August 9, 2006—Even as some of America’s dirtiest power plants start to clean up their act, scores of large, old, and inefficient electricity-generating facilities that fail to use available technology continue to pollute the nation’s air, according to a report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP).
According to the report, just 4 percent of the nation’s nearly 1,200 fossil-fuel-burning power plants account for 45 percent of their sulfur dioxide emissions.
A bright spot in the EIP report: After years of delay, sulfur dioxide emissions should start to decline over the next several years, as a significant number of coal-fired power plants install scrubbers to meet deadlines imposed under federal and state clean air rules, or to resolve enforcement actions brought by EPA and states. Almost half (46) of the 100 largest SO2 emitters have either begun construction of a scrubber, or have committed to install one by 2010.
EIP ranked each of the just under 400 power plants for which the most recent emissions and electrical generation data are publicly available, based on emission rates, or pounds of pollutant for each megawatt-hour (or million megawatt-hours, in the case of mercury) that the plant produced.
The top 50 plants averaged 22.44 pounds of sulfur dioxide per megawatt-hour, compared to only one pound per hour for plants equipped with state of the art scrubbers.
For the second year in a row, Louisville Gas and Electric’s Coleman plant in Kentucky claimed the top spot as the nation’s dirtiest power plant in terms of SO2, generating just over 40 pounds of sulfur dioxide per megawatt-hour of electricity. Southern Company’s Bowen plant in Georgia led the nation, with just over 186,000 tons — 20,000 tons more than it emitted in 2004. Reliant’s Keystone plant in Pennsylvania followed in close second, with over 178,000 tons — 7,000 more tons than it emitted in 2004.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Georgia have the heaviest concentrations of the dirtiest plants in the nation for SO2. A fully searchable database of the EIP report is available online.
