TVA praises, environmentalists challenge pollution rule changes

TVA praises, environmentalists
challenge pollution rule changes

By Duncan Mansfield
The Associated Press

KNOXVILLE, TENN. | The Tennessee Valley Authority said Friday that Bush administration plans to relax air-quality rules will not alter its multibillion-dollar commitment to clean up emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The country's largest public utility is now waging a court battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over the so-called "New Source Review."

The rule, an amendment to the Clean Air Act, requires fossil plants built before 1977 to meet new plant emission standards if they are extensively modified or upgraded and become essentially a "new source" of pollution.

EPA contends 51 power plants across the country have violated the rule during the past 20 years, including seven of TVA's 11 coal-fired plants. TVA counters the improvements were "routine maintenance" and therefore exempt.

On Thursday, the Bush administration announced that the EPA wants to relax the "New Source Review" rule to make it easier for utilities, oil refineries and industrial plants to expand.

Those changes would be for future years and would not affect the current TVA-EPA lawsuit before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

John Shipp, TVA's manager of environmental policy and planning, said Friday that EPA's proposal also would not alter TVA's plans to spend about $1 million a day through the end of the decade on required and voluntary emission controls — a $5 billion commitment since the 1970s.

"There has always been a loophole and they have just made it much bigger."

Stephen Smith,
Southern Alliance
for Clean Energy

"We are in the midst of the largest emission reduction effort ever undertaken by a utility to reduce our nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions," he said. "We have no intention of changing our plans."

Still, TVA would support the administration's effort to fix or reform the rules, he said, saying it would give TVA greater "flexibility" in operating its coal plants, which account for 60 percent of TVA power.

But environmentalists in the Tennessee Valley were outraged.

"There has always been a loophole, and they have just made it much bigger," said Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

The New Source Review exemption for old plants was adopted because it was expected that utilities would soon retire these plants.

"But that hasn't happened. As a matter of fact, TVA is running the plants even harder than they were even then, and TVA is resisting putting the controls on," Smith said.

Emissions from coal-fired plants lead to acid rain, smog and haze, unhealthy conditions that can be particularly acute across the Tennessee Valley and in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

"How dangerous is air pollution in national parks even under current, stricter standards?" asked Don Barger of the National Parks Conservation Association.

"It would have been less threatening to your health on Tuesday morning to walk to work in Washington, D.C., which was under a code red pollution alert, than to have hiked an equal distance on the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains," he said.