A study of EPA GHG emissions standards for existing power plants in WECC region

This paper studies the 2013 10-year plan of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), and its ability of meeting the emission rate standards for existing power plants proposed by the US Environmental Protecting Agency (EPA) in June 2014. The study represents a 10-year generation planning study. A reduced 240-bus WECC system is used as a test model, and is built on MATPOWER Software. Future energy storage has been considered in the model and is represented by adjustable-speed pumped hydro storage (AS PHS). The option 2 regional approach of the EPA emission rate standards for existing power plants has been chosen for the study. Two cases has been studied; with and without AS PHS. The results showed that considering AS PHS resulted in a significant reduction in gas generation, total system operating cost, and CO2 emissions. The EPA emission constraint was met in both without and with AS PHS cases; however, the result was better with AS PHS. Therefore, the 2013 WECC plan was able to meet the regional EPA emissions standard imposed on the current generators of the reduced WECC model.