Legal Actions Against Duke Energy and Alabama Power
SELC takes on South's most polluting industries
Whenever a power plant makes modifications that will result in increased pollution, the New Source Review portion of the Clean Air Act requires the plant to install the best available pollution controls. However, when they passed this law in 1977, Congress allowed many old, coal-fired plants to be "grandfathered" from this provision, assuming that these old plants would be retired over the next several years. To be safe, however, Congress required that if a "grandfathered" plant was modified and pollution increased as a result of that modification, the plant lost its grandfathered status and would have to meet modern pollution standards.
©Jim Waite
Coal-burning power plants are the largest source, by far, of the soot-causing sulfur dioxide emissions that cause kills thousands of people each year across the South.
However, in the years since these provisions of the Clean Air Act were passed, none of the grandfathered plants - including dozens of such facilities in the Southeast - have been taken out of service. Nor has the pollution-control equipment at the vast majority of these plants been upgraded to meet modern pollution standards. Instead, utilities have invested in what they call "life extension projects," spending tens of millions of dollars to keep their grandfathered plants running without upgrading pollution controls. In the meantime, many of these old plants are emitting four to 10 times more pollutants than newer plants.
To combat this illegal emission of tens of millions of tons of pollution, in 1999, EPA initiated a wave of enforcement actions against 13 utilities for violations at 51 plants operating throughout the South and Midwest.
SELC joined forces with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice in the federal government’s lawsuits against two of the South's most polluting utilities—Southern Company's Alabama Power, and Duke Energy. The lawsuits are a key component of SELC's ongoing effort to close the loophole in the Clean Air Act that exempts old power plants from modern pollution controls.
