Environmental Protection Agency

Clean Air Rules: A New Roadmap for the Power Sector

How new market-based regulations fit with today’s programs.

What do the Clean Air Interstate Rule, the Clean Air Mercury Rule, and the Clean Air Visibility Rule require of the power sector? Authors from the Environmental Protection Agency review implementation progress.

A Climate Emergency?

Capacity shortages from global warming should be the real cause for alarm.

Suppose the experts are wrong about climate change. Suppose they’ve underestimated the impact of global warming. Of course, to longtime readers of Public Utilities Fortnightly, the idea that a warming climate might force adjustments in utility resource plans is nothing new.

Power-Plant Development: Raising the Stakes

Duke Energy’s Jim Turner and other utility executives weigh the odds on billion-dollar bets.

The heavy investment required for new generation technologies clearly is a global phenomenon, but global-resource competition to build power plants is making power-plant development more expensive—and may even limit the number that any one utility in any one country can develop.

Demand Response: The Green Effect

How demand response programs contribute to energy efficiency and environmental quality.

Demand response reduces overall energy usage, but the magnitude of the reduction depends on whether the technologies are developed and deployed with efficiency in mind.

Letters to the Editor

John D. Chandley, Principal, LECG LLC: Bruce Radford’s “An Inconvenient Fact” provides a helpful critique of a fundamental element of open-access transmission reform, one of the most important rulemaking cases affecting electricity regulation at FERC.

Cynthia Bogorad, Spiegel & McDiarmid, Washington: From my perspective representing transmission-dependent utilities, I am very sympathetic to the underlying concerns that appear to be driving the TDAs’ proposal. However, the TDAs’ proposal is not the answer.

Why You Should Care About CAIR

New provisions nearly eliminate the financial impacts of the rule’s ozone regulations.

As of 2009, annual caps on NOx emissions imposed by the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) nearly will eliminate the financial impacts of CAIR’s ozone provisions. What does this mean for your utility?

Trading on Carbon: How Markets Will Save the World

Utilities should plan for U.S.-wide CO2 emissions restrictions that will be more effective than state efforts.

Utilities need to begin planning for U.S.-wide emissions restrictions that will be more effective than state efforts. Such restrictions are no longer a matter of “if,” but “when.”

A Utility Executives' Guide to 2007: A Cloudy Forecast

Experts predict the top issues that utilities will have to weather this year, and beyond.

A soup-to-nuts preview of the next 12 months that touches on spinoffs and interest rates, climate change and New Source Review, the future of nuclear, investor returns, and natural-gas price volatility.

Supreme Court RoundUP: Pivotal Cases for the Clean Air Act

How greenhouse gases and Best Available Control Technology could shape the regulatory landscape—and the environment.

Two cases involving traditional pollutants and climate change are before the court. In addition to questions about the EPA’s regulatory power, both cases raise critical threshold “jurisdictional” questions about the courts’ role in addressing these issues.