TVA To Invest $1.5B In Smokestack Scrubbers

TVA To Invest $1.5B In Smokestack Scrubbers

KNOXVILLE (AP) — The Tennessee Valley Authority announced Thursday a $1.5 billion commitment to further reduce acid rain and haze-forming emissions from its coal-fired power plants.

The federal utility said it will install five smokestack scrubber stems at its Bull Run and Kingston plants in eastern Tennessee, its Colbert plant in north Alabama and its Paradise plant western Kentucky.

Together, the systems should reduce TVA's sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 200,000 tons a year. TVA's 11 coal plants released about 700,000 tons of sulfur dioxide this past year.

Environmentalists called the decision an investment in the health of the Tennessee Valley and a step toward improved visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

"This is a significant move," said Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "It is really good news for the people of the Tennessee Valley."

Don Barger, regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, said "this commitment by TVA will begin to lift the huge burden of pollution on the parks."

Although design work will begin soon, installation of the new scrubbers won't begin before 2005, said John Shipp, TVA general manager of environmental policy.

Shipp said most of the construction resources and equipment needed for the scrubbers will be occupied until then in a related pollution-curbing project. TVA also is spending $1 billion on 18 selective catalytic reduction systems to cut nitrogen oxide emissions.

When the planned projects are done, 18 of TVA's 59 coal-fired boilers at six of its 11 fossil plants will be connected to scrubbers, and 25 boilers will be hooked up to SCR systems.

"We are in compliance today and these (decisions) will certainly help insure that we remain in compliance," Shipp said of meeting federal Clean Air Act requirements.

Smith agreed, but noted that TVA used some 200,000 tons in pollution credits this past year to stay within those limits.

While TVA accrued the credits because of the agency's own efforts to reduce pollutants, Smith said he worries that TVA recently bought additional pollution credits on the open market.

"They have always said that they were only going to burn credits that were generated in the valley," Smith said. "Well that changed on Friday when for the first time they went out and bought pollution credits off system."

Use of such credits means TVA can legally exceed its pollution limits in the Tennessee Valley because another utility stayed below its pollution limit and sold the savings.

Shipp said the purchase was "risk mitigation" against unknown factors — future energy demand, a changing economy and TVA's efforts to convert its fossil plants to low-sulfur coal.

TVA might use some of these credits while waiting for the new scrubbers to come on line, Shipp said. But TVA views them purely as "an insurance policy" not a permanent policy.

"Our intention is to make (pollution) reductions in our system to comply, period," he said.

TVA is the nation's largest public power producer, providing electricity to 8.3 million people through 158 distributors in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi.