East Kentucky Power Cooperative President and CEO Tony Campbell speaks up for reliable and affordable electricity on the latest edition of Full Measure, an investigative news program broadcast to 43 million households on Sinclair Broadcast Group stations, including ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, MyTV, Univision and Telemundo affiliates.
The program investigates an aggressive new rule by the Environmental Protection Agency mandating that coal plants shut down unless they reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 per
At EKPC, the cost of complying with the EPA could exceed 10 billion dollars — more than double the value of the cooperative owns.
“Our balance sheet’s only $3.8 billion, $3.9 billion dollars,” Campbell explains. “Well, how are we going to afford that? Our current average residential member is about a bill of about $157 a month. After we build all this, it’s going to be somewhere between $257 and $308 a month, and our end consumers aren’t going to be able to afford that.”
Senate President Robert Stivers is also interviewed, stressing the EPA’s rushed transition timeline’s adverse effects on reliability and productive farmland being used for solar installations.
“We don’t have the capacity through renewables, green energy, to keep up with our demands,” Stivers said.