This post originally appeared in November on Substack and is reprinted for archival purposes
After more than a decade of regulatory huffing and puffing, the federal government has ordered a large coal-fired power plant to dispose of its coal ash in a lined pit or shut down. Last Friday (Nov. 18), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered Lightstone Generation LLC to stop dumping coal ash into unlined ponds at its 2,600-MW Gen. James M. Gavin generating plant in southern Ohio.
The Associated Press reported the Gavin order “marks the first time the EPA has formally denied a utility’s request to continue disposing toxic coal ash after a deadline to stop such disposal has passed.” EPA denied a request by Lightbridge, a joint generating venture of publicly traded BlackRock and private equity investor ArcLight Capital Partners, to delay a 2020 order to cease disposing of “coal combustion residues” in unlined waste ponds. Several other requests to delay implementation of the order are pending, according to EPA.
BlackRock and ArcLight bought the vintage 1954 plant from Ohio-based American Electric Power in 2017 for about $2.1 billion. Despite considerable AEP expenditures in pollution control equipment for oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, the plant ranks as the sixth most polluting coal-fired plant in the U.S. in terms of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to E&E News.
“For too long, communities already disproportionately impacted by high levels of pollution have been burdened by improper coal ash disposal,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “Today’s action reaffirms that surface impoundments or landfills cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater, ensuring safe water resources for these communities while protecting public health and ensuring a reliable supply of electricity.”
EPA’s order requires the company to comply “no later than135 days after notice of the final determination is published in the Federal Register,” expected this week. EPA also notes that the plant supplies power to the PJM regional transmission organization, responsible for electric reliability in a large section of the East and Midwest. EPA said, “Specifically, PJM’s process of maintaining grid reliability requires a facility like Gavin to request a planned outage at least 30 days prior to the start of the outage. PJM confirmed in EPA discussions that 30 days is generally sufficient time to assess a facility’s planned outage request. To ensure that PJM has adequate time to evaluate a request, EPA’s final action also requires Gavin to submit any request for a planned outage to PJM within 15 days of publication of EPA’s final decision in the Federal Register.”
Problems with disposing of ash and solid waste from coal-fired power plants burst onto the national scene in 2008, as POWER magazine recounted in a feature article on coal ash late last year (which I wrote). Around midnight on December 22, 2008, “a dike at the coal ash dewatering pond for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) 1,400-MW Kingston power plant in Roane County, Tennessee, failed. That led to what has been reported as the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.
“TVA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially estimated that the event released 1.7 million cubic yards of gray sludge. The EPA later upped the estimate to 5.4 million cubic yards. While there were no injuries, the spill damaged a score of private dwellings. The plume reached the Clinch River miles away. The event eventually cost TVA about $1 billion and took seven years to clean up.”
The twisted regulatory environment of coal ash management began in 1976, with passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which gave EPA authority to regulate coal ash. But EPA took no significant action until after TVA’s Kingston event. In 2015, the EPA adopted coal ash rules, defining the coal combustion residues as “non-hazardous.” In 2018, the Trump administration EPA changed the rules, adding bureaucratic steps designed to limit and weaken agency action. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned major portions of the Trump rules, which gave the Biden EPA authority to act, which it has done with Gavin.
–Kennedy Maize