Keeping up with the news this week that the EPA had passed a bill to cancel the Clean Power Plan, one story from The Onion that suggested that the EPA should just become “The Agency” suddenly appears less like parody and more like a reasonable response to what happened. While the US EPA appears to be set on pulling back sustainable energy regulation, enormous-scale data center companies keep investing in renewables.
The Onion said that ‘The Agency’ is a moniker that represents the present agenda and encompasses the EPA’s new role as a public sector agency tasked with managing papers, organizing meetings, and answering phones.
The proposal intends to reduce emissions in the United States by 32 percent in 2030, relative to 2005 amounts. It has met significant criticism over the years as a result of legal issues brought by the coal industries and several coal-friendly jurisdictions.
Some business sectors, including service providers like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and eBay, have continued to express strong support for the environmentally-friendly initiative. In 2016, the companies, which had just acquired well over six million megawatt-hours of sustainable energy, filed a legal brief in favor of the legal challenge.
Importantly, companies have emphasized that investing in renewables sounds good from an environmental standpoint and from a commercial standpoint. Renewable energyUnited States locations, the businesses started in their court brief, are less vulnerable to price fluctuation than non-renewable energy and are accessible at pricing comparable to alternative power sources in many locations of the United States.
The notion that renewable energy’s intermittency poses a barrier for a business established on ensuring continuous availability and service standards has also been debunked. For instance, in 2015, one grid operator for Texas successfully integrated a peak of over 13,000MW of wind energy with no reliability issues, according to the businesses.