Is that a Bonanza in your docket?

EPA board freezes construction of new coal-fired power plants in U.S. 15

Muckraker: Grist on Politics

In a major win for environmentalists, the U.S. EPA's Environmental Appeals Board handed down a landmark decision on Thursday that essentially puts a freeze on the construction of as many as 100 new coal-fired power plants around the U.S.

It will now be up to the Obama administration to develop rules on carbon dioxide emissions from such plants.

In July 2007, the EPA issued a permit for a proposed Bonanza coal-fired power plant in Utah. Lawyers for the Sierra Club filed a request that the permit be overturned because it did not require any controls on carbon dioxide pollution. The enviros pointed to the Supreme Court's April 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

In its Thursday decision, the appeals board ruled that the Bush administration had failed to offer a good reason for not regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from the proposed Bonanza plant. The board kicked the permit request back to the regional EPA office in Denver, saying it should reconsider whether the best available pollution controls for CO2 should be required, and stressing that it must adequately explain its decision. "[T]his is an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting proceeding," the board wrote.

"Essentially what this decision does is it gives the Obama administration a clean slate to decide what our nation's energy future should be," said Joanne Spalding, the senior attorney at the Sierra Club who argued the case before the board. "It puts it back in the lap of an Obama EPA to determine how to treat greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, and it gives the opportunity to establish policies that will essentially favor clean energy and impose restrictions on fossil fuels that emit lots of greenhouse gases."

While greens are cheering the decision, at least one industry representative is calling it a win for his team. Rich Alonso, who represents utilities and power-plant developers for the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani and previously served as a senior air attorney with EPA's enforcement office, points out that the board's decision doesn't explicitly require the EPA to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act; it simply remands the decision to the regional office.

"The EAB refused to side with the environmental groups and it found that the existing Clean Air Act does not require CO2 to be regulated," Alonso said. "A ruling in support of regulation would have turned American industry on its head by forcing inappropriate and inflexible CO2 regulation across the country, instead of allowing Congress to develop a national program to address CO2."

But Jason Hutt, another attorney representing utilities, sees a definite downside in the decision. "All permits in the pipeline are now stymied," he told the Associated Press.

No matter what industry is saying, enviros see the ruling as a notable victory, even if only a partial one.

"It's basically saying let's stop and think before we build this whole fleet of new coal plants that will be putting massive greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere," said Spalding

Kate Sheppard is Grist’s political reporter.

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  1. christophersj Posted 3:17 am
    14 Nov 2008

    WowWow, can we call this a moratorium?

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  2. F James Handley Posted 3:28 am
    14 Nov 2008

    EPA: Good Call, but Tax, don't regulate CO2Hooray!  Coal-fired power plants are US's  largest source of Co2 emissions, this is huge!
    EPA is a very over-burdened agency and its enforcement program is even more thinly stretched.  (I was an attorney there for 14 years.)  
    EPA, Congress and the new Administration should resist the temptation to regulate GHG emissions and price them instead.  Economists agree that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the best way to drive down emissions and shift to a low-carbon economy.  See http://www.carbontax.org.
    EPA regs take five years to promulgate and another decade of litigation would ensue.  And then they're unlikely to be well-enforced.  
    Tax Carbon Pollution, Pay people!  

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  3. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 3:46 am
    14 Nov 2008

    No, it's not a win

    That's not a win -- that's a big loss!
    The worst offenders in CO2 are the oldest, most inefficient plants!
    Closing those is more important than preventing new plants from coming online.
    In fact, if the environmentalists had let coal plants be built since 1970, we could have obsolesced the more egregious ones, and met Kyoto ten times over.

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  4. bkrell Posted 4:42 am
    14 Nov 2008

    awesomePerhaps this will inspire the Chinese.  Oh wait, nevermind...

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  5. Duggles Posted 5:08 am
    14 Nov 2008

    I agree with jabailo on this one.Especially when it comes to non-CO2 emissions (ones regulated under the Clean Air Act), older plants are much worse polluters than newer plants.

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  6. bkrell Posted 5:36 am
    14 Nov 2008

    In the wordsIn the words of a recent wall street journal editorial on the financial crisis...Don't just do something, stand there.

