EPA smog, soot cuts to cost TVA

EPA smog, soot cuts to cost TVA

$4 billion to $5 billion

2005-03-11
by Duncan Mansfield
The Associated Press

KNOXVILLE -- A Bush administration plan to sharply reduce pollution from America's coal-fired power plants could cost the nation's largest public utility as much as $4 billion to $5 billion over the next decade, a Tennessee Valley Authority executive said Thursday.

"We would be talking about continuing to reduce our emissions dramatically," said John Shipp, TVA's vice president for environmental policy.

However, TVA, which has already cut smog-forming pollutants by 78 percent since 1995, supports the measure, he said, because "it will require all the utilities around us to also dramatically reduce emissions."

Shipp said TVA fears that its efforts alone will not be enough to clean up the air in the Tennessee Valley.

TVA, which supplies electricity to 8.5 million people in Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, gets 60 percent of its power from its 11 coal-fired power plants in Tennessee, north Alabama and western Kentucky.

The agency has spent about $4 billion since the 1970s adding scrubbers to reduce soot-producing sulfur dioxide emissions that lead to haze and acid rain, and selective catalytic reduction systems to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions that lead to ground-level ozone and smog.

"And by the time we finish all that we have under way, we will be at about $5.6 billion," Shipp said of actions already approved to add more controls.

The effects of that effort are showing up in a decline in monitored pollutants in the sensitive Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, although low visibility, acidified streams and sometimes unhealthy air remain a problem.

But the Environmental Protection Agency's new regulations announced Thursday, called the Clean Air Interstate Rule or CAIR, will push TVA and other utilities even further to reduce pollution in 28 states and the District of Columbia, mostly east of the Mississippi River.

"We have supported Clear Skies (the administration's legislative plan) and CAIR since the beginning," Shipp said. "Because we cannot resolve the non-attainment problems in the Tennessee Valley by making emission reductions (only) in the Tennessee Valley. And this rule will require utilities all around to make the same kind of reductions that we are making."

The EPA estimates that six Tennessee counties now listed as failing soot standards will be helped by the rule, with Hamilton County meeting requirements by 2015, and Knox, Anderson, Blount, Loudon and Roan would be improved.

Meanwhile, all 18 Tennessee counties on EPA's ozone list -- mostly around metro Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Johnson City and Clarksville -- will meet EPA's targets by 2010.

Since air pollution knows no boundaries, EPA figures that reducing Tennessee-generated pollutants will help Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Alabama.

In turn, improvements in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina and West Virginia will help Tennesseans breathe easier, the EPA said.

Shipp said the technologies needed to meet the new targets are available, but new approaches are being explored.

Under the EPA proposal, sulfur dioxide emissions will be reduced in Tennessee by 53 percent or 178,000 tons a year by 2015. And nitrogen oxide emissions will be reduced by 80 percent or 101,000 tons.

"Air pollution is a threat to the health and well-being of us all," said Steve Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "This rule, when coupled with strong enforcement of the Clean Air Act, will help to reduce the pollutants that cause asthma attacks, heart and lung diseases, and acid rain and will benefit public health and the environment."