TVA should quit stalling and clean up its act
Asheville Citizen Times
Feb 17, 2001
The 106th Congress failed to pass the Clean Smokestacks Act and the bill
died when the session came to a close. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Henry
A. Waxman, D-Calif., whose office said Friday that he plans to reintroduce
it sometime next month.
If Congress had passed it, the Clean Smokestacks Act would have required
coal-fired utility plants nationwide to comply with the 1990 revision of the
Clean Air Act. The plants were exempted because power companies led
lawmakers to believe they would be phased out within ten years and
retro-fitting them wouldn’t be worthwhile. Eleven years later, they’re still
going strong and producing a lion’s share of the pollution that obscures our
views, hurts our economy and worst of all, damages our health.
The revisions to the Clean Air Act allowed power companies to do routine
maintenance on the old coal-fired plants, but anytime companies made major
modifications that increased emissions, they were required to apply for a
permit and meet the revised standards.
According to the Sierra Club, at least two utilities, the federally owned
Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides power to 8 million people in
Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and
Mississippi, and American Electric Company, which provides power to parts of
Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Virginia, have failed to comply with that
requirement. Instead, according to Sierra Club spokesman Dave Muhly, under
the guise of maintenance, they have modified old coal-fired plants so they
can continue to operate for as much as 20 more years.
"Under the rubric of routine maintenance, where, if it were your car you
would expect to change the oil and adjust the brakes, what they’ve done is
overhaul the engine, drop a new body on the chassis and overhaul the
transmission while they’re at it," says Muhly.
The Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association filed
lawsuits Tuesday in Tennessee and Alabama claiming that by doing this, TVA
has for years violated the federal clean air laws. As a result, the lawsuits
say, TVA has emitted more than a million tons of pollutants from two power
plants, pollutants that are the major source of the smog in the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park. The two plants at issue are the Bull Run plant near
Clinton, Tenn., and the Colbert plant in Tuscumbria in northern Alabama.
Lawsuits have also been filed against American Electric Company.
TVA spent $8.3 million on a capital improvement project at Bull Run and $50
million on a 13-month project at the Culbert plant, Muhly says, but TVA claims
that it has spent more than $2.6 billion over the last 20 years
to improve air quality.
"We think we do a good job while maintaining a reliable service at
affordable costs," said TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci.
Martocci may be right. But that doesn’t change the fact that pollutants from
TVA coal-fired plants are a primary factor, if not the primary factor, in
the smog and ground level ozone that blanket the Western North Carolina
mountains in the summer. According to Muhly, within TVA’s 60,000 square mile
service area, it accounts for approximately 75 percent of the sulfur dioxide
and 33 percent of the nitrogen oxide produced by all human activities.
Air pollution has turned what was once a major asset - the clean mountain
air that drew people to Western North Carolina - into a major liability. On
17 occasions during 2000, monitors on ridge tops in Western North Carolina
registered an amount of ozone that exceeds the level that is safe for
children, the elderly and people with asthma to breathe. Something needs to
be done, and it needs to be done now.
Still, even Muhly agrees that lawsuits are a poor way to resolve a conflict
like this one. A legal fight could drag on and on. Instead of spending money
cleaning up its dirty smokestacks, TVA will be paying lawyers to defend it.
And even if the environmental groups win, the only plants immediately
affected would be those named in the lawsuits, though that would send a
signal to other companies to clean up their coal-fired plants or face
lawsuits of their own.
What’s needed is comprehensive legislation that would force all coal-fired
utility plants in the country to meet the 1990 revised clean air standards.
Waxman’s bill had 122 co-sponsors in the 106th Congress. North Carolina
ranked third in the nation, behind California and Texas, in the number of times
it exceeded
acceptable nitrogen oxide levels.
But if our lawmakers continue to fail to live up to their responsibility to
protect their citizens’ health and welfare, the environmentalists’ lawsuits
may be our only hope.