What Consumer Advocates Need to Know About the Clean Power Plan

Synapse presents report at NASUCA 2014 Annual Meeting

Dr. Elizabeth A. Stanton presented on the impact of EPA's Clean Power Plan to consumers at the NASUCA 2014 Annual Meeting in San Francisco last week. She was joined by Synapse CEO Bruce Biewald (second from right) in presenting Implications of EPA’s Proposed “Clean Power Plan”: Analyzing Consumer Impacts of the Draft Rule, a Synapse report that will serve as a common resource to help NASUCA’s members think through a broad range of potential implications of various compliance approaches to their respective consumers.

While acknowledging that compliance with the Clean Power Plan will carry implementation costs, the report finds that compliance will ultimately lead to savings from reduced energy bills, as well as reduced health impacts and climate damages. To maximize these benefits, it is critical for consumer advocates to be involved in the process early on and to push for appropriate least-cost planning from states as they develop their compliance strategies.

After her presentation, Dr. Stanton told ClimateWire: "If you want the cheapest plan for your state, then you need to go out and do that analysis or make sure that someone's doing that right.”

Presentation slides from the Annual Meeting and the final Synapse report can be found here.