Smoke on the Water

appear in 32 years, Congress is poised to control CO2 emissions. And the utilities want to get as many plants grandfathered as possible.

They pulled this same stunt in 1977 when they talked Congress into exempting old plants from the Clean Air Act because they’d soon be “replaced.” But rather than replace the old plants, they used them for more capacity, and many of them are still polluting. Under a program called New Source Review, utilities had to install the “best available retrofit technology” if they rebuilt or expanded a plant in ways that increased pollution. Instead they gained unfair cost advantages by implementing massive, enormously expensive modifications in their oldest, dirtiest facilities—thereby increasing both pollution and production—modifications they then passed off as “routine maintenance.” The feds and states finally got fed up with the ruse and, in the late 1990s, sued 13 companies for illegally expanding, sans retrofits, 51 power plants in 12 states. This was part of the recent AEP settlement.

Still, AEP is as environmentally responsible as utilities get. In its hometown of Columbus, Ohio, it is helping transform the degraded Scioto riverfront into an attractive public park—just one of many examples. It invests heavily in energy-conser-

vation promotion and provides incentives to reduce energy use. Throughout its 11-state service area, it makes a genuine effort to be a good neighbor. Could it be that the duck hun-

ters and environmentalists in southwest Arkansas are fretting needlessly?

Absolutely, according to AEP and SWEPCO. Melissa McHenry, AEP’s corporate media relations manager, informs me that one of the company’s major problems is keeping wildlife, notably deer, away from its coal plants. “It [coal generation] doesn’t have an impact,” she says. “There’s wildlife every-

where. You’ll see cranes and egrets. The photographers can’t believe it.” And SWEPCO’s president, Venita McCellon-Allen, assures me that “there’s no reason the [Arkansas] plant can’t fit in beautifully with the environment.”

When I asked her about mercury, she said: “The amount of mercury distributed over the 18,000-acre intervener property [owned by the hunt clubs] over the life of the plant would be no more than the size of a golf ball. So there should be no concern.” As “a prediction for the future” she cited the abun-

dant wildlife at the 30-year-old Flint Creek coal plant in Gentry, Arkansas, where, inexplicably, SWEPCO plants food plots to bring in those pesky deer and where thermal pollu-

tion keeps a wastewater-retention basin ice free all winter and therefore attracts so many eagles, shorebirds, and wading birds that Audubon Arkansas has designated it an Important Bird Area (IBA). Finally, she explained that to help erase its carbon footprint, her company is doing things like planting trees in South America.