by Henry Robertson, Chapter ExCom
 |
Nine days before the reservoir burst at Taum Sauk, AmerenUE filed a “highly confidential” 3,000-page document with the Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC).
It was an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), an eye-glazing term for a pretty good idea. Periodically Ameren and other electric utilities must give the PSC an assessment of how demand for electricity is growing and what their options are for meeting it—with coal, nuclear, pumped storage, renewable energy, or energy efficiency programs that might avoid the need to build expensive power plants. The utilities don’t have to say exactly what they’re going to do and the PSC won’t tell them.
Still, this menu of possibilities is useful. We the public, who pay the rates and breathe the air, have an interest in what Missouri’s largest utility might do. Why should this plan be confidential?
The Ozark Chapter, together with the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Mid-Missouri Peaceworks and ACORN, asked Great Rivers Environmental Law Center to look into it. We intervened in the IRP proceeding and filed a motion to make Ameren disclose their plan. The PSC agreed, while allowing Ameren to hold back genuinely confidential or proprietary information.
So Ameren issued a “public” version of the plan, but it was still heavily censored. Often we have only the title of a document to go on. We know they’ve looked at nuclear, pumped storage and a third coal-burning unit at Rush Island in Jefferson County, but the public IRP doesn’t say if Ameren thinks these projects are desirable or feasible.
Ameren has dropped a few clues in the press, though. We know they’re seriously considering a Callaway 2 nuclear unit. They’ve said they’d like to rebuild Taum Sauk. In 2001 they unveiled a plan to build another pumped storage plant at Church Mountain near Taum Sauk, but quickly shelved it after a burst of opposition from the Sierra Club and others. (And you thought mountaintop removal was only done for Appalachian coal mines.) Is Church Mountain back on the table?
As I write we’re still trying to pry more information out of Ameren. They’ve bought three natural gas-fired power plants that allow them time to make a long-range decision. For the Ozark Chapter our intervention is part of a larger effort to convince the PSC, the utilities and the public to embrace conservation and renewable energy technologies, not dirty coal, dangerous nuclear power or hollowed-out mountaintops.