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Waiting to inhale
New England has spent the better part of a decade trying to clean up the region’s dirtiest power plants. But the Bush administration is poised to erase that progress.

BY SAM SMITH


ON A WARM summer day in New England, with the wind pushing sailboats around the bay, you can sit out on your front porch, sip a nice glass of lemonade, and inhale toxic levels of pollutants from power plants in Ohio.

Mmmm, sulfur dioxide.

The buzz-killing air quality results from a conspiracy between Mother Nature’s prevalent wind patterns and the federal government’s shortsighted air regulations: as wind pushes across the Midwest and Southeast, it picks up pollution from “grandfathered” coal- and oil-burning power plants — plants built before the 1977 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, which were granted a free pass from its emissions standards. The grandfather provision was based on the notion that those plants were so old they would probably be mothballed or upgraded — thus forcing them to meet stiffer pollution regulations — within five years or so. With their days presumably numbered, it was reasoned that the plants shouldn’t be saddled with the cost of upgrading emission controls, which could have cost millions of dollars. But many of those old plants are still here, defying the predictions of lawmakers.

The pollution from grandfathered plants contributes to some of New England’s most pressing environmental concerns: acid rain, global warming, and toxic mercury levels in rivers and ponds are all exacerbated by power-plant emissions. And though some experts estimate that about 40 percent of the region’s air pollution comes from upwind plants, we can’t just point a finger in the general direction of Michigan and wipe our hands clean.




Also, Dorie Clark on New England's energy woes
Robert David Sullivan on Bush-league environmentalism
A list of New England's grandfathered coal-burning plants




In May 2000, the Harvard School of Public Health released a study titled “Estimated Public Health Impacts of Criteria Pollutant Air Emissions from the Salem Harbor and Brayton Point Power Plants,” a two-year examination of pollution from local grandfathered power plants. What it found was disturbing. Two of Massachusetts’s dirtiest coal- and oil-burning plants, Salem Harbor and Brayton Point, released enough toxins to cause 161 premature deaths, 1710 emergency-room visits, and 43,300 asthma attacks each year throughout New England. And that’s just two plants. There are 16 grandfathered plants in the region: six in Massachusetts, six in Connecticut, three in New Hampshire, and one in Maine. Rhode Island hosts none of the bellowing monsters, but Brayton Point, the dirtiest plant in New England, sits right on its border.

It's a gas

NEW ENGLAND'S CONSERVATION Law Foundation (CLF) shares some common ground with President George W. Bush's energy plan, although they've reached it from different directions, the CLF says. Even with Massachusetts's new regulations governing coal-burning plants, which are the most far-reaching in the nation, "you can't clean a coal plant up to the level of a gas plant," argues Richard Kennelly, director of the CLF's energy project. The Massachusetts regulations, he says, "don't require coal plants to get down to comparable standards with new gas plants."

According to Kennelly, old coal plants average about 12 pounds of sulfur dioxide emissions per megawatt-hour of energy. The Massachusetts regulations require them to cut that in half. A new gas plant releases about .006 of a pound of sulfur dioxide per megawatt-hour.

There are similar numbers for nitrogen oxide: an old coal plant releases about three pounds of emissions per megawatt-hour, to be reduced by half under Massachusetts's new rules. A new gas plant releases .06 of a pound per megawatt-hour.

In addition, new gas plants release no mercury emissions at all. The best thing to do about this discrepancy, says Kennelly, is to build more gas power plants.

Sound familiar?

"There is an overlap" with the Bush-Cheney plan, Kennelly acknowledges, but where the Bush administration simply wants to increase supply, he says the CLF is thinking about efficiency and market forces that can help promote environmental goals.

The CLF argument goes like this: power producers are reacting to New England's deregulation of the electric-utility market (see "Power Struggle," page 17) by building new power plants; more than 20 new natural-gas plants are scheduled to come on line in New England in the next two years. These new plants can produce energy more efficiently than older coal and oil plants. That, combined with the new regional rules that force older plants to invest in pollution controls, will give the cleaner plants an economic advantage over the old coal and oil plants, forcing them either to shut down or to switch to natural gas themselves.

"It's a tremendous opportunity," argues Kennelly. "There are a lot of people who don't like that a fossil fuel [natural gas] can be targeted as an environmental solution. It's wise to be skeptical. But the real focus has to be on [shutting down] the old power plants."

Kennelly admits that this plan requires some leaps of faith. The price of natural gas, which continues to climb, could hinder the new plants' ability to compete with cheap coal.

An old coal plant can expect to pay about $25 to $30 in expenses to produce a megawatt of electricity. If natural gas costs around, say, $3 per million BTUs (a reasonable price), a new gas plant can expect to pay around $27 to $32 to produce the same amount of electricity. But last winter, gas prices rose to $9 per million BTUs.

And the new utilities that have entered the New England market are sinking about $2 billion into new natural-gas pipelines from Canada and $5 billion into each plant.

