Joshua Macey on the Trump Administration’s Use of Emergency Powers in Energy Policy
ICLE Academic Affiliate Joshua Macey was quoted in an E&E News article detailing President Trump’s use of emergency powers to keep coal plants open:
“If we have a reliability crisis, we need everything to get on the system immediately. And if we don’t have a reliability crisis, we don’t need to take a bunch of coal-fired power plants out of the market and prohibit them from retiring,” said Joshua Macey, a professor at Yale Law School who has been critical of the administration’s use of emergency authority.
Trump has expanded the definition of what constitutes an emergency, he said. DOE traditionally used its emergency authority to respond to natural disasters or blackouts observed during California’s energy crisis in 2000 — not for potential risks about grid reliability.
“The kind of crisis the administration is pointing to looks categorically different from every single use of the 202(c) in the past,” Macey said.
Read the full piece here.