NEWS

Power plant proposal sparks fierce debate in rural Ga.

03/27/2008

Daniel Cusick, Greenwire reporter

BLAKELY, Ga.—This community calls itself the "Peanut Capital of the World," a fair boast given the nearly 80 million pounds of legumes harvested annually from its farms. But its top export could soon become coal-fired electricity.

Merchant-power developers LS Power Group and Dynegy Inc. are planning to build one of the country’s largest new pulverized coal plants at Hilton, a crossroads community 10 miles west of here.

The proposed 1,200-megawatt Longleaf Energy Station would rise from pine-studded forests directly across the Chattahoochee River from Southern Co.’s Farley Nuclear Plant in Alabama and about 50 miles north of the Florida state line. Together, the two would generate nearly 3,000 megawatts, enough to light 2.3 million homes—this in a 20-county region with fewer than 1 million residents.

But for Houston-based Dynegy, which will operate the Early County coal plant, the project is not about supplying local power needs. The company expects to sell most of Longleaf’s output to utilities near and far and return millions of dollars in revenues for its shareholders.

The notion of being an electricity exporter while at the same time enduring the plant’s air pollution and providing it with precious water has stirred up an intense debate in Early County, pitting neighbor against neighbor and, in some cases, family against family.

For economic development officials, the prospect of landing a $2 billion industrial plant, along with as many as 150 permanent jobs, is a boon for a local economy that has stagnated in recent years in the face of falling peanut prices.

Olin Thompson, chairman of the county’s economic development authority, said the plant will generate millions in additional tax revenues and spin off additional regional development. "I also know they’re going to bring in a lot of coal, and there will be an awful lot of sales tax revenue generated from that," Thompson said.

But critics say Longleaf is no prize for southwest Georgia or the broader region, which includes southeast Alabama and parts of the Florida Panhandle. Beyond the plant’s pollution and water demands, they say tax revenues will not be realized until two decades later, when financial incentives provided by the county end.

"It’s a trade-off I’d rather not make," said Bobby McLendon, president of the Early County advocacy group Friends of the Chattahoochee, one of several groups challenging the plant’s state environmental permits in court.

"Why accept a plant that promises a hundred or so jobs when it’s going to dirty our air and load our rivers and creeks with toxic substances?" McLendon asks. "It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that’s a bad deal."

Emissions at issue

Beyond emissions regulated by the Clean Air Act—nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and mercury—Longleaf will also release 9 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, placing it among the top 100 U.S. producers of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas, based on U.S. EPA estimates.

The plant’s greenhouse gas pollution has put the plant in the crosshairs of the Sierra Club’s national coal campaign. The club’s lawyers have promised to appeal Longleaf’s permits all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We’re prepared to fight this for as long as it takes," said Justine Thompson, director of the Atlanta-based nonprofit GreenLaw, which is working alongside Sierra Club and Friends of the Chattahoochee to overturn the plant’s air permits on appeal.

Georgia officials say the Longleaf project has been held to the highest pollution-control standards. Among other things, the plant must be equipped with the best available control technology (BACT) for all major air pollutants.

"They didn’t just accept what we sent over," Mike Vogt, LS Power’s manager for Longleaf, said of the regulators. "They looked at it hard, and they didn’t give us everything we wanted. But they were fair about it."

LS Power says it will spend about $400 million on air pollution equipment, roughly 20 percent of the plant’s total estimated cost, to meet Georgia’s permit requirements. The plant will have low-NOx burners, "over-fire air" technology and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) to remove NOx and a dry scrubber to remove sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid mist from the plant’s flue gases.

But environmental groups insist Georgia’s regulators allowed LS Power to cut key corners. Among other things, they allege the state accepted insufficient modeling data for the plant’s projected fine particulates, or soot, which could pose health problems for the plant’s neighbors and foul the air for miles.

‘Global warming consensus scam’

But in southwest Georgia, where roughly a quarter of the population lives below the federal poverty line and off-farm jobs are scarce, the environmentalists’ view of coal plants runs counter to local public opinion.

McLendon, who has lived most of his 68 years in Early County, knows this firsthand. His outspoken opposition to the Longleaf plant has cost him friends and alienated business and opinion leaders, many of whom he has known for decades.

Consider Billy Fleming, the former Blakely mayor and councilman and current publisher of the Early County News. In a recent interview, Fleming characterized the plant’s local opponents as adherents to a fear campaign orchestrated by outside groups and "a few more who just don’t know the facts" about the plant’s environmental impacts.

Skeptical about assertions that human activities are a major cause of global warming, Fleming said his own investigations into coal-fired power have him convinced the Longleaf proposal is as benign as any other industrial project of its size, and that concerns about greenhouse gases are overblown.

Fleming’s view is reflected in his newspaper, which earlier this month published an opinion column in its news pages under the headline, "The global warming consensus scam."

As for other pollution concerns, Fleming told readers in a 2006 column: "They are not the unbridled threats you hear from the environmental activists and NIMBYs."