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  7. PBrazelton Posted 6:30 am
    14 Nov 2008

    Seriously?The argument is that we should build new coal plants because they're marginally less filthy than older ones?  That's like preferring a sharp stick in the eye instead of being set on fire.  How about we chose neither?
    John, I'm sure you're really interested in the truth, so read Myth #3: http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/top-5-clean-coal-myths.  Newer, more efficient plants haven't helped curb CO2 emissions at all, nor should they - the Clean Air Act only impacted smog-creating compounds.  Granted, less coal would have to be burned to produce the same amount of electricity, but that's swamped by the tripling of coal use in that period of time.
    A legal moratorium is the only sane solution at this point, for reasons too numerous to detail (read Grist, you might get an idea).  But here's the best reason - say the utilities sink billions of dollars into new coal plants in the next decade.  How much harder will it be to get them to decommission those shiny new facilities when a true moratorium goes into effect?  

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  8. edwards Posted 9:20 am
    14 Nov 2008

    EPA Does Something RIGHTHoorah for CLEAN energy technologies! The idea of clean coal is a joke - impossible to accomplish without massive federal funding that would make even nuke plants look cheap. There's a good discussion of alt fuels at AltFuels101.com.

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  9. tmullins Posted 12:23 pm
    14 Nov 2008

    NO, That's a boner in my pocket !Turns me on like Sara Palin shooting Moose and Wolves.   Change is coming folks this time it will come from the bottom up !
    END MTR - http://www.wisecountyissues.com



    Hannity shut the fuck up !

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  10. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 2:36 pm
    14 Nov 2008

    Tonight's Top Ten List

    Look Brazelton,
    I'm sick and tired of you Grist Ecologist whipping out some list of myths or ways to answer the (insert nasty term here) just because someone presents a reasonable answer that doesn't require mouthing the Green Party Line Bullshit.
    The old coal plants are dirty.
    If we had built new ones we'd be better off by any metric you clowns could muster.
    Should we replace them ultimately?  Yes, but we could have been breathing easier, with less CO2 RIGHT NOW, if the greens hadn't dragged us all down with their crazy meddling.

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  11. Tasermons Partner Posted 3:11 pm
    14 Nov 2008

    So, instead of of old coal vs. new coal......just replace both with renewables.  That way there is no "marginally better".
    There's only absolutely better!

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  12. sanderson508 Posted 4:01 pm
    14 Nov 2008

    coal fired power plantsThe governments worker bees do care and do understand.   This is a great example of how they respond when the freaken idiots that have been controlling the govenment for the last eight years are bagged and dumped.   Let us all hope the freaks put Palin up again.   It's the best thing they have done for us and the environment in years.

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  13. Wolverine Posted 1:58 am
    16 Nov 2008

    Why Bailo Is WrongThe problem with this attitude toward anything that needs serious change is that it does not produce significant change.  Mining coal, in the first place, is reason alone to ban new coal plants.  Building more of them will simply result in more environmental and ecological destruction by mining, including some of the worst environmental destruction on Earth called mountain top mining.  The only way to stop this hideous practice is to stop building coal plants, not to focus on which ones emit how much pollution or use how much coal.  Those are minor details in comparison.

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  14. vbstenswick Posted 1:13 pm
    16 Nov 2008

    Waste heatFirst, we certainly cannot build any new coal plants.  Second, many if not all of the existing coal plants could be upgraded using the Organic Rankine Cycle to get more power and not burn any more coal.  This would be a temporary while new technologies are developed.  We certainly need more conservation.  I do not know what technologies will eventually win out, but the whole world is working on clean energy.  We really need to avoid any bad big decisions, and building 100 new coal plants is a bad big decision.  I think eventually wind and enhanced geothermal will be huge.   Also microgeneration using hydrogen fuel cells in the home.  The hydrogen of course needs to be produced cleanly, which could be done with electrolysis, but a cheaper method may have to be devised.  The organic rankine cycle can also be used at many idustrial sites to recover energy from waste heat.

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  15. dobermanmacleod Posted 3:02 pm
    16 Nov 2008

    A US moritorium on new coal is insufficientAny carbon diet strategy would be dependent upon clean coal:
    "The vast majority of new power stations in China and India will be coal-fired; not "may be coal-fired"; will be. So developing carbon capture and storage technology is not optional, it is literally of the essence." --"Breaking the Climate Deadlock," Tony Blair, June 26, 2008
    But:
    Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide -- a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he stressed."

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