#cepp

This post and all the keyboarding I’m doing here about this proposed clean energy program will become irrelevant if the so-called “progressive wing” of the dems and the two corporate shill dem senators insist on pursuing their ego trips and/or campaign contribution donors and refuse to put something together that will let us move forward with a climate package. Forget the republicans.....they are giggling away at this nightmare, but that’s about all they can do because they do nothing else.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

President Joe Biden ran on a platform that promised climate action on a scale never seen before in American politics. One of the supporting beams of that plan is something called a clean energy standard — a mandate for utilities to generate a certain amount of clean electricity by a set date. Biden’s proposed standard targeted a carbon-free electricity sector — the second-most polluting slice of the emissions pie in the U.S. behind transportation — by 2035.

Congressional Democrats sought to put that clean energy standard into Biden’s first major legislative priority — a $2 trillion infrastructure package aimed at improving the nation’s infrastructure and simultaneously reducing emissions. But a handful of centrist Republicans and Democrats succeeded in whittling down the package by about a trillion dollars and removing the standard from the bill, which has already passed the Senate and is poised for a vote in the House this week. Biden and progressives promised to get their clean energy standard done another way. That’s how something called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, a wonky and complicated climate policy that nobody had ever heard of before this month, made its way into Democrat’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill.

The CEPP, as it’s called, could be Democrats’ last best chance to pass climate policy this decade. And if it passes, it will become the nation’s first-ever federal policy aimed at significantly reducing emissions from the power sector. A year ago, the CEPP didn’t even exist as a concept. Its invention is an acrobatic feat and a calculated effort to get past arcane Senate rules.

Here’s how the CEPP works as both a clean energy standard and a reconciliation-friendly piece of policy.

A clean energy standard is built on a foundational assumption: If utilities produce more clean power, they’ll become greener over time, and emissions will go down. But forcing utilities to get clean isn’t a budgetary matter, it’s a policy change. The CEPP gets around that by using federal dollars — which, of course, pertain to the budget — to reward utilities for going green.

More specifically, any type of company that retails electricity that increases its share of clean energy by 4 percent each year can tap into a $150 billion grant program created by the CEPP. Clean energy is defined as power sources that emit no more than 0.1 metric tons of emissions per megawatt-hour, which include wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and hydropower.

By Scott Scheffer 

No matter what happens with the Build Back Better Act, to reach the 2030 climate targets set by President Biden, the country will need to bring every lever to bear, from states, localities, and businesses to the federal government, Congress and the administration both, and the country will need to look to every economic sector for gains, and the country will need to sustain these efforts throughout the years to come. Any less in one area means more required by the rest.

Recent modeling by Rhodium Group supports this finding, making clear that a forward path exists even if the CEPP falls out. But it would require even more progress by leading states, and rapid action by the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies across multiple sectors, from standards limiting new, unmitigated gas-fired power plants to near-term coverage of refineries and other major emitters.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

With tensions on Capitol Hill high, I set out this week to understand what’s driving the differing ways utilities view the clean energy proposal, which could turn on a spigot of federal money. Despite the opportunity to pad their earnings, some companies, like AEP, are urging caution about the clean energy proposal, while others, like PSEG in New Jersey, are embracing the plan.

The differences come down to variations in companies’ comfort levels with making big investments in carbon-free energy, plus local issues like the availability of wind and solar power within a utility’s territory and the politics of state legislatures and utility commissions.

The Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP, as the proposal is called, would send subsidy payments to electric utilities that increase their share of electricity generated from clean sources by at least 4 percentage points per year from 2023 to 2030. Utilities that fall short of that target would pay a penalty.

If most utilities meet the goals, the U.S. electricity sector would leap from its 2020 level of about 40 percent carbon-free sources (including renewable energy and nuclear), to about 80 percent in 2030. The program would cost about $150 billion, Democrats have said.

PSEG is in the process of selling off all its fossil fuel power plants and is investing in several offshore wind farms, which helps to explain why its CEO is saying nice things about the federal proposal. Exelon of Illinois, which already gets nearly all its electricity from carbon-free sources, also supports the plan’s main concepts.

But most utilities, including Ohio-based AEP, have not said they support or oppose the policy. Instead, they are commenting in general terms about the bill as a whole, and focusing on the parts they would like to change.

"West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin just cooked the planet. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean that literally. Unless Manchin changes his negotiating position dramatically in the near future, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.

Quite a legacy. But he has earned it.

The 3.5 trillion reconciliation bill includes a long list of programs and tax reforms that will help reduce poverty and improve the social safety net, such as universal child tax credit, universal pre-K, free community college, and an expansion of Medicare. But it is also the primary vehicle for President Biden’s ambitious climate action agenda, including cuts in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and, most importantly, the Clean Energy Performance Package (CEPP), which is a clean energy standard that incentivizes power companies to shift away from fossil fuels...

From a climate point of view, the importance of these climate policy measures is impossible to overstate. In order to have a decent chance at maintaining a habitable planet, scientists agree that the world needs to zero out carbon pollution by 2050. And to have any shot at that, we have to start moving now. Every year, every month, every hour of delay makes that goal more difficult to achieve, and increases the risks of accelerated climate chaos that will make this past summer of hellish wildfires, storms, and droughts look like the good old days.