When it comes to predicting the impact of EPA rules, we can't trust the utility companies

Seven times either I or the SC Small Business Chamber has intervened in rate hearings for SCE&G and Duke Energy.  Seven times the public was told that these power companies had to have every penny of their rate hike proposal or their world would come to an end.  Seven times their rate increases have been cut by about 50% or more by the SC Public Service Commission.  Seven times SCE&G and Duke continued to rack up big earnings after the rate cases were over.

Just last December we settled with SCE&G for a 1.38%  rate hike compared to the 6.6% it asked for.  This month we settled with Duke which had originally asked for a 15.1% overall electric rate increase (14% for small businesses) but in the end was satisfied with a 8.16% overall rate hike (3.42% for small businesses).

This is the background you need to know when utility companies scream that new EPA rules on limiting carbon pollution from coal plants (which account for 40% of our carbon emissions in this country) will cause rates to skyrocket.  The track record shows that you simply can’t believe them. 

Below is a story today in The Hill in which I make this point.

 

The Hill
September 23, 2013

Emissions regulations are central battle in Obama climate agenda

 

 

By Julian Hattem and Ben Goad

If the Obama administration's proposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants become law, they would represent the first major victory for the president on his second-term climate plan. But opponents are not ready to roll over.

 

The Enivronmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposal has reignited a bitter fight over the consequence of the proposed regulations on businesses, with coal country and business groups warning that the announcement will be a death knell for the energy resource and have trickle-down effects throughout the economy.

“The facts are plain and simple: coal provides the greatest share of electricity we use,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. “If these regulations go into effect, American jobs will be lost, electricity prices will soar and economic uncertainty will grow.”

Together with an upcoming proposal to cap emissions from power plants already in existence, Friday’s proposal from the EPA amounts to the centerpiece of the White House’s second-term climate agenda and a major effort to control releases of the primary greenhouse gas.

Power plants are the largest source of carbon emissions, accounting for about 40 percent of the nation’s discharges, but currently they are allowed to spew the gas without limit.

The proposal on future facilities sets caps for the amount of the greenhouse gas that new coal and natural gas plants will be able to send into the atmosphere. The draft rules also call for new coal plants, which emit more carbon than natural gas-fired facilities, to use a carbon capture and storage technology that opponents believe is too expensive and still not yet proven to work as planned.

Requiring that technology could amount to a de facto ban on new coal facilities, they have worried, and could hurt small companies disproportionately.

“It is clear that small facilities with sparse capital reserves will be the most impacted by stringent [greenhouse gas] standards,” the conservative American Action Forum concluded in a report issued Friday. “Even though they contribute less than one percent of U.S. emissions, small entities will face the same regulatory hurdles that large utilities encounter.”

Other businesses, however, counter that the realities of climate change present far worse threats to portions of the private sector than do the proposed regulations. Along the coast of South Carolina, businesses fear rising sea levels that could decimate the state’s retail and tourism industries, said Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.

Knapp rejected claims by industry groups who say the regulations will necessarily raise energy costs for American households.

“The sky is always falling for those guys,” Knapp said. “They simply try to scare the public, and guess what? The next quarter, they’re still making profits – double-digit profits. It’s obscene.”

The White House is comparing its regulatory effort and the opposition it has stirred to Obama’s first-term focus on developing new fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, the second largest source of American carbon emissions.

“We saw a lot of the same naysayers who said that this would be really bad for the auto industry,” Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said on Friday. “But over the course of time in which those rules took effect, we have seen the auto industry strengthen significantly in terms of creating jobs and putting forward better products and improving sales and revenue.”

The administration is predicting that requiring the carbon capture technology will lead to new advancements, making it cheaper and easier to employ.

The power plant rules are the administration’s most prominent environmental and safety regulations of Obama’s second term to date, but they are hardly the only ones.

In recent weeks, the administration has issued proposals to certify that the EPA has the authority to regulate streams, estuaries and smaller bodies of water, and to curb cancer-causing dust that can occur at construction sites.

Coming down the pike are final rules limiting pollution from automobiles, upcoming yearly limits for the amount of biofuel that refiners must blend with conventional gasoline and new standards for smog.

Yet time is growing short for the Obama’s second term regulatory agenda, with the clock already ticking on the president’s time in office.

“It’s important to move quickly, both to finish it in this administration and because we need to end the unlimited dumping of carbon pollution from the existing fleet of coal plants, which are the biggest source of carbon pollution in the country,” Dave Hawkins, head of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate program, said.

