Today, Explained - Can power plants go green?

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

The EPA has just announced new rules for power plants to clean up their act. But to get to those lower limits, companies might have to switch to two largely untested technologies in the power sector: hydrogen production and carbon capture. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American power plants are going to have to change. President Biden's EPA just announced some new restrictions. These aren't restrictions, as some would say. Oh, sorry, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, what is the situation then? We have an obligation to not only leave behind a healthier planet for generations that will come after us, but to leave behind a fairer and more just society. Hmm, that sounds good. But what's in the new rules? Folks, this is our future we're talking about.

Okay, what if, can we explain the new regulations? Failure is not an option. Understood. The new rules for power plants and the technologies that will enable a greener future. Inaction is not an option. I get it. Coming up on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever.

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Ciao! Ciao! Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Sto ascoltando Oggi Spiegato. Today explain, explain, explain, explain. My name is Nicholas Kuznets, and I'm a reporter at Inside Climate News, where I write mostly about oil and gas. What did the EPA announce last week? So the EPA announced new rules that would drastically limit climate pollution from the power sector.

We're proposing new technology standards that would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet. It applies to coal and gas-fired power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet. It applies to coal and gas-fired power plants and sets a series of dates beginning in the 2030s saying that if these plants are going to continue operating for decades, they need to start using technologies to do that,

including carbon capture technology. The power sector is, along with transportation, one of the two biggest sources of climate pollution in the country. And so in order for the country to meet the climate goals it set, which, you know, for Biden administration, net zero across the economy by 2050, and he set even sooner to get zero emissions from the power sector. There need to be rules in place that cover all these different parts of the economy. This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis.

How does the power sector end up being such a big contributor to climate change? What's happening there? The emissions are pretty much all coming from coal and natural gas being burned at power plants. And, you know, that's where we get a large chunk of our electricity. And coal has been shrinking in the share that it holds in the power sector over the last 20 years. But there's still a significant piece of the electricity is being generated by coal-fired power plants. And so the EPA's new rules or new regulations, what would change?

The rules basically set limits and targets for cutting the greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. When finalized, these technology standards are expected to avoid 617 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by the year 2042. Folks, that's equivalent to the annual emissions of 137 million cars and passenger vehicles. There's flexibility for how individual plants can do that and how states can do that. And so it's going to be different around the country. And there's no specific requirements. But for a coal or gas-fired power plant, there's really only a couple of options. You can shut it down, of course, and replace it with renewable power like wind and solar.

And at least currently, that's generally the cheapest option. But another option would be to put carbon capture equipment onto the power plant that would actually take the carbon dioxide that's coming out of the smokestacks, capture it, compress it, and then send it somewhere for storage. But currently, there are no commercial-scale carbon capture operations on power plants. And there's been efforts to do this for years. There was one operating for just a few years before it shut down. It's largely unproven technology, at least in the power sector.

Tell me what carbon capture is and how it works. Sure. So it's a technology or really like a suite of technologies, because there are different ways to do this, that pulls carbon dioxide out of smokestack emissions. So you attach this equipment and it can be like a solution that the emissions that are coming up the smokestack have to go through. And then there's chemicals in that equipment that bind to the carbon dioxide and pull it out. Once it's pulled out, it has to be compressed to the point of where it's a liquid, and then it can be piped somewhere and generally pumped underground to store it, ideally, indefinitely. Does it work? Does it remove carbon from the atmosphere the way it's intended to?

Well, I think there's a recurring theme here, which is the answer is technically yes, but in the real world, it's a little more complicated. So technically, the technology is proven to work and storage can work. But one of the biggest problems is it's very expensive. And particularly when you're trying to apply it to a power plant, it's very expensive. So expensive that no one's doing it. So that's been the biggest problem. And, you know, when it comes to the power sector, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the big climate and tax bill that Congress passed last year, the signature sort of climate bill of the Biden administration. This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever, ever. It included tax incentives that were supposed to make carbon capture a

little more cost effective. And so that kind of set the stage for this rule now. And what the Biden administration is effectively saying is, okay, power sector, you've said you can use this technology. Here you go. Now's your shot. So far, at least, the utilities have balked. They basically said this is too expensive and we can't do it. So on the one hand, you have companies saying this is an important technology. On the other hand, for years, they continue to say it's not quite ready commercially. So, you know, it's going to be kind of a put up or shut up moment, I think. Let's go back to the bigger thing that we're talking about today, which is the EPA rules.

