In the fall of 2019, Alabama Power filed a petition with the Public Service Commission (PSC), seeking permission to charge its customers well over a billion dollars over a 40-year period for an unprecedented expansion. The company says it needs to be able to generate a lot more electricity, even though the state’s electricity demand is generally stable. The proposed expansion would increase Alabama Power’s capacity by nearly 20%.
In March, Sierra Club and other intervenors challenged Alabama Power’s expansion at a hearing before the Public Service Commission. The company’s proposal, which is mostly made up of fossil fuels, is a bad financial deal for customers.
In the coming months, the PSC will review the record and decide whether to grant, partly grant, or deny the company’s plan.
This blog series will explain Alabama Power’s proposed expansion and clarify the stakes of one of the biggest energy cases ever to be decided in Alabama history. Missed our previous posts? Blog one is here, blog two is here, and the third post is here!
By Sari Amiel, Legal Fellow with the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program
In Africatown, an all-Black Mobile-area community, a rich history and vibrant culture contrast sharply with today’s harmful environmental conditions. Located just three miles north of downtown Mobile, Africatown is home to many descendants of enslaved people that were brought to this country in 1860 aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to enter the United States. Africatown is also home to Mobile’s first Black school, now called the Mobile County Training School.
For decades, heavy industry has cast a dark shadow over Africatown. The community sits within what Alabama Power itself calls Alabama’s “Chemical Corridor,” a 50-mile area containing 26 large chemical companies. According to National Geographic, since the 1920s, Africatown has absorbed paper mills, a sawmill, a lumber yard, and a tank farm containing oil and gas storage tanks. The town is also home to the Hog Bayou gas-fired plant, whose power Alabama Power seeks to buy for the next 19 years.
“Unfortunately … the city of Mobile has set zoning laws in such a way that caused industry to move to Africatown and heavily pollute the area,” said Joe Womack, an Africatown resident, prominent local environmental justice activist, and Sierra Club member.
Womack remembers the days when pollutants from the International Paper mill “used to fall from the sky and coat surfaces in ash.” After years of polluting the air with chloroform, a substance that causes cancer, that paper mill abruptly closed in the 1990s, leaving behind toxic pollution. Just last month, the EPA formally identified several “brownfields,” or environmentally contaminated sites, in Africatown. According to the EPA, those sites “include a 40-acre former manufacturing plant and multi-family housing complex, a former paper manufacturer, and a historic sawmill.”
As its pollution levels increased, Africatown has experienced declines in its population and economic conditions. Now that the Public Service Commission intends to allow Alabama Power to buy power from the Hog Bayou gas plant—which is located in Africatown—for the next two decades, Womack expects those distressing trends to continue.
“The Hog Bayou area is so polluted already, and needs to be cleaned up,” said Womack. “I am worried that this action by Alabama Power will make the area even more polluted, thereby further endangering the health and safety of our community.”
Alabama Power’s expansion is also set to raise rates for its customers who live in Africatown, thus increasing the energy burdens borne by a community that already bears disproportionately heavy environmental and public health burdens.
Africatown is far from alone in shouldering these unfair and unhealthy burdens. Nationwide, communities of color face a disproportionate share of environmental pollution. According to the NAACP, “due to air toxics emissions from natural gas development,” more than “1 million African Americans live in counties that face a cancer risk above EPA’s level of concern.” The NAACP reports that pollutants emitted by burning gas, such as volatile organic compounds, result in “African American children [being] burdened by 138,000 asthma attacks and 101,000 lost school days each year.”
More recently, increased exposure to air pollution has been linked to higher rates of death from Covid-19. Given these trends, it is deeply upsetting—but sadly, not surprising—that Black Americans have experienced a disproportionately high percentage of overall Covid-19 deaths.
Womack leads two organizations—the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC) and Clean, Healthy, Educated, Safe, and Sustainable Communities (CHESS)—that seek “environmental justice” for Africatown. The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) defines “environmental justice” as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.”
Environmental justice communities, like Africatown, are frequently left out of important conversations about zoning, permitting, and other laws allowing industries to set up shop in their backyards. According to NEJAC, “meaningful involvement” with local communities includes giving the public “an opportunity to participate in decisions about activities that may affect their environment and/or health,” and a chance to “influence the regulatory agency’s decision.”
Throughout Alabama Power’s processes of planning and seeking the Commission’s permission for its impending expansion, meaningful involvement of Africatown residents has consistently been absent. Alabama Power admitted at the PSC hearings that the company did not inform Africatown residents of the company’s plans, let alone ask community members for input regarding the Hog Bayou plant. This lack of meaningful involvement has created a serious risk of repeating history by placing still more environmental and public health burdens on a longstanding environmental justice community.