Expired PAEP Webinar – April 14, 2021

Biological & Economic Benefits Estimation under

§ 316(b) of the Clean Water Act 

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 12:00 (Noon) Eastern Time 

Issuance of permits under the Clean Water Act (CWA) requires a carefully balancing of the costs and benefits of the individual permit requirements.  Often this balancing is done in the development of numeric water quality criteria when then can be translated into individual permit limits.  However, for other potential stressors, the water quality requirements are more qualitative leading to a less rigorous assessment costs and benefits.  One example of this occurs with CWA § 316(b) which requires facilities that withdraw cooling water to use “the best technology for minimizing adverse environmental impact”. While this section was part of the CWA since its inception in 1972, regulations on how to select the best technology available (BTA) for each facility were not finalized until 2014.  In issuing these regulations, USEPA allowed an explicit consideration of the economic costs and benefits in making a BTA determination.  In this case, the benefits are economic values of the improvements in the aquatic community in the affected waterbody.  This presentation will discuss the process used to determine how the economic values of aquatic community improvements are quantified.  Further, we will discuss how such cost and benefit comparisons could be incorporated into other CWA permitting issues.

Presenter:  William Dey

Vice President and Senior Principal Scientist at ASA

Registration Deadline:  April 9, 2021. 

PAEP Members – Webinars are free to 2021 PAEP members but you will still need to register.

Non-Members – the fee for the webinar is $10 per person.

Registrants will be sent an email, closer to the event date, providing information on how to join the webinar.