The entire argument rests on a 36-year-old survey form: "DOE Form 860 (1990) defines electric utility to mean 'a corporation, person, agency, authority, or other legal entity or instrumentality that owns and/or operates facilities within the United States for the generation, transmission, distribution, or sale of electric energy primarily for use by the public.'"

So the leap is: an old survey form says "sale of electric energy primarily for use by the public," therefore anything not grid-connected isn't a sale to the public.

No assessment of prior practice, history, the plain meaning of the statute, or other statutory exemptions. And there are grid-connected plants serving a single customer so why the distinction?

Why the 1990 form? Congress froze it into the statute so a survey agency couldn't rewrite Clean Air Act coverage by editing a questionnaire. EPA is now exploiting that freeze by treating the form's obsolete boilerplate as substantive law; a taxonomy EIA itself abandoned, since modern EIA-860 covers essentially all generators above 1 MW, grid or not.

It's as if Congress defined citizenship by reference to a 1990 Census form, and the agency decided who's a citizen by parsing the instruction booklet.

100% complete BS. The silver lining is that without Chevron deference, this "interpretation" won't survive litigation, though the memo's "not final agency action" disclaimer means challengers may have to wait for an actual permitting decision to sue.

For sure, an argument can be made that the text of the law could be tightened up. In my opinion, there's nothing in that text that would exclude these generators. In addition the rationale provide for excluding these generators seems... disingenuous at best.

No it isn't. Otherwise the entire concept of Original Intent would be dead in the water rather than a cornerstone of how multiple federal judges all the way to the Supreme court rule on cases.

apparently you're very excited about this partisan victory. at some point we do need to actually think about how to effectively manage the country. there should be a back and forth about the appropriate degree of environmental regulation since it is a tradeoff between economic constraint and qualify of life.

I grew up in the 70s, and my father was a Nixon supporting environmental engineer. At the time the amount of nitrogen and sulfur being emitted into the air in the northeast was turning surface water into acid. a ph of 6 was getting quite common, 4 wasn't unusual, and if you were in a bad spot it was approaching 1. Not only would that water not support life, or be unsafe to drink, but it was actually unsafe to touch.

So if we were reasonable people we would look at the economic activity and the upside of burning these gasses, and add up the numbers and based on past experience make a very reasonable estimate of the impact, and make a decision.

but we fired all those people, and we're very much not interested in having this discussion. I fail to see how that's a win for anyone except the polluter.

just type 'single cycle gas plant efficiency and emissions vs combined cycle' into google