The Washington Post reported yesterday that Dominion Power’s proposed coal-fired plant in Wise County will move forward with the approval of the state’s Air Pollution Control Board. This was the last major step in what has been a long bureaucratic and contentious process that C-VILLE has followed.
As part of the approval, though, the board reduced the proposed plant’s limits for the annual emissions of sulfur dioxide and mercury, two pollutants that Wise County residents and environmentalists argued would significantly damage air and water quality around the plant. The approval did not limit the plant’s emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
The approval also requires Dominion to switch another of its coal-fired plants in Central Virginia to run on cleaner-burning natural gas.
Cale Jaffe, the lead attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), saw the board’s failure to limit carbon dioxide as a failure of the state. While the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the EPA to treat CO2 as a pollutant, according to the Post, Virginia does not regulate the gas as a pollutant. Jaffe told the paper, "We’re still shying away from the obligation to address climate change."
The SELC argued that the board’s restrictions on the proposed plant’s pollution levels shows that the Wise County plant was not the environmentally cutting-edge facility that Dominion had touted. While applauding the board for reducing pollution amounts, John Suttles of the SELC said in a press release that the creation of a new coal-fired plant will fuel mountaintop coal mining.
Suttles says that the permits fall short of compliance with the Clean Air Act in regard to carbon dioxide emissions.
"Despite the vast improvements in these permits," says Suttles, "they are still flawed, and illegal. We will be challenging them further in court."