Should FERC have a role in the EPA's Clean Power Plan?

Dive Brief:

The EPA's Clean Power Plan left FERC out of the process, and commissioners at the agency have indicated they want to have a role in ensuring carbon reductions do not impact grid reliability.
FERC Commissioner Tony Clark told E&E Publishing that perhaps a technical conference could be convened to find a way for the agency to provide a high-level view of the potential impacts of carbon reductions. He wants, above all, a formal role for FERC in evaluating the Clean Power Plan.
Collette Honorable, President Obama's nomination to a vacant seat at FERC, has said she would support a technical conference but stopped short of advocating a direct role for the commission.

Dive Insight:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposed Clean Power Plan is aimed at cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 30% below a 2012 benchmark by 2030. But utilities say the proposal is too much, too quickly, and could endanger grid reliability by forcing some plants offline.

The EPA says it wrote significant flexibility into the regulations, but in late October released a notice of data availability in which it conceded "some stakeholders have expressed concerns with the approach that the EPA used to determine states’ interim goals."

"Significant shifts of generation away from coal-fired generators to [Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC)] units ... will be necessary by 2020 and will be difficult for at least some states to reasonably achieve in that timeframe," EPA noted.

FERC's Clark said he would support a technical conference on how the commission can be involved. "There's got to be somebody who takes a look at it from the 20,000-foot level and can say, 'Wait a second, what you're telling these utilities to do over here doesn't work over there, and it's going to cause reliability problems,'" he told E&E.

Honorable, who did not directly advocate for a role in her testimony before a Senate committee last week, said she has a history of pushing for "infrastructure development to ensure safety and efficiency, increased reliability and resilience efforts, diversity of energy and of our energy workforce."