Why is it that the EPA is the one enforcing this or forcing us to do this? Well, Congress passed the Clean Air Act decades ago, and that gave EPA authority use that law to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, but it's also greatly restricted exactly how the EPA can do that. Well, good afternoon, everybody. In the Obama administration, they passed rules that were meant to cut greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. And today, after working with states and cities and power companies, the EPA is setting the first ever nationwide standards to end the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from power plants. But they were challenged in court, and ultimately the Supreme Court tossed them and ruled that they were unconstitutional.

So these rules were developed after that decision. And so, you know, very much had that decision in mind and are meant to be more workable. There was also another change since then, which is that in the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year, Congress gave authority to do this. So that's not to say that it can't be tossed again.

You know, there will surely be legal challenges. Republican attorneys general have been challenging Biden administration rules, pretty much all of the major ones coming out. And the Supreme Court has already shown that it's often very skeptical of these kinds of regulations. So there could certainly be challenges that could stick with this, too. All right. So the news comes down. The EPA is making power plants do this. And then what's the reception? Who's saying what about this? Democrats and most environmental groups have been really supportive and said this is what we need to set the country on the right track to limit climate pollution. Republicans immediately came out strongly against the rule,

and certain industries have come out somewhat critically, though it's a bit more complex there. But importantly, also Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, which is a state that gets something like 90% of its power from coal, has been really critical. Actually, before the rule even came out, he said he would block all the administration's nominees to the EPA in response to this rule. And he's in a position to do that because he heads the Energy Committee. This is a no. Without getting to the nitty-gritty of the rules, the Biden administration has a goal of zero climate pollution from the power sector by 2035. And so the rules get a long way to that goal, but they explicitly do not meet it.

And so there's some environmentalists who are, you know, pushing for the final rule to go further. What else is the Biden administration doing to get at the problem of emissions? The Biden administration recently came out with rules meant to do something similar for the transportation sector. Tonight, the Biden administration is hoping to put the brakes on climate change by proposing some of the toughest regulations yet on vehicle emissions. So they've been coming out with rules sort of going sector by sector. And there's this big rush to get the rules in place, not just before the end of Biden's term, but to have them in place early enough in the term that they can't be repealed if Republicans take control of the White House and Congress

in the next elections. Because there's this law called the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to repeal rules that have been passed within the previous 60 days. So there's a big rush to get all these rules in place because a rule gets introduced, and then there's a public comment period, and then there's a final version that has to be developed. And so it's a very lengthy process. And they're trying to get all of this done so that it's not completed in those last 60 days of the administration. It's very hard to say, you know, how this will shape up, right? I mean, we don't know about the legal challenges, for example. And of course,

we don't know who wins in 2024. But one thing that's in their favor is the economics have been working in the favor of renewable power. Coal used to be the largest source of electricity in this country. It's now about 20%. So that trend has been happening. And of course, there's real global imperative with nations all around the world trying to do this at the same time. But the bad news is it's not happening fast enough. So there need to be rules in place

to make sure it continues and speeds up. Nicholas Kuznets of Inside Climate News on carbon capture. There is another way to clean up power plants. I just learned about it, although scientists have been watching it for a while. And it is making a lot of people wildly optimistic. That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Leah, start by giving me your full name and telling me what you do. My name is Leah Stokes, and I am an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, where I work on climate and clean energy policy. Okay, so Leah, power plant operators are going to have to cut emissions. That's what the EPA says, the Biden administration says. One way to do that is carbon capture. But from what I'm reading, a lot of people seem much more excited about hydrogen. Can you explain why?

