During President Obama's Administration, a number of new environmental rules have been proposed, finalized and/or published that appear to be targeted at coal and oil fired utility scale electric generating units (EGU's). To be fair, many of these initiatives were set into motion in previous Administrations, going back to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. However, aggressive regulation of coal-fired units in particular has led to the common characterization that these requirements when taken together constitute a "train wreck" (see Figure 1) for the U.S. electric power sector. We are already seeing significant existing U.S. coal capacity permanently shut down and replaced with natural gas combined cycle - an outcome which appears to be the preferred energy policy of the Administration. While the body of these regulations must be viewed in-total, four of these rules are summarized as context to the hypothetical case study presented in this paper. The four rules include; 316 (b) of the Clean Water Act, Coal Combustion Residuals, mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) and the Cross State Air Pollution Rule.
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