SD Coal Plant Blocked: Sign Of A New EPA?

This post is written by Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's Move Beyond Coal Campaign.

This is a great day for clean energy and people's health: Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overturned the State of South Dakota's approval of the massive Big Stone II coal-fired power plant.  The EPA's decision comes after the state failed to require state-of-the-art pollution controls for the coal plant - controls that would address harmful soot, smog and global warming pollution.

Today's decision is also a victory for the rule of law - with the EPA signaling that it is back to enforcing long-standing legal requirements fairly and consistently nationwide and that they're concerned about pollution and global warming.

As the first major coal plant decision by the EPA since President Barack Obama took office, this signals that the dozens of other coal plant proposals currently in permitting processes nationwide will face a new level of federal scrutiny.

The proposed Big Stone II 500-megawatt coal plant would have emitted more than 4 million tons of global pollution annually. The Sierra Club and Clean Water Action have been working to stop the Big Stone II project and ramp up clean energy investments in for more than three years. 

This decision also likely spells the end of Otter Tail Power's Big Stone II coal plant. At a minimum, Otter Tail Power will have to go back to the drawing board and redesign the project to incorporate the best and maximum available control technology for pollution like soot and smog.

Otter Tail Power will now have to be responsible for the cost of its pollution. We hope that this increasing cost of coal will encourage Otter Tail Power, along with Governors Tim Pawlenty and Mike Rounds, to harness the clean and affordable wind resources available in the region. Minnesota and South Dakota should be leaders on the path to renewable energy independence, not laggards proposing 19th century coal plants.

We will also continue pushing the EPA to set limits for carbon dioxide, the main contributor to global warming.

With coal-fired power plants accounting for almost 30% of our nation's carbon dioxide emissions, burning less coal and investing in clean energy such as wind and solar instead is a common sense approach to helping meet global warming pollution reduction goals.

Read about the decision in this MN Public Radio story, and in these two EPA documents:

Download EPA Decision Pt 1  (PDF)

Download EPA Decision Pt 2  (PDF)

Comments

[Andrew]

Glorious! Now if we could only get SD's wind energy out of the state...

[Dahun]

Since wind is offline 75% of the time it requires 100% back-up from fossil fuel as it is impossible to know when it will be down. During the 25% of the time wind is producing power it is necessary to have fossil fuel plants idling and ready to ramp up to supply even levels of power.

Pushing for wind adds zero capacity, cleans no air and adds fluctuating power at several times the cost of any other source.

You can rejoice at stopping a coal plant but support of wind and solar makes use of coal or natural gas necessary. They are impedements to stopping the use of fossil fuel and they do not add to capacity and they do not clean the air.

There are 103 nuclear plants in this country that produce 20% of our electricity. This is the equivalent of burning 200 billion tons of coal, each year! Building another 250 plants would be the equivalent of all the coal burned for power each year which is one trillion tons, each years. 1,000,000,000,000 tons.

If you are serious about actually cleaning the air, this is the only way possible. Focusing your attention on coal plants results not in clean air but less electricity.

[jon]

The same transmission lines used to send electricity from coal-burning plants in South Dakota should be used to send wind-generated electricity.

Solar-generated electricity, ideally from rate payers' rooftops, should be sold to the coal plant for the same price as transporting, burning and generating the electricity from coal would cost, plus any profit margin.

Not all nuclear power plants (newcueler?) in the United States produce that same amounts of electricity, making the idea of building 250 more plants facile, in addition to being false reasoning.

The idea that solar and wind power cause fossil fuels to be burned more, however, is pure genius.