Environmental Regulatory Change: A Practical Step Utilities Can Take
Environmental regulation affecting the power sector has shifted across administrations for more than a decade, creating an ongoing challenge for utilities making long-term operational and investment decisions. With significant regulatory activity continuing today, Balch partner Claire Johnson explains why participating directly in the rulemaking process can help utilities ensure their individual concerns and operational realities are part of the regulatory record.
Power companies plan years—and often decades—ahead, while the environmental regulatory landscape can change much more quickly. That dynamic has persisted across administrations and can make it difficult for utilities to evaluate long-term investments, operations and compliance strategies with certainty. Recent forecasts of significantly increasing load demand, and changing regulatory developments underscore why generators should remain engaged as policies evolve. Industry groups play an important role in the rulemaking process, but it is important for individual power plant owners to consider their specific operational concerns and priorities. By participating directly in rulemakings, power plant operators can help ensure those perspectives are heard and documented, creating a record that can remain valuable as load grows and regulations and administrations change.
GET AHEAD OF THE CURRENT
In Balch & Bingham’s Get Ahead of the Current Video series, our attorneys share insight on the issues shaping the energy industry and other highly regulated sectors, along with the experience, perspective, and client-focused approach they bring to helping organizations prepare for what’s next.
Claire Johnson counsels clients navigating environmental regulatory compliance issues, environmental permitting, and environmental litigation on both the state and federal level. She routinely works with power cooperatives and large power companies, and their trade groups, on nationwide Clean Air Act (CAA) matters, including rulemaking comments and appellate rulemaking challenges, and New Source Review and Title V issues. She has experience representing clients on CAA matters in front of the D.C. Circuit, Fifth Circuit, and Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Claire also has experience with other major environmental regulations, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), and their state counterparts.
TRANSCRIPT
One challenge that the power sector is facing today is a lack of durability in environmental regulations.
Each administration has over the past decade or so come in and repeal and replaced the policies of the prior administration and that lack of durability, it really affects the power sector because the power sector requires long term planning
one thing we counsel our clients to do is participate in rulemaking, which means submitting comments on proposed rules. That can be really beneficial because you get in front of the agency and the administration and you make sure that your concerns are heard. We also counsel clients. A lot of our power sector clients are part of industry groups and industry groups do a great job of commenting on rulemaking, but I think it's also important that each utility think long and hard about submitting their own comments because sometimes important nuances can get lost in industry comments and what's really important to you on a day-to-day basis needs to be heard by the administration, by the agency. It needs to be in the record now so that when a new administration comes, they can look back in the docket in the record and see the comments and understand what's important to you in the environmental regulatory realm.
Balch's environmental team has more experience with the power sector than most law firms across the country and we serve not only very large power companies, but we also serve small power cooperatives and we see what each of those types of power companies need and the important differences between those types of clients. We as a group have many decades of experience specifically servicing the power sector and helping them understand environmental regulations. We have people on our team who know what the 2008 GHG rule says and every single iteration up until today and that sort of history and experience specifically in the power sector really cannot be substituted.
