Old US power plants emit twice as much pollution - report
Date: 21-Jun-02
Country: USA
The General Accounting Office analysis of air emissions from power plants came less than a week after the Bush administration said it would relax costly air pollution rules when older utilities are repaired or expanded. The GAO report compared emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide from new and old power plants in 2000.
The pollution contributes to acid rain, smog and soot, and can aggravate asthma, chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. "For equal quantities of electricity generated, older units in the aggregate, emitted about twice as much sulfur dioxide and about 25 percent more nitrogen oxides than did the newer units which must meet the new source standards for these substances," the GAO said.
Put in more concrete terms, older power plants emitted about 12.7 pounds of sulfur dioxide for each megawatt-hour of electricity generated, while new plants emitted about 6.4 pounds, the GAO said. One megawatt-hour is the amount of electricity needed to power roughly 1,000 homes for an hour.
The worst offenders were older power plants in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, the report said.
The GAO report was requested by Sen. Jim Jeffords, a Vermont independent who heads the Senate Environment committee. Jeffords opposes the Bush administration plan announced last week to ease the so-called "new source" pollution rules for older power plants. Among the proposed changes is a new definition of routine maintenance, which would give utilities more leeway to expand old, dirty plants without having to install expensive state-of-the-art pollution controls.
For the past three decades, the older plants were required to install costly pollution control equipment only if they launched a major expansion or refurbishing plan. More than half of the nation's fossil-fuel electricity plants were built before 1972.
Applying stricter anti-pollution standards to old plants could have other effects, the GAO said. "A requirement that older units meet the standards could have reduced the quantity of electricity generated, raise the price of electricity and/or shifted generation among units," the GAO said.
"If older units had been required to meet new source standards in 2000, to the extent practicable, other units might have increased their operations - for example, by running more hours each day - to meet the demand for electricity that would have otherwise been produced by the units that retired," it added.
The GAO report included the following estimates of air pollution from new and old power plants:
EMISSIONS PER MEGAWATT-HOUR OF ELECTRICITY
Old New
plants plants
Sulfur dioxide (pounds) 12.7 6.4
Nitrogen oxides (pounds) 4.7 3.8
Carbon dioxide (tons) 1.0 1.0.