Saturday, November 22, 2014

Stop Carbon Capture


 
By 2020, the aver­age annual house­hold gas and elec­tric bill in Ver­mont will increase by more than $880, thanks to the Obama administration’s pro­posal to reg­u­late car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from U.S. power plants.  COST OF GOING GREEN: New car­bon reg­u­la­tions from the EPA will cause Ver­mon­ters’ res­i­den­tial gas and elec­tric bills to rise 36 per­cent over the next five years.
A study released Thurs­day by Energy Ven­tures Analy­sis, a Virginia-based con­sult­ing firm, finds that EPA reg­u­la­tions will spike power and gas costs for res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial and indus­trial cus­tomers by an esti­mated $284 bil­lion over the next five years. The increase rep­re­sents a 60 per­cent rise as Amer­i­cans can expect to watch coal-based elec­tric­ity decline and nat­ural gas prices rise.  View the entire report online at the Energy Ven­tures Analy­sis website.
While the report shows that Amer­i­can house­holds over­all will see elec­tric­ity and nat­ural gas bills rise about $680 annu­ally com­pared to 2012, Ver­mon­ters will expe­ri­ence an even higher increase. Ver­mon­ters paid an aver­age of $2,466 for gas and elec­tric bills in 2012; they will pay $3,348 in 2020. The cost of elec­tric­ity will increase the most in states that have imple­mented dereg­u­la­tion of whole­sale elec­tric power mar­kets, the report claims.
More­over, the power rate increase for indus­trial use is pro­jected to rise from 10 cents per kilo­watt hour to 12.3 cents per kilo­watt hour, accord­ing to the report.
The total annual cost of power and gas in Ver­mont will top $1 bil­lion in 2020, a $300 mil­lion cost increase over 2012. Elec­tric­ity costs make up $200 mil­lion of that total increase.
“EVA’s analy­sis is the first to fully exam­ine the com­bined eco­nomic impacts of the EPA’s long list of pro­posed and final­ized reg­u­la­tions on the elec­tric power indus­try, includ­ing the Mer­cury and Air Toxic Stan­dards, regional haze reg­u­la­tions and the Clean Power Plan, whose four build­ing blocks are based on flawed assump­tions,” said Seth Schwartz, pres­i­dent of Energy Ven­tures Analysis.
“For exam­ple, exist­ing coal-fueled gen­er­at­ing facil­i­ties are already oper­at­ing at very effi­cient lev­els and, col­lec­tively, will not be able to achieve an addi­tional 6 per­cent heat rate improvement.”
In recent years, the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency has issued a slew of reg­u­la­tions on the elec­tric power sec­tor, the major­ity of which tar­get power plant emis­sions under the author­ity of the Clean Air Act. The new rules claim to address CO2 emis­sions, ozone and par­tic­u­late mat­ter, inter­state trans­port of air pol­lu­tion, mer­cury and air tox­ics, haze and more. Each of the new reg­u­la­tions imposes new costs on elec­tric power com­pa­nies and, by exten­sion, their customers.
The report claims the indus­trial sec­tor will be hurt the most, espe­cially alu­minum, steel and chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers, as these indus­tries need reli­able low-cost elec­tric­ity to com­pete globally.
High-cost renew­ables gen­er­a­tion is expected to dou­ble in Ver­mont at the same time whole­sale nat­ural gas prices will more than double.

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