This article is about the Early County, GA LSPower/Dynegy coal
burner:
Coal power plant's permit in the
crosshairsEnvironmental groups say planned
facility will be too pollutingBy MARGARET
NEWKIRKThe Atlanta
Journal-ConstitutionPublished on: 11/29/07
Did the state drop the ball when it gave a permit to Georgia's first
planned new coal power plant in years?
An administrative law judge will answer that question in the next few
weeks, after nearly a month of arguments that ended Thursday.
If allowed to go forward, the 1,200-megawatt plant
would sit on the Chattahoochee River in Early County, near the Florida
border.
Owned by Houston-based
Dynegy Inc., the plant would be a merchant,
meaning it will have to find utilities or other large power users to buy its
power.
Its capacity is roughly the same as one of the two new nuclear units
Georgia Power wants to add to its Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta.
A group of Early County residents, as well as most of the state's
environmental community, has been fighting the plant for more than two years, on
a number of fronts.
What brought them to Atlanta in recent weeks was the plant's environmental
permit.
They want the plant's permit from the state Environmental Protection
Division tossed out.
The Early County plant will be built with more air pollution controls than
any new coal plant in the state.
But it won't be as clean burning as it could and should be, according to
the Sierra Club, Friends of the Chattahoochee and Greenlaw, the environmental
law firm representing them.
Federal law requires new plants to have controls that achieve the "maximum
degree of reduction" in pollution, attorney George Hays told Administrative Law
Judge Stephanie Howells.
"This is not the maximum degree of reduction."
Hays said the state Environmental Protection Division relied too heavily on
the company's claims and data in drafting the permit.
And he said that permit is not as strict as those at other coal plants in
development around the country.
He noted that the scrubbers planned for the new plant are less effective
than those Georgia Power is now installing on its old ones.
Scrubbers remove acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide and mercury from coal
smoke.
The EPD is allowing Dynegy to use so-called dry scrubbers at the plant,
instead of the more expensive wet scrubbers. Wet scrubbers remove more sulfur
dioxide.
Lawyers for the state said they opted against wet scrubbers because of
water supply issues. Wet scrubbers use more water.
They also attacked the credibility of the Sierra Club's expert witness,
saying the witness was a Sierra Club member and donor and that her science was
biased.
They said the EPD permits were reasonable — and that opponents would have
attacked it in any case.
They said the Sierra Club fights coal plants around the country, and uses
permit issues to do so.
They said Friends of the Chattahoochee didn't want a coal plant in the
neighborhood, period.
Bobby McLendon, chairman of the river protection group, agreed with that,
at least in part.
He said during a court break that he had a number of issues with the plant
in addition to the permit, including the fact that it will have a 20-year
exemption from local taxes.
His wife, Jane, said local doctors were opposed to the plant, and that she
didn't buy claims that the plant would help economic development.
"We need something," she said. "It's a poverty situation."
But she said a coal plant is not the answer. "We don't need this."