whether they uh whether there are ways in which uh changes can be uh sort of baked in to make them more lasting if if industry looks at things and sees an uncertain regulatory uh environment where they think there’s a good chance things are going to still go in the direction they’re going now they’re going to be building for that future and not for whatever you might put in a regulation that might be gone any Year I’ll just sort of align myself with Mario’s remarks and I think the the goal for any Administration should be not swinging for the fences on a particular policy but uh but um seeking durability seeking impact that lasts over time and so U you know so the 1978 Carter Administration neber eggs were on the books for 40 years uh you know can can I just interrupt and say I used to think that was possible but I looked at the permitting reforms that the Trump Administration did that really were pretty modest and yet they were you know villainized and because they were Trump Administration they you know they had to be undone I and not just modest but disproportionately benefited Ren renewable yeah and that’s and I I share the the fear that we’re now into a pingpong on various issues you know it’s it’s wus and just tick TI tick tick um you know uh ideally um that you know this Administration and any Administration would be looking to try to settle that down recognizing that you know just by nature of the Democracy you’re not going to be in power for forever um yeah but your constituents want you to be ow anyway I I hate to be I hate to be so pessimistic but please uh Bonnie wtel I’m in the investment business great panel by the way uh Mr bowling in your comment the comments about California I’m reminded of uh the uh statement by Milton fredman that efficiency in government is not necessarily an asset if the end they’re pursuing is wrong that is not necessarily applicable here for permitting but I just put it out yeah here’s my question I am I’m really like the question posed by the moderator about ultimately where are we going and I am in no way connected with the nuclear industry but from what I read my understanding is that has to be where we’re going ultimately if for no other reason just driven by the defense imperative we can’t be relying on Chinese solar we have to have the cheapest energy around Silicon Valley is going to do it anyway because they need the en they need this unlimited energy and if people are going to hate fossil fuel so much it’s the only place to go uh you’re reactions well I’ll just start as you certainly recognize that sometimes inefficiency has its own goals and U and its own purpose um and ultimately um you know we you know those goals should be transparent um and I’d say you know I I started off uh I’ve worked through several nuclear renaissan and um and I you know I I was holding out the hope for you know Pebble bed walk away safe nuclear reactors as we were working on during the Bush Administration and you know that and and I I would like to see um that regulatory regime become more efficient um to you know get over the you know the Three Mile Island Fukushima you know paralysis and and move forward um that uh I I’m afraid that I I like to work on things that work um and I like to see things get built and so I’m a little impatient and I haven’t had the patience to stick with nuclear um my hat is off to people who stick with it and I appreciate their their professionalism is anybody optimistic about smrs uh I am but with a with a a big caveat which is the industry needs and and the lawyers who represent the industry need need some change I I I’ll just give one anecdote I I had a pitch that I’ve been kicking around that involved a regulatory challenge to some of what the NRC has been doing vcv smrs and uh you know someone got a second opinion and I saw what this big law partner who has been doing this for his whole career said and it’s like don’t you understand back in the 70s the DC circuit said the NRC can do whatever they want so this is stupid that you would ever want to challenge any of these things because that’s the way it should be it’s like if you’re representing an industry and you’ve only gotten two reactors of any significant size built uh I don’t think you’re going to be effective for ad an effective advocate for it so if that change I mean the fundamentals are good I mean the reason smrs are attractive is simply because it’s so hard to make big stuff right um but the fundamentals are very attractive I think there is a real future for that but it’s going to take changing uh the NRC and the folks who who practice in front of it yeah and I’ll just say that if there’s one thing that Senator Bernie Sanders has always hated more than the Vietnam War it’s nuclear power and uh and the progressive caucus in the house is in box step with him uh on all this on all this stuff and as much as I love the idea of a hippie Revival it’s really bad for nuclear power so Andrew shinsky with Interstate Natural Gas Association of America thank you all um one of the things I wanted to question Mario you brought up the clean power plan 3.0 now um obviously at the time that was argued that was prior to the IRA um talk about you know adequately demonstrated and all that technology does the IRA change the calculus under the underlying substance question for a court taking that up to say okay it was subsidized now it’s adequately demonstrated such that we can prolongate this role moving forward so those two things are orthogonal however you say that word um uh uh I I don’t think that those two things are related um in the sense I thought there was that legislative history that says that was the whole reason for the IRA well but there’s right one statement by one Congressman that was said that that said you know we expect the IRA subsidies be used to to reduce costs um uh um you know the under Section 111 it has it’s the bestest the emissions rate has to has to be based on the best systems of emissions reduction that the administrator determines has been adequately demonstrated taking costs non-air health benefits and energy requirements into account um but at a basic level the question of adequate demonstration