Perhaps that's why, even if some in the environmental community agree that price deregulation might help achieve a green agenda, it's difficult for many to embrace the idea of building more power plants. "I don't know where [the CLF] gets off on this argument," says Rob Sargent of MassPIRG. "Our argument is: you might be right, you might be wrong. But we shouldn't base any environmental policy on predications of what the price of natural gas should be."

— SS

There was a brighter side to this grimy story: New England’s progress toward regulating dirty power plants, particularly the tough new emissions standards for Massachusetts’s grandfathered plants that Governor Jane Swift announced in April. But now environmentalists and state lawmakers are bracing for a possible major setback to their clean-up efforts: the Bush administration’s energy plan, released on May 17. Of paramount concern are its recommendations for reviewing the legitimacy of lawsuits brought by the state of New York against grandfathered plants in the Midwest and Southeast. The suits allege that these plants violated Clean Air Act regulations by upgrading their production capacity without upgrading their emission controls — regulations also up for review under the Bush energy plan, which wants them evaluated with an eye toward their negative impact on domestic energy production. These initiatives could yank the rug out from under efforts to clean up New England, because no matter how clean power plants are here, dirty plants outside our borders can still ruin our air.

In other words, though state-level action is great as far as it goes, blanket federal action offers the only route to real progress. The Bush energy proposal may have environmental and state leaders in New England holding their breath, but not in anticipation of cleaner air.

IF THIS were a Hollywood movie, New England would be personified by a busty Julia Roberts crusading against — well, against PG&E, the corporate villain in Erin Brockovich and the owner of the Salem Harbor and Brayton Point power plants.

“Every major clean-air battle has really started in New England,” says Rob Sargent of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MassPIRG).

In April, Governor Jane Swift announced that grandfathered plants in Massachusetts would finally have to curb their emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, and carbon dioxide. These four pollutants pack a serious punch: sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide soot caused the deaths and health problems referenced in the Harvard study; mercury causes birth defects and brain damage; and carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas.

The other New England states don’t match Massachusetts’s new standards, but all are ahead of the national curve. Connecticut has its own set of regulations, which target sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. New Hampshire and Maine are busy crafting similar rules. Maine reached an agreement earlier this month with Wyman Station, the grandfathered oil-burning plant near Portland, to reduce emissions. And US Representative Tom Allen (D-Maine) has sponsored the Clean Power Act of 2001, which would close the grandfather loophole entirely.

Meanwhile, states outside the Northeast have been moving in the same direction. Although Massachusetts is the first state to regulate the four major toxins from power plants, similar legislation is pending in Illinois and North Carolina. Texas has already started reducing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. And it was New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer who filed the suit against 17 grandfathered plants in 1999.

It is this legal action — which Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey joined (though the Garden State’s involvement in the suit is coming back to haunt former New Jersey governor and current EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman; see “Mixed Signals,” page 21) — that the Bush energy plan recommends reviewing. The administration’s stance signals that the suits could be quashed if they don’t meet the president’s vision of a hassle-free regulatory process for power plants.

The review is “the biggest threat to New England right now,” says Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Washington, DC–based Clean Air Trust, a watchdog group formed in 1995 by former senators Edmund Muskie of Maine and Robert Stafford of Vermont. “This administration is considering granting immunity to big coal-fired plants in the Midwest and Southeast that violated the Clean Air Act. Even if, say, Massachusetts goes forward with plans to clean up its plants, this would allow big, dirty power companies to continue polluting and sending pollution to New England.”

“One of many reasons why the New England states are working to clean up our plants,” says Pete Didisheim of the Natural Resources Council, Maine’s largest environmental group, “is to strengthen the region’s ability to tell upwind states, ‘Look, we’ve done what we can to clean up our plants, and to the extent to which we continue to have dirty air, we need you to do the same thing.’ But in the ideal world, you wouldn’t have different parts of the country telling others how to act. You would have the federal government providing a level playing field, requiring power plants everywhere to clean up to the highest level of emission controls.”

After all, when the wind is just right, close to half of New England’s smog comes from the Midwest. State-level action can go only so far without coordination by the feds. And this, explains Didisheim, has been a guiding principle in the region.

With Bush reneging on his campaign pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, however, there’s little hope that blanket federal regulations are in the offing. And the proposed loosening of federal environmental standards has already begun to undermine state-level progress. Marc Violette of the New York attorney general’s office says they had been ready to finalize two out-of-court settlements with power-plant defendants from the 1999 suit. But now that has been put on hold, he says. “I think it’s safe to say the [two] utilities are intrigued by the possibility of a new regulatory dynamic in Washington.”

A new regulatory dynamic — plus the billions in subsidies the Bush administration has promised the coal industry — affects more than just the utilities’ outlook.

“In terms of legislative success, I’d say the prospects for moving forward are dim,” Representative Allen of Maine acknowledges, saying that he’s not optimistic about the Clean Power Act of 2001 coming to the floor for a vote. “So I’ll keep trying to get more co-sponsors, try to get more press on this, try to work with outside groups who care about the environment.”

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Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001






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