After accepting an award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for her support of businesses on the house floor, U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, speaks to a small crowd gathered in the banquet room of the Holiday Inn Express in Chehalis in June 2015.
On Tuesday, Washington Reps. Dan Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler attempted to make the federal government recognize hydropower as renewable energy as an amendment to the Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015.
“Hydropower keeps our economy running in Southwest Washington,” Herrera Beutler said in a a release about the amendment. “This inexpensive, clean, renewable energy source is a key resource that continues to attract employers to our region. I’ll keep working to put hydropower at the center of our nation’s energy policy so we can keep the utility bills of businesses and ratepayers as affordable as possible.”
The motion was approved by voice vote.
The amendment is a little confusing because the federal government already considers hydroelectric energy as a renewable resource, so it comes not exactly as a change to the classification of hydroelectricity, but as part of a larger political fight around the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules for reducing carbon emissions by power plants, especially coal-fired ones.
The Clean Power Plan, which defines the new standards, was released in draft form last year by the EPA. It regulates carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants under the Clean Air Act and gives states some flexibility on how they can meet emission rate goals. It also calls for a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions from existing power plants from 2005 levels by 2030.
However, as noted in the press release, the EPA didn’t designate existing hydropower as a renewable energy source in the Clean Power Plan and thus states can’t rely on them to meet the EPA’s proposed new levels.
The Ratepayer Protection Act, the bill that the amendment was attached to, is a response to the proposed Clean Power Plan and would postpone the deadline for states and operators of existing fossil-fuel burning power plants to meet any existing or new EPA rules on carbon dioxide reduction until any court challenges were over. It also gives governors the option to not comply with the standards if doing so would impact user rates or reliability.
“This amendment addresses the unfair carbon reduction targets placed on states — many in the Pacific Northwest — with hydropower generation and enables those states to meet any potential final carbon reduction goals,” Newhouse said in the release.
The release includes Washington, Oregon, South Dakota and Idaho as “significantly disadvantaged under the rule.”
According to a Clean Power Plan map released by the EPA, Washington is in a good position to meet the standards because it already has programs in place that would be part of its carbon reduction plan. Some of those plans include its own emission standards, emission limits, energy efficiency codes for residential and commercial buildings and renewable energy portfolio standards or goals.
