This morning, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its much-anticipated Clean Power Plan Rule, loosely known to energy insiders as “the carbon rule.” Building on a key section of President Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan, the rule sets guidelines for states to follow in meeting a nationwide goal of carbon emissions that are 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy stressed that the plan was meant to give states the flexibility to respond to requirements according to their own particular circumstances and resources. So, what will it mean for Nevada?
Due to the passage of Senate Bill 123 in the 2013 legislative session, the state is already on the right track. That plan called for the Nevada’s major utility (NV Energy, although it’s not named in the bill) to reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity plants and replace the capacity of these plants with “increased capacity from renewable energy facilities and other electric generating plants.”
Environmentalists have roundly applauded both the EPA’s carbon rule and Nevada’s plan as solid moves in the right direction. But the specifics of the state’s future energy mix remain murky — and potentially leave something to be desired when it comes to renewables.
A state-by-state map developed for the Clean Power Plan shows that, as of 2012, Nevada’s energy mix was 73 percent natural gas, 12 percent coal-fired, 7 percent hydroelectric, 1 percent solar and .4 percent wind. With NV Energy’s plans to shut down Reid-Gardner Generating Station and stop buying power from the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona — both coal-fired — the percentage of coal will go down. But what will replace it?
“We have a lot of natural gas,” says Jane Feldman, chair of Sierra Club's Nevada Energy Task Force. “It does burn cleaner than coal, but it’s a fossil fuel; it’s still not clean. There are fracking problems. And if you don’t have pipelines, you have to use rail cars (which burn fossil fuels) to transport it.”
Sierra Club and other environmental groups are pulling for increased renewable energy development in the state to balance the heavy reliance on natural gas. Nevada is already a leader in this regard, says Clean Energy Project, noting that $500 million in state tax abatements have reaped $5.5 billion in private investment in solar, wind and geothermal resources since 2010.
But there’s much more that could be done, Feldman says, such as removing caps on net metering, which would encourage rooftop solar development.
“We don’t need to take acres of pristine desert and sterilize them for solar fields,” she says. “We need to be moving in the direction of rooftop solar. There are places that have 35 percent solar on the grid, and they don’t have brownouts. We need to stop being so overly cautious and just go with our strengths.”