The EPA has laid out a schedule of deadlines meant to ensure its goals are accomplished. Pollution standards for existing plants, for instance, are due to be proposed next June and finalized the following year.

“To do what is on his agenda is definitely within the realm of the practical,” said Abigail Dillen, vice president of litigation for climate and energy for EarthJustice.

Regulators certainly aren’t wasting any time. As it unveiled the proposal on Friday, the EPA announced that it would begin outreach on the second set of rules, for currently operational plants, which are sure to face greater opposition.

“We’re beginning the discussion, and as we go through that discussion lots of ideas will come forward about sensible and cost-effective ways to reduce carbon from the existing fleet,” an EPA official said.

Critics of the power plant initiative worry about the dynamic it will create, especially for other industries. 

“This rule sets a dangerous precedent that EPA will soon extend to other sectors, including refineries,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Science Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “It is just the latest example of the President’s all-of-the-above rhetoric not matching his administration’s actions.” 

Ross Eisenberg, the vice president of energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturing, shared Smith’s concern about other sources of greenhouse gases that the EPA might decide to regulate. “It’s chemicals, it’s natural gas distribution systems, it’s iron and steel, metal manufacturing, food distribution,” Eisenberg said. “We’re expecting the decisions and the precedent that’s being set here, in terms of what they can and can’t mandate, what data they need to set this rule, to matter for those follow-on regulations.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/regwatch/energyenvironment/323785-new-emissions-regulations-are-central-battle-in-obama-climate-agenda#ixzz2fioOWDlx

 

 

Blue Tape Marks Climate Change Risks for Coastal Businesses

Bloomberg Businessweek
July 25, 2013

By John Tozzi

 

Sandy Bridges, the owner of Palmetto Hammock in Charleston’s historic market district, is accustomed to flooding in her gift shop, so she keeps the floor clear of the hammocks, clothing, and tourist knick-knacks she sells. The 150-year-old building she occupies is two blocks from Charleston Harbor, and if it rains when the tide is high, the water comes up to her doorstep and sometimes over it. “The wooden flooring is old ship’s decking,” she says. “They understood we were going to get wet.”

The 19^th century South Carolinians who built on the Charleston peninsula didn’t anticipate how wet. Scientists expect sea levels to rise between 8 inches and 6 feet by the end of this century, putting low-lying coastal businesses at risk. To make the threat of climate change clear to her customers, Bridges joined a campaign last week to mark where the high tide in 2100 would be if the worst of those scenarios comes true. A strip of sky-blue tape near the handle of her door indicates the spot. “Where I’m standing right now, the water would be up to my chest,” she says.

About 90 businesses so far have agreed to put tape, decals, or posters in shop windows. The campaign is part of a larger effort to draw attention to the risks that climate change poses to small businesses. “The tourism industry in our state is primarily a small business industry,” says Frank Knapp, president of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, which is recruiting businesses along with the American Sustainable Business Council. “There’s not much greater threat to our tourism industry  

than a destroyed coast.”

Photograph by Kate Thornton for Bloomberg Businessweek

The American Sustainable Business Council and another advocacy group, the Small Business Majority, plan to release a report Thursday showing that “small businesses with fewer locations and limited resources are particularly vulnerable to devastating extreme weather events,” according to a news release from the group.

It’s not hard to imagine Charleston’s low-lying retailers under water, especially after seeing hurricanes flood homes and businesses from New Orleans to New Jersey. When Hurricane Hugo landed in South Carolina in 1989, Bridges says, the property she now occupies had water up to the attic. She knows that businesses near the sea live with the risk of devastating storms, but she’s hoping it’s not too late to keep the coastline from permanently creeping upland. “If the water keeps rising, I feel there’s not going to be much hope to maintain this area,” she says.

Knapp’s group, which has about 5,000 members, hopes that changing tourists’ hearts and minds will prod Washington to act. Visitors to the campaign’s website can send messages to lawmakers urging them to curb carbon emissions and support clean energy sources. There’s little hope of that happening in the current Congress, where Republicans are trying to block White House plans to limit power plant pollution.

Knapp wants at least to show what’s at stake for coastal businesses in the “very red state” of South Carolina. “This is about protecting the South Carolina coastal tourism economy,” he says. The damage from climate change, Knapp says, won’t be felt “in my lifetime. It might be in my daughter’s. It’s definitely in my grandkids’.”

original article