Upgrade Costs Doom Older Plants
Wall Street Journal
23 December 2011
By Rebecca Smith
Most of the coal-fired plant capacity facing retirement consists
of smaller, older power-generating units that can't bear a major
expense, especially with today's low power prices.
At Duke Energy Corp.'s Beckjord plant on the Ohio River, for
example, none of the six coal units have scrubbers. Beckjord's six
generating units were built between 1948 and 1969, when few
pollution controls were required.
Major upgrades made after 1974 in Ohio were supposed to trigger
federal and state requirements that called for installation of
advanced pollution-control equipment. But court records show that
Duke and its predecessor, Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co,
successfully beat back EPA efforts to make it install more
equipment at Beckjord at least five times between 1985 and 1994.
Duke estimates that bringing the plant into compliance today would
cost $400 million for scrubbers, which remove sulfur dioxide and
mercury from flue gasses, $200 million for "bag houses" to extract
coal particulates and mercury and $200 million to $250 million for
equipment to remove nitrogen oxides. That is more than the between
$500 million and $750 million it would typically cost to build a
new gas-fired power plant. And that is why Beckjord is on the
retirement list.
For the mostly bigger, newer coal-fired plants that remain open,
Duke expects to spend $6 billion in total on environmental
upgrades for them. As a result, its emissions profile will change
dramatically, even though it expects its total generating capacity
to rise by 12%. By 2017, it says, sulfur-dioxide pollution from
its power plants will tumble by two-thirds and nitrogen-oxide
emissions will fall by half compared with 2011 levels. Total
mercury emissions will drop 73%, over the same period.
The EPA is working on more rules that will affect coal-burners
like Beckjord, including one intended to prevent coal-ash toxins
from polluting water supplies. Beckjord's site near the Ohio River
holds so much coal waste that if it were possible to stack it all
on a one-acre lot, the pile would rise 1,750 feet in the air, or
to a level three times as tall as the Washington Monument. Duke
says it doesn't yet know what it will do with the waste when
Beckjord closes.