(OPINION) President Joe Biden’s aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent study commissioned by North Dakota’s state government.
The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units.
Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.
The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies.
Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warned after the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would “dwindle to concerning levels” under the regulations.
The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U.S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA’s finalized regulations.
“Biden’s Green Agenda is shutting down baseload power and is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid. Electricity costs are up 30% under Biden already,” North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. “Prices will continue to skyrocket if he’s re-elected as real power demand increases dramatically for the first time in decades—for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI.”
Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden’s regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to “higher prices AND less reliability.”
In April, the EPA finalized the first part of a multi-pronged effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions produced by the nation’s power sector.
The regulations require existing coal plants to slash their carbon footprint 90 percent by 2032, which could force the vast majority of such plants across the country to shutter over the next two decades. They further require significant emissions reductions for new natural-gas-fired power plants that operate more than 20 percent of the time.
