14 thoughts on “The Illegal Unconstitutional EPA Power Grab”

  1. Rand, the page layout of your blog is broken for narrow displays with Chrome on Windows systems. The left margin pushes over the middle column on narrow windows rather than disappearing as it does under IE and Firefox.

    1. Now it’s displaying correctly for me in Chrome. My Chrome browser must have got in a funny state. Sorry for the distraction.

      1. Huh, that is weird. It does the same thing on my work laptop where I have one of my display flipped to portrait orientation. But it’s been stuck that way ever since the last format change. *shrug* I just drag the tab over to the other monitor that is still in normal landscape orientation.

    2. I’ve been having that issue in Opera.

      Also, on page 236 of the EPA plan it says: “The EPA is aware of at least four affected EGUs located in Indian country:”

      When the military used that same term in Iraq they were decried as racists.

    3. I have that problem, too, when the window is about 1100 pixels wide. It’s ok when the window is either narrower or wider.

  3. On page 28 it says:

    For fossil fuel-fired steam generating units, we are finalizing an emission performance rate of 1,305 lb CO2/MWh.

    1,305 lbs of CO2 would come from 356 lbs of carbon, and coal has 14.6 MJ/pound, so there’s only 5,214 megajoules in the carbon they’ll allow to be burned to produce 3,600 MJ of electricity (there’s 3600 MJ in a MWh). That would require an efficiency of 69 percent in a Rankin cycle steam plant, which is simply not going to happen.

    I think I can get upwards of 80 percent efficiency in a bizarre split-cycle Ericsson-cycle engine, but I’d have to build an experimental prototype, and it can’t use solid pistons or turbines because of the extremely high combustion temperatures. I can picture the compression and expansion cycles but I’m still rough on how they’ll interact with the heat transfer sections to form a complete engine.

    1. I could get 99% out of a Stirling engine, if it was in orbit and the cold side was 3 Kelvin. But that would be for a solar power satellite.

    2. There are different rules for new, modified, and reconstructed plants, and whether they’re pure steam plants (a proxy for coal), or combustion turbines. This summary didn’t make my head hurt too much. Bottom line:

      New steam (coal): 1400 lb/MWh
      Modified steam: TBD
      Reconstructed steam: 1800 lb/MWh for plants with >=2000 MMBtu/h, 2000 lb/MWh for plants with 50% of the cost of an equivalent new plant). And they haven’t even come up with the standards for “modified” plants, which include any change that increases the power (and hence emission) output. The bottom line is that the moment you so much as breathe on your coal physical plant, you’re dead. Or at least you’re buying emissions credits from somebody.

      Of course, the unintended consequence is that nobody will breathe on them, and they’ll become unsafe and inefficient, because why waste the sunk cost?

      I think the “flexible state plan” stuff is largely bullshit, in that all they’ve done is added up the existing and planned generating capacity and applied the above standards to them. On the other hand, it makes the whole regulatory regime delightfully incomprehensible. Since hiding the cost from the rate-paying public is the name of the game, it succeeds beautifully.

  5. OT: The Amazon Affiliate search box is not working for me, at least on Safari under iOS 8. Instead, I get a static(?) picture with the text “Let’s Fight Hunger Together.”

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