Saturday, December 24, 2011
If the Lights Go Out - WSJ.com
Although our air seems pretty clean, I'm sure it could be better, and that should be the goal.
That being said, it doesn't seem to be a "crisis", so I'm thinking there is time to "do no harm"...
That being said, it doesn't seem to be a "crisis", so I'm thinking there is time to "do no harm"...
This is from a recent Wall Street Journal opinion column:
"Last week FERC convened a conference on the wave of new Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to force dozens of coal-fired power plants to shut down. The meeting barely fulfilled the commission's legal obligations, but despite warnings from expert after expert, including some of its own, the FERC Commissioners refuse to do anything about this looming threat to electric reliability.
The latest body to sound the EPA alarm is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which last Tuesday released its exhaustive annual 10-year projections. 'Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years,' the report explains.
NERC's forecasts are the gold standard for the U.S. power system because they are built from the bottom up, starting with finely grained data from individual plants. NERC has been doing this work since 1967, and since 2005 it has operated under the FERC umbrella as an 'electric reliability organization' similar to Finra, the securities regulator with quasi-governmental duties."