What is the headline with hydrogen? Yeah, well, the first thing to remember is that it's not really the Biden EPA that's saying we have to deal with power plant pollution. It's actually the Supreme Court. Way back in 2007, they had a decision, Massachusetts versus EPA, and it said that the federal government has a requirement under the Clean Air Act to deal with carbon pollution if it endangers Americans' health. And it said that the federal government has a requirement under the Clean Air Act to deal with carbon pollution if it endangers, you know, Americans' health. And it sure does. That's been found for a long time. So, I mean, 2007 was not yesterday. I remember when that happened. I was a child.

Yeah, you were a child. You're still youthful. I don't believe that. So, you know, the fact is that this is a long time coming. It's just basic regulations that are required under the Clean Air Act to deal with pollution at power plants. And so there's been another Supreme Court decision in the interim. This is West Virginia versus EPA last year. And what that said was that if and when the Environmental Protection Agency finally deals with carbon pollution from power plants, it needs to happen at the power plant, what's called within the fence line. So if you're going to deal with carbon pollution within the fence line, you have to use the technologies that are available that are relatively cost effective and have been tried to some degree. And so what technologies are there? Well, there is carbon capture and sequestration. And then there's also blending into gas hydrogen as another chemical that isn't as much of a greenhouse gas.

So rather than just burning fossil gas, you can blend it with hydrogen and burn hydrogen and fossil gas together. And both of these techniques would reduce carbon pollution at a power plant. OK, that's very cool. So then all it takes is we've got to get a bunch of hydrogen to mix in with the natural gas. How do we go about doing that? Yeah, so this brings in another big topic, which is that the Inflation Reduction Act, this really big climate bill that passed last year through Congress, it included a tax credit that is going to incentivize the production of clean hydrogen.

The Biden administration is betting big on green hydrogen, investing billions of dollars in tax incentives and research and development. This is called 45V for those in the know who care about weird numbers and letter strings in the tax code. For the rest of us, it just basically means that there's now money for people who want to go make clean hydrogen. But the big debate that's happening right now is, well, what is clean hydrogen? How do we know that it was actually produced cleanly? Hydrogen is bound by some inconvenient facts of physics. Breaking it from oxygen in water requires huge amounts of energy, which to be climate friendly, must come from low carbon sources like wind or nuclear nuclear already much in demand.

And what I have been saying along with a lot of other smart folks is that that hydrogen needs to be produced through clean power that is new, that is actually in the same place where the hydrogen is being made and at the same time. So if you want to say that you made clean hydrogen, you've got to be actually drawing on a power source to run what's called your electrolyzer that makes that hydrogen with new clean power at the same time in the same place. Okay, so the term clean hydrogen, which I'm just coming across now, makes me think that there is something also that is dirty hydrogen. There sure is.

Yeah, hydrogen comes in a rainbow of colors, like gray hydrogen. The majority of hydrogen is right now made with fossil fuels. And so gray hydrogen is made with natural gas, fossil gas. It's very polluting. But you can make it with renewables. So think about wind energy, for example. Let's say you have a wind project. You just built it. It's new. And, you know, there are some times that you're providing electricity to the grid because the grid is going to pay you a really good price and it needs a lot of electricity. But there are other times when the grid doesn't want to pay you as much because

there's too much electricity on the grid at that time. Well, why don't you use that wind energy to run an electrolyzer that can basically store that extra energy in a chemical form? That chemical form is called hydrogen. It's like you're making a fuel. And so that's called green hydrogen because green hydrogen is made with low carbon energy sources like wind energy, solar energy, etc. So there's a whole variety of ways that you can make hydrogen, and they all come in different colors, but the gold standard in this case is green, and that's hydrogen made with clean, new, renewable energy.

