The state's largest utility, Dominion Virginia Power, announced plans Tuesday to spend $500 million over the next decade to significantly cut air pollutants at several of its coal-fired power plants, including ones in Chesapeake and Yorktown.
CHESTER, Va. — The state's largest utility, Dominion Virginia Power, announced plans Tuesday to spend $500 million over the next decade to significantly cut air pollutants at several of its coal-fired power plants, including ones in Chesapeake and Yorktown.
The improvements are aimed at complying with state and federal regulations by reducing emissions that contribute to smog, acid rain, mercury contamination and nutrient pollution falling onto the Chesapeake Bay, utility officials said.
"Today, we are setting a new standard in our pledge to be a leader nationally in the effort to improve air quality," Thomas F. Farrell II, president and chief operating officer of Dominion, said at a news conference in the shadow of the utility's largest power plant, in Chester, south of Richmond.
Farrell described how Dominion has spent, or has committed to spend, $2.5 billion since the mid-1990s to modernize most of its 23 coal-burning units in Virginia and West Virginia. About half of that anti-pollution work stemmed from an out-of-court settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, signed two years ago.
While the investment is enormous, Farrell said, customers will not feel the pinch with higher electric bills; Dominion's base rates are frozen until 2010.
Public health and environmental groups welcomed Tuesday's announcement, but pledged to continue pushing for legislation in the upcoming General Assembly session that, if approved, would require reductions at a faster pace.
Their favored legislation, called the "Clean Smokestacks" bill, has not advanced in two previous attempts, however. And Dominion executives said they would oppose the measure again if it surfaces in the state capital this winter.
Dominion's package of emission controls unveiled Tuesday "is pretty good stuff, pretty strong," said Mike Town, state director of the Sierra Club. "It probably should have happened sooner, but that's OK. This is good news for Virginians."
Power plant emissions have been linked to respiratory ailments such as asthma and lung scarring, and are thought to be responsible for fish-consumption advisories due to high traces of mercury.
The Bush administration has proposed a mercury control rule that would allow utilities such as Dominion to cut their emissions and buy or sell "mercury credits" to companies in other states. Environmental groups oppose the rule.
At the Chesapeake power plant, all four units overlooking the Elizabeth River will be equipped with scrubbers to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide by about 95 percent , said Dan Genest , a Dominion spokesman. The work should be completed by about 2011, and will help further reduce smog in the region, he said.
Scrubbers are tall metal silos. Inside, a limestone slurry is injected into a rush of gases that result from burning coal to produce energy. The procedure neutralizes environmentally harmful emissions, while also creating gypsum, which can be recycled into wallboard and sold for construction projects, Genest described.
Scrubbers also will be added to two units at the Yorktown power plant, and to two units at the Chester power station, officials said.
In addition, Dominion will build an unspecified number of anti-pollution systems onto some of its plants that use a technology known as "selective catalytic reduction." These structures operate similarly to how catalytic converters control nitrogen oxide emissions in cars and trucks.
When all the improvements at Dominion's power plants are completed in 2015 , the utility estimated, emissions of sulfur dioxide will be reduced by 80 percent , nitrogen oxide by 74 percent and mercury by 86 percent , compared to 2000 levels.
By 2015, Dominion also forecast, all of Virginia will be free of unhealthy smog levels. Currently, Hampton Roads, Richmond, Northern Virginia, Roanoke, Winchester, Fredericksburg and sections of the Shenandoah National Park experience excessive smog during a typical year.
However, largely because of power plant controls already executed by Dominion, state officials intend to ask federal regulators to remove Hampton Roads, Richmond and Fredericksburg from a national list of smog-troubled cities.
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
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