An editorial from the Charleston Daily Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As power outages go, the one in the Washington, D.C. area last week was relatively minor.
But the outage didn’t seem minor to the dozens of people stranded on elevators, stuck deep in darkened Metro rail depots and to businesses forced to close early and lose revenue.
But thanks to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rush to judgment on coal-fired power generation, “relatively minor outages” like the one that affected Potomac Electric Power customers are likely to occur more often.
As every former West Virginia coal miner knows, the EPA is enforcing strict new regulations regarding electric power emissions, forcing the closure of 188 coal-burning power plants in the nation so far, including Appalachian Power’s Glasgow plant in the Upper Kanawha Valley.
Also closed in the recent years due to environmentalist pressure was a coal-burning power plant in Maryland whose existence might have provided a back up source of power during the D.C. outage.