But it sounds like if there was a lot of money, billions of dollars, in fact, in the Inflation Reduction Act to produce clean hydrogen, at the moment, the United States doesn't have what it needs. That's right. So why do we need clean hydrogen in the first place? Well, there are parts of our economy that right now run on fossil fuels that are really hard to stop running on fossil fuels. So this is things like what we call heavy industry, making steel, for example. It's also things like aviation. When you go in a plane somewhere, right, you're using jet fuel. And it's really hard to swap that out, for example, with a battery,

because batteries are heavy and planes need to be light to fly. So the amount of energy you can store in that battery, it doesn't really work to like take off. So we need a liquid fuel that can still run a plane. Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in really hard to decarbonize parts of our economy. What are the challenges to producing clean hydrogen? I mean, I hear you saying if we could do this thing at scale, we could be looking at incredible changes in this country. Yeah, I think there's lots to be optimistic about hydrogen, actually. And the federal government put like hundreds of billions of dollars towards this

because it's not just the tax credit. There was another law passed that created hydrogen hubs. So there's a lot of money flowing into hydrogen right now. So we need to scale up hydrogen really rapidly. And for some people, they're thinking that that means that we can sacrifice in the short term, that even if hydrogen is dirty in the short run, what we really need to do is scale up this industry. And so it's more important that in the long run, we have a big industry that can clean up pollution. And what I say to that is that does not make sense for two reasons. One, you can't ruin the reputation of a technology and expect that to just go away.

Think about nuclear energy, right? Nuclear is a carbon-free resource and it remains very unpopular and very controversial. So hydrogen, if we want it to be a technology that people like, that they accept, we can't have it causing pollution in the short run. That's not going to be good branding for this industry long term. And the other thing is that the kinds of electrolyzers,

the machines that make hydrogen, the kinds that we want, they're not as available right now. We want them to be what's called flexible so that when we have too much energy on the grid, right, like, oh my gosh, we have all this extra wind and solar. What are we going to do it? The electrolyzer can ramp up and store that extra power as a fuel. And then at other times when the sun has gone to bed, when the wind's not blowing, that electrolyzer can turn off and say, oh, I don't have anything to do right now.

I'm just going to chill. And the electrolyzers that we currently have more like run 24-7. And that isn't actually the kind of technology that we need. So we have to set the rules in such a way that we actually incentivize green hydrogen and the technologies like flexible electrolyzers that would go along with renewable energy to really make clean hydrogen over the long run. You know, look, often when we talk about climate change, you know this as well as I do. In fact, you probably encounter it as often as I do. I think it seems like there are a lot of good ideas out there, but very few of them are going to happen in the next year or two years or five years in enough time to make a difference, right, in the shorter term. But what I hear you saying is that we are inexorably moving toward a world where clean hydrogen is part of the equation, and it might happen fairly soon.

I mean, I'm coming away feeling optimistic, and that worries me. No, no. Why not be optimistic? Join me in the future where we have solved climate change. I live in that part of my mind regularly. I mean, I would challenge your view and not because I don't adore you. You're fabulous. But because I want you to be a little more optimistic, we have the vast majority of the technologies we need to take on the climate crisis. What are those technologies? Let's talk about it. The first thing is we have to clean up the electricity sector.

And that's partially what the EPA is doing here. When we get to 100 percent clean power, as President Biden has committed to doing by 2035, that's going to clean up about one quarter of our carbon pollution. All right. How do we do more? Well, then we can electrify everything we can. So cars, our homes, right? Even parts of heavy industry, we can use electricity. We can use that clean power to run lots of parts of our lives. These are cool things like heat pumps, induction stoves, electric vehicles, e-bikes, you name it. Okay, that's going to do another half of the problem. So we've now solved three quarters

of the problems with two things, clean electricity plus electrification. Now we've got that last quarter. That's the tricky stuff. That is where clean hydrogen lives. That's how we're going to clean up heavy industry, airplanes, parts of the agriculture sector for things like fertilizer. Hydrogen is playing a really key role in cleaning up that last quarter of the problem. So I'm very optimistic that this tax credit for hydrogen, a nice stable, fat amount of money is going to create a lot of innovation, a lot of deployment, and we are going to be a lot further along with hydrogen electrolyzers in, you know, five years from now than I think anybody really understands. Leah Stokes, optimist and professor at UC Santa Barbara. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Amin El-Sadi.

It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.