Curious for your back-of-the-envelope assessment: Let’s say EPA stops enforcing air and water rules for power plants. Would doing so ease regulatory pressure enough on coal-fired power plants to put them back in the money and farther up the dispatch curve? Or is the regulatory structure such that state enforcement would mean that “turning off” environmental controls would not be an option?
It would seem, too, that the economics of natural gas remain a tangible factor in coal’s viability, not to mention state-by-state renewable energy targets, as well as regional market structures that some believe are making nuclear power uneconomic.
Your thoughts?
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