Six of the oldest and foulest coal fired power plants in America are shutting down because they don't meet Obama EPA's stricter mercury emissions standards. They aren't worth the money it would take to upgrade them, so the power companies are shutting them down. Children won't be exposed to the dangerous mercury they emit and they will no longer add large amounts of climate destabilizing greenhouse gases to the air. Everyone's air will be a little cleaner and we can breathe a little easier. And a successful court challenge by Earthjustice has kept 2 plants from expanding.
Quite simply, these plants were money losers with no future.
And that's not even counting the enormous damage to human health and the environment.
The latest round of closures started last week when FirstEnergy said it would close six plants in its portfolio totaling 2,689 MW of capacity. The plants are getting very old, making them some of the dirtiest in the country. The average age of the six units is 55 years, with the oldest facility built in 1947. Five out of six of the plants had been relegated to reserve plants, FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin told Politico:
“The bottom line,” Durbin said, “is the plants haven’t run all that much in the last three years,” and the company doesn’t “think they’re going to be running much” in the years to come, so it “didn’t make business sense” to keep them open. Now that they know the plants have no future, “we couldn’t justify spending any additional money.”
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The plant’s current owner, Richmond, Va.-based Dominion Resources Services, warned Wall Street last year that the plant with its 1950s and 1960s technology would be just too expensive to keep open if the Obama Administration pushed tougher air pollution standards.
Although 6 plants is only about one percent of the coal power plants in the U.S., these are some of the most polluting and inefficient plants so eliminating them has a bigger environmental impact than 1%. Because new coal plants are not cost competitive with gas and wind power when the capital costs and regulatory uncertainties of new coal are considered, these plant closures are part of a growing trend away from coal power in America.
New coal power plants are not being built and old plants are shutting down.
About 3 out of 4 U.S. coal power plants are over 30 years old using dirty, inefficient technology. These plants will be replaced over the next 20 years.
Moreover, environmental activists at Earth Justice are celebrating a successful legal challenge to the immediate expansion of a Kansas coal fired power plant. The judge is forcing the utility to determine the health and environmental costs before approval will be considered. Because credible conservative economists have determined that these costs are higher than the value of the power these plants produce, this may set a precedent for stopping new coal plants.
In his decision, Judge Emmett Sullivan emphasized that the expansion will need additional approval from the federal government as a result of changes to the project from earlier configurations. He enjoined the government from issuing any additional approvals pending a full “environmental impact statement” (“EIS”) disclosing all of the environmental and human health impacts of the project, which includes harm to human health as well as contribution to climate change. An EIS must also discuss “alternatives” to a proposed project, such as renewable energy projects and energy conservation.
“The people of Kansas and downwind states will now get their legitimate public health concerns heard,” said Jan Hasselman of Earthjustice who led the lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club. “Once the facts of this dirty and dangerous project are exposed to the public, we think that the federal government will have to just say no.”
“The financial and public health risks involved in the development of this project have always made it a bad deal for those of us who will have to breathe dirty air and pay unnecessary costs for this coal plant,” said Lee Messenger of Garden City, an opponent of the expansion. “Sunflower needs to be accountable for the debt it has already created with its existing coal plant, not get in over its head again with another risky and unneeded coal plant."
“From a public health and environmental perspective, coal-fired power is the most expensive option available,” said Scott Allegrucci of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “We are confident that once the environmental impacts of this plant are considered in light of alternatives, the project's impacts will be unacceptable and it will be rejected.”
According to recent American Wind Energy Association fourth quarter data, Kansas has the largest number of wind projects under construction in the nation. This decision comes as utility companies and developers across the country are abandoning planned coal plants as unnecessary and too costly and are moving toward a greater reliance on clean energy.
In fact coal is costing Appalachia, where it is mined, more than it is worth, according to a recent Harvard study.
In Appalachian communities alone, public health burdens from coal mining cost $74.6 billion each year. Air pollutant emissions cost $187.5 billion, mercury emission impacts reach $29.3 billion, and greenhouse gas emissions (and accompanying climate change effects) from coal-fired plants costs between between $61.7 and $205.8 billion. And then there are the smaller costs--between $2.2 and $10 billion in impacts from land disturbances, and impacts from toxic spills, declines in property values, tourism loss, and crop damage.
If utilities are required to use the whole system costs of coal to gain approval, there will be no new coal fired power plants.