On June 2, 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the Clean Power Plan guidelines to states for regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from existing power plants under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. In the proposal, EPA defines the “best system of emission reduction” based on four building blocks and calculates state-specific goals from CO2 reduction measures under the four building blocks. The following presentation provides an overview of the EPA proposal, with a focus on the state goals.
The metric of these state goals has been loosely termed an emission rate; however, without distinguishing the ways that the state goal equation deviates from an actual emission rate, it would be easy to misinterpret the proposed state goals and the effort required to reach them.
