EPRI

As the Senate prepares to take up climate change legislation, members are hearing from the electric utilities industry, which may have more at stake in this bill than any other sector.

The Edison Electric Institute, representing investor-owned utilities, has been vocal throughout the process, calling for even more free emissions permits than the House gave away in its American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry front group with a budget topping $20 million and ties to the phony letters scandal, is launching a campaign over Congress's August recess to push farm- and industrial-state senators to make the climate bill friendlier to coal.

This week, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), whose members represent more than 90% of the electricity generated and delivered in the United States, also weighed in with its own proposal for an all-of-the-above approach to energy, which it promises would cut emissions, too — with 50 new nuclear plants and plenty of coal.

“There is no silver bullet” for keeping up with electricity demand while cutting emissions, EPRI CEO Steve Specker said. “We need everything.”

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has been trying for the past year to get Congress to set up an independent corporation dedicated to clean coal development. He introduced the Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Act (HR 6258), which provoked some hearings in 2008, but it went nowhere and died. So this spring he reintroduced the bill, virtually unchanged (HR 1689).

What happened next is further proof of the enormous leverage Boucher wields as a coal state Democrat in shaping national climate legislation.

His bill was incorporated wholesale as pages 52-75 into the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), the climate bill Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are shepherding through the House.

It fills section 114 of the Clean Energy Title of the Waxman-Markey bill, and it is a giant gift to the utility industry. It would create the Carbon Storage Research Corporation and funnel $10 billion to support the corporation over the next 10 years, with up to $500 million designated simply for "administrative expenses" to be spent at the discretion of its officers.

The most curious part is where all that money is going to come from. The answer: from every ratepayer who uses electricity, in the form of an almost invisible tax that would average 50-cents-a-month, conveniently referred to as an "assessment."