Electricity is a necessity for our homes, factories, and our way of life. But the power plants that we depend upon also pollute the air we breathe, emitting millions of tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and Nitrogen oxides (NOx). These pollutants trigger asthma attacks and contribute to lung and heart disease. As well, power plants emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is linked with global warming. The fourth major pollutant from power plants is mercury, a neurotoxin especially harmful to children and developing fetuses.
"Nationwide, power plants account for roughly 2/3 of all SO2, 22% of NOx, 40% of CO2, and roughly 1/3 of all mercury emissions," according to the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), who released a report July 27 of the worst polluting power plants in the nation.
EIP ranks the top 50 power plant polluters for SO2, NOx, and CO2 using data made available to the public from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2005. The latest data available for mercury emissions is 2004. Within DOE is the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which actually provides the pollution data for DOE.
The good news for the Washington metropolitan residents is that none of the worst plants lies in Maryland or Virginia. However, Maryland has seven "outdated power plants emitting high levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, and carbon dioxide," according to the Maryland League of Conservation Voters. The latter points out, "Every single river and stream in Maryland has fish advisories due to mercury poisoning"; and nitrogen oxide is a key contributor to smog, especially in the 15 Maryland counties that don't meet federal ozone standards for health air.
Old Power Plants — Major Source of Pollutants
The problem is especially critical with the large, old, inefficient electricity-generating facilities that are not employing available technology and continue to pollute, according to the EIP report. For example, only 4% of the nearly 1,200 fossil fuel burning power plants in the country are responsible for 45% of the SO2 emissions. For the CO2 emissions, the efficiency of the coal conversion to electricity is problematic. The report states that only about a third of the energy in coal is converted into electricity in the coal-fired power plants. The rest is wasted heat. The technology "has remained largely unchanged" since the 1960s.
Don't we have environmental laws to protect us from the dangerous pollutants? Yes, but when the original Clean Air act was passed in 1970, several of the older power plants were Grandfathered in, and so they evaded the stricter pollution controls. EIP says that a "disproportionate share of emissions comes from a handful of old plants that have been slow to install pollution controls, or which operate inefficiently." Some of these electric power companies choose to clean up their plants based on business decisions, while others elect to "buy their way out of emissions caps," said Ilan Levin, counsel for EIP and primary author of the report. Levin is referring to the right under the EPA's rules in most eastern states for plants to bank, buy, and sell their pollution emissions as long as certain ceiling levels are met.
It doesn't have to be this way. What are broadly called "scrubbers" can be used to reduce plant pollution emission rates. They rely on a chemical reaction with a sorbent to remove pollutants such as SO2. "The top 50 plants averaged 22 pounds of sulfur dioxide per megawatt-hour, compared to only one pound per hour for plants with state of the art scrubbers," highlighted the EIP report.
Large coal-fired power plants equipped with scrubbers have shown that cleaner power is attainable. The report mentions a plant in Pennsylvania and two in West Virginia that used wet limestone scrubbers and achieved SO2 emission rates of approximately one pound per megawatt hour—well below the average of 22 pounds of the dirtiest 50.
The report noted that many companies owning plants emitting large quantities of sulfur dioxide have not made commitments to installing scrubbers by 2010, the deadline for meeting air quality standards which limit fine particle pollution. "Mirant mid-Atlantic has been silent," says the report, "about the cleanup plans for three of its three Maryland plants (Chalk Point, Morgantown, Dickerson)," even though Maryland law requires large reductions of SO2 by 2010. Both Chalk Point and Morgantown in Maryland are ranked in the top dirtiest 50 for emission rate and total tons of SO2. The owner of C P Crane in Maryland, Constellation Power, has not made public plans for installing scrubbers there where the plant is ranked sixth for its SO2 emission rate.
Virginia Electric and Power has plans in 2008 and 2010 for installing scrubbers at its Chesterfield plant (ranked 30th in SO2 tons), but not at Yorktown or Chesapeake.
The Worst Plants
The ranking of power plants really depends on the type of measure. EIP uses three types. One way is to measure the amount of pollution per unit (megawatt-hour) of electricity generated—an emission "rate." A second way is to ignore the amount of electricity produced and focus instead on the total tons of pollutant emitted—a gross impact on public health and the environment. (Mercury is so harmful that it is usually measured in pounds, not tons.) The nation's nearly 400 major power plants can be assessed on each of the four pollutants by these two approaches. Finally, this year for the first time, EIP invented a composite score by combining the emissions "rate" rankings of the four pollutants.
Based on the combined ranking across all four pollutant categories (SO2, NOx, CO2 and mercury), the 50 dirtiest plants can be found at: http://www.dirtykilowatts.org. The worst three plants are in North Dakota. The report shows that the 12 states with the dirtiest power plants are in Indiana with 5; Alabama, Kentucky, North Dakota with 4 each; Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa with 3 each; and Illinois, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Wyoming with 2 each.
Additionally, you can find the dirtiest power plants on each of the four main pollutants by two measures: emissions rate and total tons at the above website.
The rankings in the EIP report include the 376 largest power plants in EPA's emission tracking system database for 2005. EIP states that these plants represent a third of all power plants tracked in EPA's inventory and account for about half of the total U.S. electric generation.
The EIP says it is "dedicated to more effective enforcement of environmental laws and to the prevention of political interference with those laws." This rather frank description is consistent with the fact that EIP's founder, Eric Schaeffer, who directed the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement until he resigned in 2002, was dissatisfied with the allegedly weakened enforcement by the Bush administration of the Clean Air Act and other laws.
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