Rewired Infrastructure Post-Paris

Authors

Steven Ferrey, Suffolk University Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Connecticut Journal of International Law

Abstract

The Trump Administration announced in 2017 that it is withdrawing the U.S. from the international Paris Agreement regarding climate change which went into full effect in 2016. More than half the states sued the EPA when it promulgated the Clean Power Plan (CPP) to reduce power sector carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030; thereafter, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the regulation, pending eventual review on the merits. The Trump Administration began efforts to repeal the Obama Administration CPP which was designed to satisfy the U.S. Paris Agreement commitments to curb CO2 emissions from burning coal to generate electric power.

The CPP remains in protracted limbo, although even before, in 2017, the U.S. Department of Energy forecast that even the CCP was not demanding enough for the U.S. to achieve its Paris Agreement commitment to reduce CO2 emissions twenty-six to twenty-eight percent by 2025. This article examines recent data which suggests that the U.S. currently is on track under business-as-usual to reduce CO2 emissions twenty-seven to thirty-five percent below baseline 2005 levels by 2030, even reaching the 2032 CPP-required levels of CO2 reduction a full decade in advance, without assistance of the CPP now enjoined by the courts.

This article examines how this is possible under economic forces, what is happening to coal, the traditional work-horse of the electric power sector, and the ascendance of renewable energy alternatives. This article then pivots to look at the new dimension of land-use requirements to produce and transmit wind power from where it is most available to population centers.

We showcase several instances where single state opposition to siting new power lines, exercising state police power, frustrates the development and deployment of additional renewable energy sought to be transmitted through the state.

The exclusively state and local control over transmission and distribution power line siting varies in each state. This article peels the legal onion to distinguish whether this critical authority is controlled in each of the 50 states either by local land-use laws or is preempted by state law. There is no federal authority over transmission facility siting, despite the increasingly interstate nature of power transmission. The article concludes by analyzing the degree to which renewable energy can maintain reliability in the power grid.

First Page

328

Last Page

359

Publication Date

2018

Recommended Citation

Steven Ferrey, Rewired Infrastructure Post-Paris, 33 Conn. J. Int'l L. 328 (2018).

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License