Other key stakeholders, such as the privately funded Early County 2055 commission, also seem willing to let the plant proposal go unchallenged, even though the project appears to undermine a key piece of the group’s economic development vision.

In a report issued last year, Early County 2055 planners identified developing alternative energy as an economic priority, noting the region’s significant capacity to develop ethanol, biodiesel and biomass-based businesses.

But the same report backpedals on its own recommendation by noting the likely completion of the Longleaf plant. "Despite some environmentalist resistance, the project has the support of a majority of Early County residents," the document notes.

Celia Doremus, a spokeswoman for Early County 2055, said the group sidestepped the power plant issue because "it was already in the works" when the long-term planning project began in 2006. But she acknowledged the group had filed no comments with Georgia regulators on the permit, even though petitioners had until mid-November 2006 to do so.

Battle lines

As with almost all new U.S. coal-fired power proposals, the battle lines over Longleaf have extended far beyond Early County. The national spotlight has been especially glaring on LS Power and Dynegy, which last month were singled out by the Sierra Club’s national coal campaign as the country’s most aggressive developers of new coal-fired power.

"While other power companies are shunning carbon-based pollution because of its widely recognized financial and regulatory risks, Dynegy is moving in exactly the opposite direction on coal—threatening the climate, the pocketbooks of ratepayers, the health of those living near the power plants, and the long-term wealth of its investors," the club said in a Feb. 20 release.

About 30 demonstrators organized by the Sierra Club last week rallied outside the statehouse in downtown Atlanta, chiding Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) to "step up to the plate" on global warming by issuing a moratorium on new coal plant development.

In addition to the Longleaf project, which received its final air permits last May, a second proposal for an 850-megawatt coal plant in east-central Georgia arrived at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division last month. Proponents of that project include 10 electric cooperatives under the name Power4Georgians LLC.

And rumors continue to swirl that Georgia Power Co., the state’s dominant investor-owned utility, will announce plans to build a new coal plant within the next year, possibly in lieu of expanding its large nuclear plant near Waynesboro in east Georgia.

A spokesman for Georgia Power, while noting that coal should remain a viable option for new power generation, said the company has no current plans to build a new coal-fired plant.

Environmentalists say the convergence of events proves that Georgia is racing headlong toward a future where emissions from coal and other fossil fuels will grow exponentially, wreaking havoc on the environment.

Leading climate experts, including those from the Georgia Institute of Technology, have estimated that global warming would hit Georgia hard. Sea levels along its coast are expected to rise between 1 and 2.5 feet over the next century, permanently altering the barrier islands and other low-lying areas.

Persistently warmer temperatures, especially in the summer, could also encourage the formation of ground-level ozone when emissions from power plants and motor vehicles mix in hot, stagnant air. Such conditions could pose serious new challenges for cities like Atlanta, where tightening federal air quality standards will make overcoming long-standing pollution issues even harder.

"We’re terrified that we’re going to become the bull’s eye for every coal-fired power plant developer that can’t get permits to build someplace else," said Thompson of GreenLaw. "As the laws are toughened up, particularly with states around us like Florida and North Carolina battening down the hatches and refusing coal-fired projects, we’re going to become an even bigger emitter of CO2."

‘A tough sell’

Already, two of the nation’s three largest CO2 polluting plants are in Georgia—Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Scherer (27.2 million tons a year) near Macon and Plant Bowen (23.2 million tons) north of Atlanta. Three additional Georgia Power coal plants—Wansley, Harllee Branch and Yates—also rank in the top 100, according to U.S. EPA.

Yet despite such warnings and Georgia’s already large contribution to coal-fired emissions, state policymakers remain unconvinced that government action is warranted. Perdue has remained largely silent on the issue, deferring to his environmental agency on most matters involving power plants. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division, meanwhile, has argued strenuously that it is upholding the law.

In late 2006, the Governor’s Energy Policy Council issued a suite of recommendations, including that environmental and utility regulators "document the current carbon dioxide emissions from Georgia electric generating units, forecast future emissions from these facilities and evaluate the economic impact on Georgia from possible carbon regulations." But to date, no formal effort to account for the utility sector’s CO2 emissions and their economic impacts has begun, according to sources familiar with the council’s recommendations.

Environmentalists say they have found it equally difficult to find allies in Georgia’s General Assembly, where Georgia Power and its parent, Southern Co., wield considerable influence.

"It’s a tough sell with that crowd," said Tom Barksdale, an Early County native and opponent of the Longleaf proposal. "They don’t want to listen, but we’re going to keep at it until somebody hears us."

Last August, a state legislative energy committee convened an expert panel for a discussion titled "Global Warming: Debunking the Myth or a Need for Climate Change Policy?" Three of the four presenters claimed much of the climate dialogue was driven by questionable science, hysteria and environmental posturing.

Rep. Jeff White (R), the committee’s chairman, came away concerned that passing aggressive state-based measures aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions could "handicap our way of life for no reason."