In an other thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=56189
Engineer Don said that some of the power stations were shut off due to using up their pollution credits. It seems to me that ultimatley the real problem in California is that there are not enough operating power stations in California. One method to fix this would be have more power stations each having their amount of NOx they could emit. Is this better than allowing the current power stations to emit more NOx?
I think that it is not better but I am sure that it is more complicated than that.
As I understand it, there are lots of levels of agencies with emission regulations, and the jurisdiction of each are kind of unclear. There are regional regulations, like the SCAQMD (South Coast Air Quality Management District), State agencies, and Federal agencies, and they each have a seperate set of laws. If the State orders the generators to ignore their emissions limits then it might free them from the first two requirements, but the Federal laws might still apply.
I don’t really know how much of an impact the emissions regs are having at this point. I was just pointing out that a big utility coordinates it’s resources, wheras merchant plants benefit if the resources are improperly coordinated and lots of outages are scheduled for the same time. This seems to be happening a lot.
This is a different enough question from the currently extant California power thread (here) that I’m going to leave it open.
But this thing has the potential to spawn more threads than the election did (that is, if y’all have enough electricity to post!). I’d ask members to try to keep their questions to already-active threads.
Thanks.