is let’s look around the world and see whether any fossil fuel any coal or natural gas plant on planet Earth has been able to use carbon capture technology to reduce emissions by 95% and if you can’t find a single example and there aren’t any um for this particular emissions rate uh um then it doesn’t matter what the cost is um now that so so I I think that the the cases that again I urge everybody to read the cases that EPA is citing for adequate demonstration because they really cut against uh uh they really they really show that EPA is going to face an uphill climb uh uh convincing the DC circuit that that this stuff has been adequately demonstrated but of course it has to take costs into account and um and that can’t be you know as Fabulous As the you know hundreds of billions of dollars of um of of of net benefits are that EPA puts into every rule these days uh uh you there is no legal basis for reducing the cost calculation by the amount of those subsidies none um uh one statement by one Congress person is not uh is not going to suffice can can I take moderator’s uh prerogative here and just answer one other part of that so I agree with all of that but I don’t think it’s enough to find a handful of plants that do this around the world because in epa’s own view the system of emission reduction has to include a system of pipelines and sequest rate I mean you need the whole system even if you believe that this is something that EPA has the authority to do to require people to take measures that are completely out of their control but the idea that we have a system of emission reduction that includes thousands of miles of CO2 pipelines and sequestration sites and and yet again we have an Administration that it’s working completely at Cross purposes because they mandate CCS they supposedly support CCS but do you know how many permits they’ve issued for CCs in the last three years zero I mean there’s no you know and they claim that they’re they’re getting ready to uh but not not not for a power plant so anyway I I don’t think the IRA helps them and I’ll go out in a Lim and say I don’t see how this stands up in in in court but if I may just following up because one of the things that the panel discussed was cost benefit analysis and the fact that they hide the costs or lie about the benefits so to kind of politely push back on the orthagonal portion of that is to say wouldn’t we have to have an accurate accounting of what those cost benefits may be because if they’re the ones saying what the cost benefit looks like wouldn’t that change that calculus sorry to ask that question again so you’re saying because there’s nothing that’s adequately demonstrated based on cost benefit correct but we’re saying before if cost benefit is predicated on you know hidden costs and lied about benefits wouldn’t that change the calculus to your point oh I mean yeah I just think that there you know when this gets if I understand your question correctly when this goes before the inevitable DC circuit you know case on this is going to look very closely at every one of those elements in section 111 energy requirements cost calculation adequate demonstration of course uh and uh and I think you know there there’s certain aspects of this that we can object to but it’s like water under the bridge I mean net health benefits statistical using statistical life and express preferences to calculate net health benefits is something that EPA has been doing for a long time uh and uh I this will not be like the most opportune moment to to l litigate or relitigate that necessarily um but you know one one major vulnerability and I hope to get into this over the lunch hour um uh with administrator wheeler and and chairman Danley is that there’s a lot of you know again the outside the fence line stuff this build out of carbon transport infrastructure it’s not just outside of epa’s jurisdiction it’s outside its expertise and so all of its speculation is just the agency not knowing what it’s talking about uh how long it would take how much would cost to build this pipeline infrastructure out and uh and uh and so you know query whether uh what level of deference courts um courts give to agencies at the frontiers of science when the agency manifestly doesn’t know what it’s talking about thank you depends on your judge draw if you get judge Ginsburg which you won’t for this because it’s a big case but and he’s senior status yeah but I’m not so sure about everyone else on Court well this has been a very uh interesting if somewhat sobering discussion um uh and I think we’re we’re we’ve managed to say exactly on time so it’s 12:00 I will thank all three of you for really a very interesting interesting presentations and especially interesting discussion thanks thanks to all of you thank you and uh thank you for this terrific terrific panel and discussion uh just two points of uh we have a buffet uh lunch which is uh on the left side of the room and you can help yourself and the second order of business is there should be uh Wi-Fi passwords um on your table it uh you’re looking for the Marriott bonvoy Network and the password is one word fed sock 2024 fedock 2024 thank you
Under the Biden administration, the executive branch has issued multiple regulations that have incentivized a transition away from fossil fuels towards a more “Green” electrical grid. How will a transition away from fossil fuels impact the reliability of the grid? With environmental rules that disincentivize internal combustion engines, how will the increase in electrical vehicles affect the grid? Does the grid have the capacity to meet these goals? Will these new demands on the grid impact electricity prices to American consumers? Will these new requirements impact the reliability of the grid?
Featuring:
Edward Boling, Partner, Perkins Coie LLP
-Michael Buschbacher, Partner, Boyden Gray PLLC
-Hon. Jeffrey Holmstead, Partner, Bracewell LLP
-Mario Loyola, Senior Research Fellow, Environmental Policy and Regulation, Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, The Heritage Foundation
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As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speaker.