Reducing Greenhouse Gases and Improving Air Quality Through Energy Efficiency Power Plants: Cutting Through the Fog to Help Air Regulators “Build' EPPs

摘要

Half of Americans live in areas violating national health-based air quality standards.Coal- and gas-fired power plants are important contributors to the problem. The Clean Air Acthas historically addressed power plants through regulation of smokestack emissions, employing“stovepiped,” pollutant-by-pollutant control strategies. Air quality has improved, but throughduplicative or conflicting requirements and at ever-increasing cost. Worse, such controls oftenincrease CO2 emissions, consume additional water, and create thermal discharge and ash disposalconcerns. This paper summarizes recent efforts to help air regulators consider energy efficiencyprograms as a viable alternative to smokestack controls. It outlines the regulatory challenges thatmust be addressed and legal constructs that can be used, and it highlights specific steps that theenergy efficiency community can and should take. The paper also presents a planning tool todemonstrate to regulators how the effects of many different efficiency measures installed bymany different customers can be aggregated in a sufficiently rigorous and detailed way to meetregulatory needs. Our hope is that the emissions reductions from an “Efficiency Power Plant”could be accepted by EPA and state air regulators in ways that are analogous to those frommobile sources (e.g., vehicles) . The tool enables users to input as few as ~20 assumptions aboutthe number of different “proxy” efficiency measures that will be installed, and generates seasonaland hourly emissions reduction profiles. Preliminary discussions with air regulators suggest thetool offers great promise for illustrating the impact of multiple pollutants, not only for CO2 butfor criteria pollutant emissions as well.