In an era of increasingly complex, overlapping, and sometimes inconsistent environmental regulations and policies at the federal and state levels, Brattle assists utilities, merchant generation companies, and industry organizations through the risks, compliance planning, and opportunities created by these initiatives.
We provide analytical support and strategic guidance in engagements ranging from asset-specific valuations and retire/retrofit decisions, to company-level resource planning, to industry-wide evaluations of current and emerging environmental regulations. Our services cover two main areas:
- Greenhouse gas (GHG) policies and regulations (such as potential federal policy like the now stayed Clean Power Plan, the AB32 program in California, and the RGGI program in the Northeast) and their relationship to compliance costs, power and gas market costs, and other investment decisions; and
- Litigation support and expert testimony on air quality and other pollution control compliance areas such as New Source Review (NSR) cases.
Our perspective and breadth of capabilities in environmental compliance enables us to offer value to our clients by assessing the combined impact of technological, market, and regulatory risks and opportunities. Our team’s expertise in environmental economics is complemented by the firm’s depth in power market modeling generally and by its broader knowledge in energy, finance, and regulatory consulting, allowing us to serve a full range of client needs.
- GHG Policies
Air quality and climate change regulations continue to be at the center of energy and environmental policy debates. We assist government and regulatory entities, companies, and associations in analyzing and executing strategies to meet both business objectives and environmental regulations.
Brattle economists have actively participated in the development and compliance of the Clean Air Act and related federal and state laws and regulations for more than thirty years. We have analyzed compliance plans for Acid Rain (Title IV), Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), Regional Haze regulation, Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), and Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR). We recently studied the impact of coal-fired power plant closures and the impact of environmental compliance costs on capacity planning and fuel demand in the Midwest. Many of our engagements have involved litigation arising from enforcement of the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act.
Recent cases include:
- United States of America, Plaintiff v. Ameren Missouri;
- State of New Jersey and State of Connecticut, Plaintiffs v. RRI Energy Mid-Atlantic Power Holdings, LLC, RRI Energy Power Corporation, Inc., Sithe Energies, Inc., and Metropolitan Edison Company (States v. GenOn);
- United States of America, Plaintiff and Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. and Sierra Club, Intervenor-Plaintiffs, v. DTE Energy Company and Detroit Edison Company;
- United States of America, Plaintiff v. Louisiana Generating LLC, Defendant; and
- United States of America, Plaintiff v. Kentucky Utilities Company
Published in CommonWealth Magazine
A new study prepared by Brattle economists has found that achieving the goal of an 80% reduction in GHG emissions, while feasible, will require New England to significantly accelerate clean energy resource deployment.
Below is a list of representative engagements for our Environmental Policy, Planning, and Compliance practice.
Brattle experts have been at the forefront of the major New Source Review (NSR) cases over the past decade, providing defendants with a breadth of analytic support and expert testimony in cases brought by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), states, and advocacy groups. These cases have focused on the emissions consequences of historic maintenance projects, and Brattle experts have successfully countered the plaintiffs’ experts’ theories and empirical findings with credible and persuasive alternatives. In addition to litigation support, Brattle experts assist generation owners in NSR-related compliance analysis, as ongoing NSR scrutiny requires many generation owners to reassess current compliance liabilities and assess the NSR implications of future capital projects at existing plants.
For Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, a Brattle expert provided testimony on the likely changes in energy and capacity prices as a result of projected coal plant retirements and environmental retrofits in the MISO region. The findings relied on a customized analytical tool to simulate the important aspects of generation dispatch and power price formation in Wisconsin and MISO market as a whole, and enabled isolating the market price impacts of a range of plant retirements and environmental retrofits.
For an electric utility in the western U.S., Brattle experts conducted a study to assess reliability and supply-chain implications of compliance with the EPA’s Regional Haze Rule. The Regional Haze Rule aims to reduce haze-forming pollution (primarily due to emissions of particulate matter and its precursors SO2 and NOX) that reduces visibility in parks and wilderness areas, especially in the Western U.S. We assessed the impact of outages at coal units to tie-in the environmental retrofit equipment on available resources to meet the utility’s load obligations in the future. In addition, we compared the historical retrofits on coal units in the region against projected retrofits to comply with the Regional Haze Rule.
Brattle experts assisted a municipal electric utility in developing a least-cost strategy to comply with the environmental regulations facing its largest coal plant. We developed a screening tool to compare the economics of environmental retrofits against alternatives such as replacement with a new gas-fired combined cycle or relying on market purchases of energy and capacity to meet the retail load obligations. We presented the results of the economic analysis and potential hedging strategies to the executive management.